“Content is king” as long as you make it rule. This popular saying is very true, as every digital marketing campaign revolves around content. WordPress is a “content management platform”. Text is content, images are content, videos are content, everything is content.

Since every single business who promotes its products and services in the online environment requires content, it’s quite interesting how many of these brands don’t understand the critical importance of optimizing WordPress posts before hitting the publish button.

To optimize means to carefully assess the material that you’re about to publish while making the necessary modifications. Optimization techniques are meant to make your content shine and glow, thus making it can receive much more attention and interest.

An interesting report suggests that over 63% of today’s businesses lack a well-documented content marketing strategy.

Nevertheless, other studies show that 64% of digital marketers are eager to improve their content strategies.

What’s certain is that 91% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C webmasters and entrepreneurs acknowledge and understand the huge necessity of high-quality content for their businesses.

In today’s post, I’m going to discuss several insightful optimization tips before publishing WordPress posts. Each of these steps can mark the difference between “average content” and “amazing content”. Take a pen, a piece of paper, and note it all down.

Make sure you take action on this advice every time you have to publish a new piece of content and notice the differences in results yourself!

If It’s Really Bad, Delete It

The famous Stephen King has given this amazing advice that few content publishers are willing to take: “if your content is bad, kill it”.

What did he mean by that?

When you publish something on the Internet, that piece of text, audio, or video is likely to be “alive” for a long, long time. As more and more people get to know your brand, they might stumble upon that content.

Well, if it’s bad and it doesn’t really provide much value, it’s only going to hurt your business. For that simple reason, you need to objectively assess if you’re publishing content because it’s valuable or because you “have to”.

Ensure that Your Post Aligns with a Specific Goal

There are more content marketing goals that you should align with while publishing on WordPress. For example, some articles are meant to provide educational information, while others are meant to convince your prospects to opt-in to your email list, to provide feedback, or to purchase your products.

Of course, a good piece of content can address more goals, but it’s quite ideal for you to know what to expect from each post that you publish. Therefore, before you bring it online, ensure that your post has a “hidden” purpose that your readers will identify. Your call to action is very important in this case!

Make Sure Your Message is Specific

A piece of content is made of many words. Whether it’s a text, graphics, audio, or video, you’ll want to ensure that your post’s message is very specific. For example, if you compile a list of 10 useful resources for your audience, you should prioritize one or two resources (your products perhaps) and do it in such a way that they stand out.

Moreover, before you even begin writing it, establish the specific segment of your audience that is most likely to be interested in your information. For example, if you write for a self-development related audience, you’ll have many types of people (sub-audiences) that you can target.

Make sure you focus on one. E.g. People aged between 20 and 30 who have anxiety problems. Another post can be about older people (40+) who lack self-esteem. Send specific messages to specific sub-audiences!

Perform Keyword Research

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important step in your optimization checklist. If you have a bit of experience with WordPress, you’re likely to be aware of SEO’s benefits for your business. If you optimize your content for SEO on a consistent basis, you’ll be attracting a lot of organic traffic in the long run.

SEO is quite broad, yet there are a few critical steps that every webmaster and marketer should keep in mind before publishing any type of content.

Keyword research is one of those steps. Simply put, even though you’re writing for people, you’re also writing for the search engines. For that reason, you should always know which keywords you’ll be targeting.

How do you perform keyword research?

Start by getting familiar with today’s most popular keyword research tools.

Google Keyword Planner is one of them, and it’s also free. SEMrush and Keywordtool.io are other relevant choices that will help you figure out what keywords are popular among your audience.

You can use Google Analytics to discover the keywords and key phrases that your current users are inserting in the search engines before they reach your pages. The bottom point is that you should never publish a post without having implemented a keyword strategy.

Include the Keywords

Once you have a few keywords that you believe to be suited for a particular blog post, you’ll need to optimize the content by carefully including those keywords and key phrases.

The simplest way to do that is to leverage a WordPress SEO plugin like Yoast. This plugin is not the only option, though it seems to be the most popular at the moment.

Yoast SEO simplifies the keyword optimization process by providing a useful checklist that you need to keep into close consideration. For example, it will point out that you haven’t used your main keyword in your meta description. Or, it will suggest that you add various semantic keywords throughout the post. Either way, leveraging a plugin is a great way to start. Once you get more experienced, you’ll be able to do it on your own.

Explore Headline Possibilities

You can publish the most amazing content in the world, and yet, your headlines might sabotage your efforts. Your post titles are the key to a fruitful content marketing experience. If you neglect them, people won’t feel compelled to click them because they won’t be attractive enough.

Before you publish any particular WordPress post, make sure you’ve explored a lot of headline possibilities. Your headlines are the first thing to appear both on Google and on social media channels (after people share them). Therefore, they need to be interesting, informative, and concise.

For example, headlines that feature the words “how-to” but also numbers (5 ways to…) will create a higher impact and engagement. Furthermore, question headlines seem to be working pretty well too, as they arouse curiosity.

Your headlines should trigger strong emotions. For that reason, leveraging power words can prove to be truly useful. Moreover, you can leverage tools like BuzzSumo to analyze the most shared topics on social media networks. This will help you figure out the patterns of the most attractive titles.

Optimize Your Meta Description

Optimizing your post’s meta description is important because of two reasons.

First, Google and the rest of the search engines are looking for all the possible elements that you provide in order to identify your value proposition and message. That way, they can index your post and boost it according to its relevance and gained interest.

Second, when search users type in a keyword or a key phrase, they’ll stumble upon two important elements: your headline and your meta description.

Many users will read the meta description in order to figure out whether clicking on your headline will bring them value or not.

For that reason, you’ll need to optimize your meta description by including specific and relevant keywords, but also by making users curious about what’s next.

Pay Attention to Your Post’s Format and Structure

After someone clicks on your post, he won’t immediately start reading. Users tend to skim through the articles before making the final decision to consume the content integrally.

If readers notice blocks of text, there’s a high probability that they’ll bounce off your website. Why? Because nobody likes having to decipher blocks of text. For that simple reason, you should recheck your blog post’s format and structure.

Keep your paragraphs short, as well as your sentences. Include images and leverage as many visual cues as possible.

Proofread and Edit Your Post Thoroughly

We’re human beings and we make mistakes. You can try your best not to, but at the end of your post, you are still likely to find one or two grammar or spelling errors. Here’s the thing… you cannot afford that!

As I’ve mentioned earlier, your posts will live long lives. Every word you put out there represents your brand. If every post you publish contains a few mistakes, you’ll damage your brand’s reputation.

Before you hit the publish button, make sure you leverage a spellchecker tool like Grammarly. Secondly, make sure you double read it yourself. Nevertheless, if you’re not that of an excellent proofreader and editor, I’d highly suggest you invest a few bucks in professional proofreading services. I’ve always had a great experience working with academic writers.

Add and Optimize Visual Content

Before you publish your posts, make sure you compress your images. By doing so, you’re ensuring that your website’s speed won’t decrease and that your users will be able to navigate fast throughout your pages. Moreover, Google and the rest of the search engines are putting a lot of emphasis on website speed. If your site loads slowly, your rankings will slowly decrease.

Nevertheless, adding visual content such as graphics, screenshots, images, or videos between the text can have a great impact on your social engagement. People are likely to comment and share on your social posts if they contain a few quality visual assets.

Include an Effective Call to Action

Lastly yet very importantly, make sure you add a strong call to action. This is the final piece of the puzzle that prompts readers to action. Keep in mind your content’s goal and align your CTA with it.

If you want people to share your post, simply ask for it by emphasizing a “Share” button that stands out. If you want them to comment and provide feedback, ask for that at the end of your post. Either way, never publish a WordPress post without including a call to action!

Takeaways

Developing a pre-publishing content optimization strategy is the best thing you can do for your business in the long run. Every time you fix your mistakes and make your content better, you’ll be gradually improving the reputation of your brand.

Not just that, but Google and the rest of the search engines will reward you for your great efforts. There’s a big difference between content that doesn’t have a keyword strategy, high-quality images, a good structure, and content that has all that. Follow today’s checklist and pay attention to the changes in your overall performance!