Step 3. Improve the vital 20%

The goal you outlined in Step 1 will determine how you improve your content.

Our goal, if you recall, was to improve our organic reach in the SERPs and increase our on-page conversions.

At the time, we had around 100 posts on our site, so our 80/20 analysis was easy: we needed to focus on the 20 highest performing posts.

This meant ensuring each post was optimized for on-page SEO and each content upgrade was relevant and interesting to the reader.

Here’s how we approached each area.

1. Increase our organic reach

Like many SaaS startups, our goal, in the beginning, was to hit the ground running with content marketing.

But, with few employees, it meant we didn’t always follow the best practices for on-page SEO.

Sometimes, in an effort to publish on time, target keywords weren’t assigned to posts and pages, and when they were, they weren’t always the best choice to being with. Other times, images were titled incorrectly or overlooked entirely.

Our content was performing; we were receiving positive feedback and building links from other sites. But as a company, we know we could do more to boost our organic traffic.

Today, it’s a very different story.

We now have checklists and standard operating procedures (SOPs) for every step of our content creation process. From choosing a blog post topic to writing compelling meta-descriptions, we have systems in place to ensure our content meets high standards.

Here are a few of the things we improved for our Facebook Lead Ads post, among others:

i. Assigned target keywords

Not all our content had an assigned keyword (I know, don’t hate) so we made sure each post had an assigned keyword.

We use Yoast SEO for all our on-page SEO—and so should you. It’s the best out-of-the-box SEO plugin on the market. And it’s free.

ii. Added LSI keywords

Our keyword research tool of choice? Ahref’s Keyword Explorer. As mentioned, in the beginning, keyword research wasn’t always as thorough as it could have been.

So, when we updated our most popular content, we added a few LSI keywords.

iii. Rewrote meta-descriptions

High click-through rates from the SERPs has been known to increase rankings.

We rewrote our meta-descriptions so users would feel more compelled to click through and read our content.

iv. Added target keyword to images

This included adding our target keyword to the hero image in each post and ensuring all images were titled correctly (e.g. “Facebook Lead Ads.png” not “facebook-hero-image-2”.)

Tagging images correctly is especially important with infographics because it helps drive more traffic from Google Images.

2. Increase our on-page conversions

Once we were confident we had done all we could to drive more organic traffic to our content, we focused on increasing engagement and conversions once users were on our site.

A few areas we focused on:

i. Improved introductions

It’s easy to believe a blog post introduction’s only goal is to keep visitors reading, but it’s also another opportunity to increase on-page optins.

In short, if you can make readers feel a sense of urgency or excitement in the introduction, they’re more likely to optin for the content upgrade.

With this in mind, we rewrote the introductions for a few of our most popular posts in an attempt to encourage more signups.

ii. Repositioned lead forms

If you’re a regular reader, you’ve probably noticed many of our posts have a callout box (COB) above the main body.