Your content impacts your site's ranking and people's interest in your site and products. However, creating good content can be challenging: you have to convince people of your content AND convince the search engine to rank you as high as possible in the search results. We show you how to optimize your content perfectly with XOVI NOW.
Table of content:
Why is user intent important for my content?
Identify and answer user questions.
How do I find user questions with XOVI NOW?
Make sure you have a good headline structure.
How do I optimize headlines with XOVI NOW?
Perfect your texts with the Text Optimizer.
Analyze your page with URL Analysis.
Find the ideal content for internal linking.
| If you manage multiple websites, activate the website’s project for which you want to optimize content. |
Why is user intent important for my content?
The user intent (also: search intent) is the technical term for the trigger of a search. It is why a person enters a specific search term in a search engine. To rank well with your content and satisfy the user, you need to understand the user intent and provide them with the content they are looking for.
Search results reflect the search engines' interpretation of user intent. Whoever is at the top fulfills it best in the eyes of Google & Co. Search engines evaluate a website’s content and how users interact with it after clicking on the search result.
| If you want to know how to recognize and fulfill user intent, read the article User Intent: Your Key to SEO Success. |
Your content must be better than most of the first page. For position 1, you would have to knock the top dog off its throne. To do that, you need to know what content made it into the top 10. So take a good look at the top 10 search results and ask yourself the following questions:
- What is the user intent?
- How are the individual search results (snippets) formatted? What are their topics and wording?
- Is there a search result that is drastically different from the others? And if so, what is that difference exactly? Include it in your content!
- Now, look at the actual pages. What type of content do the top 10 offer the user (topic), what type of content, and how is it written and formatted (length, tone, text, images, videos, tables, infographics...)?
Identify and answer user questions
User questions (W-questions or keyword questions) are questions or phrases people 'ask' a search engine. In other words, people seek answers or solutions to specific questions. You can find particularly frequently asked user questions directly in the search results — including the response.
By identifying these questions and providing the most helpful answer, you ensure that your content is highly relevant and helps your visitors with their challenges. That way, your site becomes their go-to resource, builds trust, and positions your company early in the customer journey.
How do I find user questions with XOVI NOW?
XOVI NOW offers a question tool that gives you the user questions for your topic keyword. These are questions that contain the keyword itself and those that do not but belong to the topic.
You can find the question tool in the Keyword Research section. After you enter your topic keyword, you will find it under the User Questions tab.
You’ll find the results in descending order of relevance to the keyword. You can also see
- how many answers there already are to this question,
- which answers these are
- for how many keywords a question is displayed in the search results
| Learn more about the XOVI NOW User Questions Finder here. |
How to use user questions?
By including user questions in your content, you show people that you know what's on their minds and provide them with answers that matter to them.
Choose the proper content format.
How can you provide an even more helpful answer? Could another content format lend itself more easily? A more easily understood wording?
Choose user questions for your headings.
Answer one question after the other. Choose the question as the heading. Then, answer the question in the following paragraph.
This way, the user knows immediately that they’ll find an answer to their question.
Put a user question in the meta title.
Consider including a user question in the snippet title. According to a study by Backlinko, a W-question in the title increases the click-through rate on the search result by 14.1%.
Make sure you have a good heading structure.
People and search engines use headlines to understand the content and its structure. Use headings to increase readability and focus.
The heading tag
Web pages use the h-tag to structure their content using headings. It also highlights a headline as such, making it easier for the reader to understand the content. Your page’s title is assigned the h1 heading. All subordinate headers are the headings h2 to h6. They structure your text. As HTML, it looks like this:
<h1>The Witty And Unique Title</h1>
PARAGRAPH
<h2>Helpful Fact About Your Topic</h2>
PARAGRAPH
<h3>Deep Dive</h3>
PARAGRAPH
<h2>Another Helpful Fact</h2>
PARAGRAPH
Keyword-optimize headings
Using keywords in your content still plays a vital role in good rankings. Ideally, your h1 heading and at least some h2 and h3 headings should contain the keyword. However, don't force anything; the reading flow and the meaningfulness of your headlines come first.
| We don't leave you hanging! You can learn all you need to know about keyword optimization and where to add your keyword for maximum effect. |
H1 headline as meta title
Many content management systems automatically insert the h1 heading of the page as the meta title. Together, the title and description of the metadata make up your search result, also called a snippet.
| If you'd like to know more about how optimized snippets increase traffic to your website, you can just read our comprehensive Snippet Optimization Guide. |
How do I optimize headings with XOVI NOW?
In the Site Audit, XOVI NOW checks your website for missing or duplicate h1 headings. As you probably already know, the results of the Site Audit are translated into easy-to-understand Advisor Tasks. You will receive a corresponding Advisor Task if we find missing or duplicate headers.
| Go to Advisor and enter "H1 headline" in the search bar to show corresponding tasks. |
The tasks tell you the problem, how to solve it, and which pages are affected.
| Of course, we have created a comprehensive Advisor Guide for you. Check it out! |
Perfect your texts with the Text Optimizer
Make sure search engines can assess your page easily. They analyze your content for the topics and keywords and then position you accordingly in relevant search results.
But how do you know if you have used your keyword and related semantic terms sufficiently? The XOVI NOW Text Optimizer helps you identify the topics and terms necessary for a top ranking for your keyword.
How to get to the XOVI NOW Text Optimizer: Projects → Text Optimization (WDF*IDF).
| Click Start new optimization to create a new text optimization. Add your URL, provide a keyword, and choose whether you want to optimize your text for Google or Amazon. |
| Check out our detailed Text Optimizer Guide to learn how to create a text optimization step by step, what the results tell you, and how to optimize your text specifically. |
The Text Optimizer compares the content of your page with the top 10 search results on Google (and Amazon if you wish) and tells you exactly which topics and terms you are still missing to be at the top.
The comparison with the Amazon search results enables you to optimize your product pages in a targeted manner.
What should I do with the text optimization results?
Once we analyze the page for your specified keyword, you can
- make sure that all relevant semantic terms appear frequently enough in your text
- check whether your text is the correct length for your desired search engine
- edit your text directly in the tool
- and check your optimization success
| Use the text editor to load and edit your text according to the Text Optimizer's instructions. |
However, please do not randomly add keywords to your text. Instead, consider what additional information you can provide your readers (remember the user intent!). Support your statements with examples. You will certainly find other keywords in the table that fit well into the context.
Follow the instructions in the keyword table until all matching keywords have a green check mark.
Is your text the right length? It is also worth comparing the text lengths of the top search results for your keyword. Because sometimes less is more, or the user prefers detailed explanations.
| Check the Analyzed Texts tab to compare your text's word count with the top 10 search results. If your text is significantly shorter or longer than all the other search results, you should adjust it. |
Analyze your page with URL Analysis
Use the URL Analysis to take a close look at individual pages and optimize them. It is your mini-site audit for individual sub-pages. So when you create new pages or optimize existing ones, you can use URL Analysis to ensure they meet all SEO requirements.
Go to Site Audit → URL Analysis.
| Copy the URL path of the page you want to analyze. Then work through the results list until all relevant error messages have a green checkmark. |
The URL Analysis is structured into multiple elements, for which you'll find a table of contents on the left. For example, the content element contains information about metadata, readability, length, and structure. Each element shows analyzed factors, and a status icon shows whether we found any issues.
Do you still see a small red x or a warning icon somewhere? Then you can fix them if they are relevant to you. For example, if Twitter is not a relevant social media channel for you, you can ignore Twitter-related error messages.
Find the perfect content for internal linking
Good internal linking is essential for two reasons:
- You're making it easier for your visitors (and potential customers) to navigate your site, and you're ensuring that additional content is just a click away. This makes for a good user experience and more leads and conversions.
- Internal linking helps search engines understand your site's topic focus and structure and identify your most important pages. This allows them to better match and classifies your content to appropriate search queries.
When you optimize your content, please link to other relevant pages. But also make sure to establish links TO the content you’re optimizing.
We're now going to use the Content Relevance Search to find suitable content
- that we can link to in the content we are optimizing (outbound internal links)
- in which we link the content to be optimized (internal inbound links)
What does Content Relevance Search do?
The Content Relevance Search is a search engine that delivers search results related to your website. Enter a keyword, and the Content Relevance Search will list the content of your website that best matches this keyword. The results are sorted by relevance in descending order.
Go to Site Audit → Content Relevance Search.
1. Find content for outbound links.
The Content Relevance Search helps to find other relevant pages on your website to create in- or outgoing links.
First, look at important/related topics your content covers. Then, type a keyword in the Content Relevance Search. It will show you corresponding pages on your website that fit your query.
Those pages can be further articles, guides, but also product pages. Basically, everything you think is useful and interesting for the user and gives them a full understanding of the topic.
Now link the matching pages in your optimized content. For example, if you're working on an article about jogging with a dog, look for related content on your site that you could link to, such as product pages about dog harnesses, dog leashes, or safety in the dark.
2. Find content for inbound links.
Now we want to establish links TO your optimized page from other pages on your website. You can probably use many of the inbound link search results for this; after all, they're on a related topic. If they touch on your current topic or a reference to it makes sense, include a link to your existing optimized content on those pages.
Let's stick with the jogging with dogs example: If you have just linked your content to appropriate pages like dog harnesses and reflectors, you can also link your optimized page to these pages.
You then set a link in the page about dog harnesses to your optimized page about the keyword jogging with the dog.
You can also search for the keyword for your optimized content. Your optimized content should later become your top search result in the content relevance search. But even now, you should find matches, even if they're not perfect. These pages are at least partially about your current topic. So provide them with a link to your optimized content.
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