How To Optimize Existing Content With ALPS 

How to optimize existing content using ALPS that improves your SEO performance immensely?

Optimizing existing content around a target topic and, more importantly, ranking high for it in the search engines can be challenging in today’s competitive SEO landscape.

But ALPS can be of great help. How? Here is everything you need to know to plan and execute your SEO content strategy to drive rank and traffic improvements.

Steps to Optimize Existing Content That Surely Improves your SEO performance

STEP 1: Eliminate manual analysis and figure out the Content, Authority, and Technical gaps for all pages at once

You might already know that Google uses over 200 ranking metrics in their algorithm. Therefore, to analyze every ranking factor manually, can be challenging.

To make this manual process more time efficient, ALPS’s Scores Report categorizes all Google metrics into three broader sections, Content, Authority, and Technical.

Analyzing these categories within ALPS helps you quickly figure out your page-wise standing against top-ranking competitors on where you’re lagging so that you can prioritize improvement actions based on those findings.

In this step, with the Scores Report feature, you can find the Content, Authority, and Technical scores for all your keywords and web pages at once. 

With this information, you can easily benchmark your scores against that of the top-ranking competitors to figure out gaps in your Content, Authority, and Technical parameters.

Analyzing this report also enable you to prioritize improvements based on goals and resources.

How Scores Report help?

Analyzing Score Report help you:

• Figure out content, authority, and technical gaps for all keywords for your entire domain at once
• Understand where you need to focus your improvement efforts
• Prioritize optimization efforts based on their in-depth knowledge of the difficulty levels

The process

1. You just need to input your domain to find the overall performance gaps for all individual pages in terms or rank and search volume:

You can prioritize your optimization efforts based on this data. Where the ones with low gaps can be targeted for quick wins or short-term plans, and the ones with high difficulty can be targeted in the medium and long-term plan.

This section includes:

• Content Scores: These scores determine the content quality for every target URL when benchmarked against the Top 3 competitors.

• Authority Scores: These scores determine the authority for every target URL when benchmarked against the Top 3 competitors.

• Technical Scores: These scores determine the technical quality for every target URL when benchmarked against the Top 3 competitors.

• Filters: You can use different filters to sort the URLs with high, medium, and low gaps in terms of content, authority, and technical parameters. Also, you can filter the URLs through time period, rank, and search volume.

In-depth keyword-wise analysis

Using the Drill Through option, you can analyze the exact difference in performance for every keyword against top-ranking competitor URL and understand where you need to focus your improvement efforts to win against them.

Based on this entire report, you can prioritize the optimization efforts by figuring out all the pages that have content gaps and the size of the gap.

A bigger gap means more optimization effort is required. So, you can filter the pages with small and big content gaps to prioritize the optimization efforts based on priority and go for short-term, medium-term, or long-term optimization plans. Similarly, you can prioritize both authority and technical parameters based on the gap size.

Example: A web page with low content or a low authority gap or a low technical gap can be the priority or be covered in the short-term plan for quick rank improvements. 

A few important things to remember:

• When the Content Gap is low, it can be optimized in the short term for quick wins without much difficulty. However, when the content gap is more, it can be a part of your longer-term goal
• Similarly, the Authority can be optimized for a medium-term plan or long-term plan.
• The Technical aspect can be optimized depending on how agile you are in your tech practices.

Typically, you should look first at the content, then authority and technical parameters. It depends entirely on the client’s resources and needs.

STEP 2: View Page-wise Content Gaps to Prioritize Improvements

Post analyzing the above Scores Report, you can analyze and plan your page-wise content improvements based on this Content Gap Analysis feature. You can easily measure the content gaps for every individual keyword and page and plan your improvements based on the goals and resource availability.

From our experience, we understand that the Content is easiest to optimize and must be given immediate priority.

For instance, when the content gap is low, it can be optimized in the short term for quick wins without much difficulty. However, when the content gap is more, it can be a part of your longer-term goal.

How?

In this scenario, you can use the Content Gap Analysis feature to prioritize the optimization changes in the pages based on the availability of the resources and business needs. 

For example, if a page is targeting 10 keywords, and among which for 4 keywords the page is already doing good, for another 3 keywords the page content needs minor improvements like changing title, meta, etc. Whereas for 3 keywords the gap is huge, and the content needs vast improvements like writing new content or creating a completely new page for that keyword.

How Content Gap Analysis help?

Conducting content gap analysis help you:

• Measure content gaps for every page within your domain for all relevant themes
• Get page-wise recommendations for content improvements
• Prioritize improvement efforts based on goals and resource availability

The process:

This section includes:

• Themes: The exact theme the target URL is targeting along with the number of keywords within that theme, search volume, business priority, and search intent.

• Rank: This section displays the current rank for the specific URL for the targeted keywords.

• Content Scores- These scores are created by ALPS scoring algorithm that indicates the content quality of that particular web page.

• Traffic- This section shows the number of traffic this target URL is attracting for all the keywords.

• Recommendations- This is the most important section that the tool provides you. It recommends you about the changes you need to make for which keywords and content. These are pinpoint recommendations that clearly states:
• Which keywords have relevant content and are optimized
• Which keywords have relevant content but needs optimization
• Which keywords needs new content

In-depth Recommendations

When you click on the above recommendations, you can find in-depth keyword-wise recommendations to know exactly where you need to focus your improvement efforts.

STEP 3: Generate SEO-optimized Briefs to Close Content Gaps     

Once you’re ready with your content strategy by analyzing the Scores report and Content Gap Analysis, then you can create SEO-optimized Content Briefs for your target core topic to create an outline for the content writers.

The AI-generated content briefs in ALPS provide you with key competitor insights about the content on a particular topic.

The content writers can use them to easily create high-quality content that ranks higher, drives more traffic, and helps beat the high-ranking competitors.

How Content Briefs help?

Generating Content Briefs help you:

• Eliminate guesswork and speed up your content planning process
• Save hours of research time
• Ensure high performing content output every time

The process:

1. Pick your core keyword category or topic. In this case, it’s ” Mortgage.” Click on the “Go” button to find all the relevant information about the content your high-ranking competitors are creating.

2. Keyword Suggestions: You get a list of all the keywords relevant to your core topic/keyword along with their search volume and relevancy scores.

3. You can use the Filter option to Include & Exclude Keywords and sort the keywords using search volume and relevancy score to find the keywords that have the potential to drive the maximum rank and traffic improvements.

4. Now you can select all the keywords you would like to target and click on “Generate Content Brief.”

5. Next you can download in the word format or view the brief in the platform within just a few minutes.

6. Once the Brief is generated, you can see all the high-ranking competitors’ content information for your selected keywords.

So, what do you get in the ALPS AI-driven Content Brief?

• Competitor Pages: Pages that rank high on SERP for multiple targeted keywords have higher content scores. The content’s length and readability grade give a perspective on the writing style required for the topic. Use it as your writing guide for your content.

• Questions: Good SEO-optimized content must include answers to some related queries so that you don’t have to navigate to other articles. Including answers to the questions in your content will ensure comprehensive coverage of the topic for targeted keywords

• Recommended Phrases: There are relevant phrases for every topic that boost content relevance and contribute to building authority. Use these phrases optimally in metadata, headlines, and body content. Certain n-grams also occur frequently on competitor pages that rank high for selected keywords.

• <H1>: The <H1> tag is used to introduce the core topic that is covered on the page. You’ll find a list of H1 tags that rank high on SERP for the targeted set of keywords.

• <H2>: The <H2> tags are typically used to introduce important subtopics. These tags help search engines identify the hierarchy and structure of the page. You’ll find a list of H2 tags that rank high on SERP for the targeted set of keywords.

• Title: Title tags inform the search engines what the webpage is about. You’ll find a list of titles that rank high on SERPs for the targeted set of keywords.

• Meta Descriptions: Meta Descriptions briefly summarize what readers can expect to see on the webpage. You’ll find a list of meta descriptions from pages ranking high on SERP for the targeted set of keywords.

At the end of this step, you have a clear understanding of the target keywords, and the content outline that would help the content writers in crafting their content that ranks high on the SERPs, drive more traffic, and beat the competitors.

STEP 4: Optimize your Content to Drive Rank and Traffic Improvements

Here’s the final step in optimizing your existing Content process. With the help of this Content Simulation feature, you can create compelling content that is loved by both search engines and readers alike.

In this feature, you can simulate/test your content written by the content writers in various scenarios to validate the impact of your optimization efforts even before you publish it.

How Content Simulation help?

Optimizing your content before publishing help you:

• Eliminate guesswork and accurately validate rank and traffic impact before the content is published
• Pinpoint content improvement areas for better SEO results

The process:

1. In this feature, you can either provide your URL link with your target content or if you don’t have a live URL, you can just click on “I don’t have a live page/URL” to optimize your content.

2. In the next page, you must choose the core keyword you want to target, and the tool will give suggestions regarding all the other relevant keywords along with their search volume and relevance scores that you can also target in your content.

3. You can also filter the keywords based on the search volume and relevance scores.

4. Once the relevant keywords are selected based on the search volume and relevance scores, you can proceed to the simulation scenario.

5. Now, you can simply paste your existing content and start optimizing the content in the simulation scenario to find the best version of your content even before you make it live. Just click on “Run Simulation” button to start the simulation process.

6. Once you run the simulation for your existing content, the simulator gives the impact on Rank and Traffic when changes are made in different sections within the content like URL, Title, Meta Description, etc.

7. With this information, you can target the right content scores and cover up for the content gaps you have derived from the Scores Report and the Content Analysis step to beat your competitors. You can try to include relevant keywords in various sections of your content and try simulating the impact of these changes to create that “perfect” content that drive rank and traffic improvements.