Performance & Optimization By Scripted

Custom analytics to easily track your content performance and make data-driven decisions.

What is Performance & Optimization?

In conversations about content marketing, “optimization” often refers to search engine optimization (SEO). The trap that content creators and marketing agencies can fall into here is writing for search engines. But keyword stuffing the “right” terms in the “right” amount of times in your content is the wrong approach. True optimization comes from writing helpful, relevant content—optimized for humans. Only then will your content rank higher with search engines.

Performance & Optimization is thus the practice of fine-tuning content so that it has the best chance at ranking high in search results and reaching your intended audience. This optimization is accomplished by fine-tuning all of the elements of your content. Broad terms are replaced with target keywords; blog posts are shaped up to answer user questions effectively; titles and meta descriptions are modified to catch the attention of search engines; and more.

In the Performance & Optimization process, good content remains essentially the same as it goes through some fine-tuning. Elements that are not helpful to your readers or search engines are replaced with focused and engaging content. The end result is higher search rankings and more readers finding your pages.

Why is Performance & Optimization Important?

To understand why Performance & Optimization is so important to your content strategy, see if this scenario sounds familiar. You’ve written a blog post about your products or services. Of course, you want it to reach your target audience, the potential customers who are looking for what you’re offering. A couple months after publishing the post, you check your performance stats and are disappointed with the results.

Why does this happen? Perhaps the keywords you used have turned out to have little search value. Maybe the topic wasn’t covered in enough detail. Your article probably wasn’t structured well, with relevant title tags and headers. Or it could be that your title doesn’t reflect what the post is really about.

These are all signs of content that haven’t been optimized for performance. Sure, it had the keywords that seemed right at the time the blog was written. It might have a title similar to pages that ranked high at the time. But your content is missing the most important components: it’s not helpful or relevant to what web searchers seek.

Or it’s possible that you did write a great and useful article, but the SEO aspect is lacking. Whatever the cause of the problem, your content could have no chance of making it to the first page of Google search results.

That’s why Performance & Optimization is so important. It’s the process that ensures your content is not only strong but that it will also be found by search engines and humans.

The Pain Points of Poor Content Optimization

Poorly optimized content brings you and your marketing team a host of problems to deal with.

When a piece of content can’t be found, you’ll have poor engagement and low conversion rates. It’s then difficult to measure or analyze its performance. You can’t see how your blog post is doing against the competitors because they’re so far ahead of you in organic search results.

When it comes down to it, you can write good top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) or middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU) content. But with limited knowledge of content optimization techniques, your efforts will be fruitless. The content’s limited reach hurts its overall quality because it’s not doing the job you need it to.

How Can a Performance & Optimization Team Help?

Creating clear, interesting, relevant, and engaging content is only part of the task before you as a marketing professional. You must also distribute it online and establish a system by which you can monitor the performance of your content and optimize it for greater effect.

A Performance & Optimization team can help you meet the latter goal. Such a team can help you monitor the visibility and ranking of your website, blogs, social media pages, and other marketing content and discover new ways to improve their performance. Through diligent keyword research and fine-tuning the elements of a webpage like headings and image alt text, your pages perform better.

Monitoring SEO performance will help you know where you stand in the following areas:

Organic traffic
Bounce rate
Click-through rate
Keyword rankings
Backlinks
Page speed
Conversion rates

You will be alerted to ways of doing things better. You will be able to craft better content, choose different keywords, and internal links and refine meta titles or descriptions to move you higher up on search results pages.

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Benefits of Using Performance & Optimization Professionals

Improving search engine ranking is, of course, a main goal for all content marketing teams. However, it presents a challenge owing to changing algorithms, growing complexity, and increasing competitiveness in nearly every industry. No company can afford to create and publish content without monitoring its performance and implementing a continuous improvement program. Here are some of the concrete benefits of bringing in Performance & Optimization professionals:

Improve Your SEO Rankings

This is the most essential task to complete. You can improve your rankings and increase conversions by continually monitoring and assessing your content.

Identify What You Got Right

Assessing the performance of your content is not all about identifying problems. It also involves discerning what's working well and producing positive results. This will allow you to keep those features in place and, in some cases, enhance them even more for maximum effect.

Make You Aware of Needed Improvements

The monitoring and regular assessment of your content will help you identify problem areas. You will then be able to gather your team together and come up with suggestions and solutions to improve them. This oversight can identify issues with crawlability, page titles, meta descriptions, page speed, and content quality.

Monitor the Competition

A Performance & Optimization team can even provide insight into what the competition is doing. If your rivals have a higher SERP, you can figure out what they have done to attain it and devise a strategy for outflanking and outranking them.

Avoid Penalties

Search engines have rules–regulations, restrictions, and procedures–that online marketers must abide by. Violating any of these rules can lead to penalties which will affect your SEO ranking. Since Google and other search engines are constantly changing their rules, you need to adjust your content to abide by them. A Performance & Optimization review team can help you keep in line.

What You Can Expect With a Performance & Optimization Team

While you and your marketing team can learn to optimize content, you’ll notice a real difference immediately when you use a Performance & Optimization team.

Experts in the field can create a content optimization strategy based on the unique needs of each client. A team of optimization experts know how to find the right balance of helpful content and SEO techniques to drive the most visitors to your site. That’s because the team is not made up only of content writers. Editors and digital marketing professionals work with the clients and the writers, bringing their own expertise and unique perspective to the optimization process.

It’s this results-driven approach that keeps the focus on specific marketing objectives. Learning these techniques yourself takes time, and engaging with an optimization team brings you results you can instantly start to measure and validate.

The Challenge

Monitoring and optimizing your marketing content is not always easy. On the surface, it may seem as though the material you published has increased traffic and conversion rates. But you can always do better. You must constantly search for new ways to enhance, update, and improve the quality of your marketing content.

Few companies have the internal expertise to meet this challenge. The more efficient and effective option is to outsource the work to professional content creation and SEO solutions companies.

Nearly 61% of professional marketers say their top priorities are enhancing organic presence and improving SEO. SEO monitoring has gained in popularity as companies struggle to track the changing interests of customers and optimize their content accordingly.

There is a good reason for this. A recent study shows that the top listings in search engine results receive 33% of traffic. Those in second place receive only 18%. The traffic percentages go down from there.

Yet, it remains the case that few companies have a dedicated Performance & Optimization team. You don't have to be among them.

Is Content Optimization Really Needed?

At this point, you may be wondering about the return on investment for content optimization. After all, you’ve already invested in creating this content, either by paying your marketing team or by hiring freelancers. You might have concerns about losing control over your content as it’s transformed.

A good way to see the value of Performance & Optimization is to think about search intent. Imagine a car dealership that created a blog post about the 2023 Ford F150. If they’re relying on the keyword “ford,” they will be up against search results for all possible meanings of the word. That includes a shallow place in a river or stream (a ford), a famous actor (Harrison Ford), and much more. But optimized content, with more relevant keywords, attracts users looking for a “Ford F150” or a “2023 Ford,” matching search intent.

In this example, no in-depth changes to the meaning and tone of the blog post would need to be made. The car dealership still has control of its content; it’s just going to better attract readers who had the intent to search for a 2023 Ford F150. With a solid call to action (CTA) at the end of the blog post, those readers will be directed to contact the dealership.

When the alternative is to allow low-performing content to linger on your site, the costs of Performance & Optimization are not that high. After all, your content is supposed to generate leads and customers for your business. If it’s not doing that, replacing it with similarly low-performing content is not the answer.

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Scripted Content Performance & Optimization

Content Audit & Analysis

Receive a thorough review of existing content to identify strengths and weaknesses.

Content Optimization

Optimization of your existing content for search engines and user search intent.

Content Creation and Optimization

Creation of new content, optimized for search engines and user experience.

Analytics and Reporting

The Scripted Performance Reporting page gives you tracking and analysis of content performance metrics.

How Scripted Can Help

The content landscape in your industry changes quickly and often. It's important to always stay on top of what content is performing well and what strategies need to change. With Scripted, you will have a dedicated strategist to stay ahead of content trends in your industry, and you can instantly see how your content performs in The Scripted Studio.

The best way to maximize your content performance is to put it in the hands of a professional content team. You will find some of the most diligent and insightful experts at Scripted. Contact us to day to learn how we can help you make more data-driven decisions.

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