Positioning in the right place and choosing the correct files and sizes for better performance, being mindful of platforms and text cutting off, word limits, and understanding how optimised content may appear on different devices.
Content creation comes with many best practice guidelines to follow. Our latest blog post offers five helpful tips to effectively optimise online content for marketing and highlights the benefits of creating content successfully optimised for your audience.
Why is optimised content important?
With so much content on the internet, standing out is key. Optimisation is a vital step towards making content visible, accessible, and engaging for an audience.
The benefits of optimised content include:
- Businesses can display impactful content on various digital marketing channels with clear messaging for their brand with a professional appearance that engages their audience
- Improved readability, using accessibility features to help both humans and web robots understand the purpose of content
- It’s also great for Search Engine Optimisation, referred to as SEO!
Tip 1: Where will content be found?
Just as we don’t post a TikTok dance video on a website homepage, blog posts are not designed to be easily condensed into Facebook captions.
Each platform has its unique parameters and audience expectations. Understanding the content’s purpose and where it’s shown allows it to be optimised further and made more appropriate for the intended platform or channel, each of which has different requirements and recommendations. When publishing content, it’s important for audiences not to feel they are being shown the same thing everywhere they go.
When creating optimised content for specific platforms, think about:
- What it will look like on a page, website, or social media timeline. Does this affect its size, length, or even quality?
- Word count. Is there a recommended length or character limit?
- Tone of voice. Who are we speaking to? What does the content structure look like?
- Branding. Does the content incorporate branding in a way that’s clear to audiences?
With these factors in mind, we can effectively optimise content for its specific platform or channel and help tailor it to the audience viewing it. Ask us for help today.
Tip 2: Choose proportions wisely
Size, it turns out, does matter!
If we’re scrolling through the timeline and a video doesn’t fit on the screen, we’ll click away.
Tailoring content also means considering the sizing recommendations to optimise content for the audience. This can include:
- If a video or graphic best viewed in landscape or portrait
- The length of text and captions and how visible they are, including where they cut off
- How big the logo is in comparison to other elements on an image or video posted on social media
- How prominent are the calls to action? Do people notice them quickly?
In content creation, a combination of many elements helps to build a blog post on a website or make a social media post live on several platforms. Issues like managing each element individually in relation to sizing, and ensuring the audience’s attention is drawn to the correct elements first, all have a part to play in optimising content.
This isn’t only for images or graphics!
When thinking about sizing content, it’s easy to imagine graphics, video resolutions and image ratios. But what about text content?
For example, did you know font sizes can affect how accessible content is?
According to the standards set by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the recommended size for website text content, to ensure it is easily readable and more accessible to visitors, is 14 pixels.
These same standards can also help to create optimised content for social media!
Choosing the right size for written content improves readability for website visitors, social media followers, and others. With optimised text content, we can be confident in our ability to deliver messages to our audience in an easily consumable and engaging way.
Proportional sizing isn’t the only size we should look out for…
Tip 3: File sizes improve performance (and make content more sustainable)
No one wants to see that buffering symbol when loading a website or a social media post.
Large files, like videos, images, and even text files, can affect the performance of content if not optimised. The longer content takes to load, the longer the audience is waiting – which could discourage them from interacting at all!
Slower, larger files also affect a website’s overall performance, negatively affecting search engine rankings.
Without optimisation, an issue like this can be problematic. From decreases in website visitors to lower engagement on social media, it’s safe to assume that the audience would be less likely to convert to our services. With that in mind, reducing file size is a great optimisation method.
Smaller files and optimised content are more sustainable
With smaller files, content uses less time and energy to load. Reducing the energy usage for every load provides much more efficient and sustainable content.
What are the benefits?
- Customers will experience fast-performing content
- Brand reputation will be more positive and acting in line with sustainable values
- Website, social media profiles and content will use less carbon, produce less emissions per load, and reduce the environmental impact.
- Increased conversion rates and improved performance in Google search. Check out this video to find out more
We can reap all these benefits by reducing the size of images and video content!
Tip 4: Don't let your words cut off!
If there’s no ‘hook’, people won’t read on.
Attention spans are becoming increasingly shorter, and it’s an important consideration for business owners who want to grab the attention of their customers with eye-catching and engaging marketing content. Content must have visual appeal to stand out and encourage audiences to pay attention.
This is why graphics and infographics are so important!
Using graphics to deliver a message, whether a new product, a raving review, or something else, allows us to use text and images to create an appealing design for the audience. But they must be optimised to work successfully…
Content that hasn’t been adapted or optimised to the platform it’s uploaded to, referring to Tip 1 here, increases the chance of vital text being obscured or not fully visible. It could also cut off with a ‘Read more’ link on social media before we’ve successfully hooked the audience’s attention, and they may never read the entire post.
Without this optimisation, content loses its effect and may not be as engaging.
So, what do we do?
- Reduce text where possible on graphics
- Check all graphics with text are correctly sized to avoid cutting off valuable information
- Consider character limits on each platform, for example how long should a meta description be before it’s cut off by Google?
Bonus tip! Make text accessible
Accessibility is vital when creating content for broad audiences online. Everyone has the right to use social media or the internet to learn more about a business, so we need to be as inclusive as possible.
Here are some ways to make content accessible for those with visual impairments:
- Choosing background and foreground colours with sufficient contrast. See this website to find out more
- Add alt text with all graphic details, including any text. This helps people fully understand what the content is and can also help inform platform algorithms and robots.
Tip 5: Device perspective
Are you reading this blog post on a laptop or a mobile phone? No matter which one, the content should always be readable!
Another crucial element of creating and publishing marketing content is creating and optimising content for various platforms and ensuring it is readable on different devices.
If customers use mobiles or tablets to view products and services, then it makes sense for content to be as responsive as possible when using those devices.
This could include:
- Changing page and content alignment to better fit a screen
- Reducing or increasing the size of content for readability
- Adding more breaks or paragraph spaces to help make content easily digestible
- Choosing simpler imagery, where details aren’t lost on a smaller device
- Check that image/video quality isn’t lost when viewing on a larger screen.
Mobile responsiveness is also a main factor in how Google ranks websites for search engines. This considers how users will experience a website, with websites optimised for mobile use favoured more in search results. Look at this Google guide for help optimising mobile content.
So, next time you create content, think about who will see it and what they will use.
Summary:
There we have it! 5 ways to easily optimise content.
With the right understanding of platforms and channels, correctly sized content in proportion and file size, content can be effectively optimised for the target audience. By following these tips, published content will be more appealing to social media users, website visitors, and more, allowing organisations to present themselves professionally online, giving an opportunity to increase engagement and maximise conversion rates.
Speak to our experts today about your website or social media content. We’re here to help!
For more insight on website content, check out this previous blog from our team.
