Optimizing Blog Content for SEO

There’s a temptation these days to take a topic like this and simply ask “can’t I just have an AI do that?” Indeed, you could feed a large language model (LLM) a blog post, ask it to optimize it for SEO (search engine optimization) , and you’d get something that at least looks different, and might perform better in search results.

If that’s all you're doing, though, your content is in trouble.

Content optimization isn’t just rewriting a blog to include more of certain keywords, for instance. Yes, that can be an individual step, though it’s a minor one. We prefer to think of optimization a bit more holistically, and so should you.

This article will talk about how to make a blog more engaging, how these engagement factors relate to SEO, and how to convert more traffic to leads.

We also provide tools and resources at the bottom to help you do this on your own. It won’t be the same as hiring experts with experience doing this for clients, but it can start you on your journey.

What Does it Mean to Optimize Content?

Most people when they think of writing content for SEO think about keyword stuffing. This is the practice of simply reiterating certain terms, or variations of them, a bunch of times. It’s how you get slop like recipe blogs with a 2,000 word personal essay before the actual recipe.

This sucks. Let’s not do that. Fortunately, we don’t have to.

On the one hand, these people aren’t wrong. Getting an article to rank for a specific term requires talking about that term, usually at length.

In many other ways, though, this understanding of SEO is actively detrimental to sustainable content efforts.

Optimizing content to rank requires that the article be engaging. Those recipe pages can get away with being bloated and boring because you still need to see the recipe. But if you’re bored on most pages, you’ll simply click out of them and find another source of information.

Creating Engaging Content

So what does engagement mean? It can mean many things:

Tell interesting stories that relate to the main point.
Use language you’d use in everyday speech so you don’t come across as stuffy and academic. Hell, feel free to swear if it doesn’t clash with your brand’s character.
Include other ways for people to digest the content: videos, images, infographics, podcasts. You won’t have all of these, but any of them can help.
Create actual value for your customers. Surface-level marketing copy isn’t valuable. Teach them something new, or entertain them. Provide value.

In a technical sense, this relates directly to one of the biggest SEO markers: time on page. Engage people, and they will stay on your site. Search engines love this, because it means they can more confidently recommend your site to more people. But that requires actually being useful, fun, educational, or otherwise creating value.

Conversion Optimization on Webpages

The next thing we want to look at is conversion optimization. Traffic is good, engagement is good, but if nothing comes of that traffic, you’re not going to stay in business.

Tools exist to track, monitor and test conversion optimization. A big one is heat mapping. This lets you track individual “sessions” on your website from users, and also aggregate session data to find trends in how people are using your site. Other systems will allow you to A/B test visitors by showing two different versions of the webpage, to see which performs better.

This yields insights that can lead to improvements. These improvements are the optimization we’re seeking.

What kind of changes might occur?

A/B testing to see which layout keeps people on the page for longer, without “frustration metrics” (keeping them on the page by confusing them = bad)
Find new locations to present calls to action. Download an eBook, schedule a demo, or whatever else your business offers.
Mix & match these calls to action to see which perform best, on what pages, and presented in which ways.

Many of these changes will be small. Like, really small. A single change might only increase your conversion rate 0.1%. But what about when you’ve done 100 of these changes across your website, and you’re doing tens of thousands in traffic per month? Then the little changes add up, and can equal dozens or hundreds of additional leads per month.

Conversion optimization also doubles as SEO optimization, for the same reasons we discussed above. If people are taking more actions on your site, it means you’re providing value and keeping them around for longer (and ideally, repeat visits).

Keyword Ranking Optimization

So you have a blog and it ranks for some keywords, but it’s ranking 34th for its primary search term, a rank low enough that it might as well not exist. After all, who’s visiting the 34th Google result with any regularity?!

But if you can just get that 34-rank up to a top 10 ranking, the page will start to bring in traffic (and leads, sales, revenue, etc.).

These “ranked but not high enough” pages are actually the best possible candidates for optimizing. There’s not much else you can do for a page that’s already performing well, and if it’s not ranking at all, optimizing it might get it ranked but it’s unlikely to push it into traffic-generating territory.

So how to do that?

If you’re using paid tools, this is a great time to have them analyze your content vs. its primary competition. There should be a word or phrase that’s the primary topic (usually contained in your title), and these tools will show you potential deficiencies.

If you have to do this manually, without paid assistance, this is still possible. Google searches and skimming top results will help you to understand how your competition is covering a topic, and what their sites are designed like to entice and retain customers.

You should then have entire sub-topics to refine and edit within your article, to make it the best version of itself.

Related:

AI Assistance and LLM-Only Approaches

Many of these tools now utilize AI models to analyze and refine writing. And they can do this a lot more quickly and powerfully than humans can manually. We use one here at Leadflask to take a look at our articles before they go live, and it’s great at showing us blindspots in our coverage of certain topics and suggesting additions.

However, there are limits. AI doesn’t know your topic like you do, and so there will be suggestions that don’t make sense, others that probably deserve their own article (which can and should be linked to one another on your site via internal linkin). And there will be blindspots for specific ideas that you and your expertise can bring to the table.

More importantly, LLMs are only as good as their inputs, so chances are it will be trying to optimize your writing by using the writing of your main competition. If you’re covering topics in the same way as pages that are already highly ranked, and you aren’t adding anything new of value (even if it’s rewritten in your voice), why should a search engine rank you among them?

It shouldn’t, is the answer. Which is why these approaches plus an expert human creator still produce the best results we’ve seen, both in specific case studies we’ve seen and in our own client work.

Make no mistake, we're using AI tools in ways that we believe enhance our effectiveness. But we've also seen the darker side of rampant AI adoption that has left some companies out a lot of money, time and resources, with fewer results to show for it. Analyzing actual results and making the appropriate adjustments is better than believing every hype bandwagon that comes along (there are a lot of them out there to jump on right now).

Being thorough with keyword and topic analysis in an article is important, but so is being unique, unexpected and memorable. AI can manage a lot, but we see it used poorly more often than well in this regard, so our recommendation to most is to find a mix that allows you to enhance your exist content efforts, but without taking on the risks that come with replacing all your content creation with LLMs.

Proof, Meet Pudding

Do we walk the walk here at Leadflask, or just talk the talk?

I'll give you an example: in about a year with our newest client, they rank (according to SEMRush keyword stats) for nearly 7,000 keywords in May, 2025, up from around 600 last year at this time!

Is this the whole story? Is their business 12 times what it was last year? No. Keywords aren't the only relevant metric. But the trend is clear, and it’s signaled a lot more business for them as these ranks have climbed. Some months have doubled year-over-year for them!

And that sort of growth only comes from the processes outlined above. 7K keywords is pocket change for some companies in terms of organic search rankings, but the point is that growth only occurss with the right process and mentality. We fully expect that 7K to look small to the same client a year from now, and hopelessly quaint in two years. And it will be because we've kept pushing our processes. Not just blog optimization, but including it.

These gains won’t be linear and upward forever, either. There are limits to content optimization alone. Maintaining a successful business that can continually grow is hard, and goes far beyond things like keyword analysis. Digital marketing is multifaceted, and traffic is an important metric, but not the whole story.

But here at Leadflask, this is what we do. We take what you have, make it better, and increase your digital presence through refinement, analysis and hard work, giving you more opportunity in the process.

Do the Work. Then Keep Doing It.

The last point I want to make is this: optimization isn’t a project with a deadline. It’s an ongoing process. I’d even call it a mentality.

If you don’t have optimization baked into your content model, it won’t be done as consistently or as effectively as it could be. If your marketing director says “we should work on some optimizations,” as though it’s a goal for the next quarter, then something’s a little bit off.

Analyzing content to see how it’s performing, and regularly diverting content efforts to improving it instead of simply creating new content all the time, should be a systemic, recurring discussion.

It’s also why having a team who folds continuous improvement into their business model can be beneficial. At Leadflask, we don’t deal in deliverables that we never return to. We create something, whether it’s a blog, website, marketing plan, or anything else. Then we return to it once it’s live, and once we have some data on it, to see how it can perform better.

It’s how growth happens, frankly. And it’s how you avoid the stagnation that comes with a lot of agencies that will do the initial work but then consider it “done.”

Content Optimization Tools & Resources

Now, go ye forth and optimize!

Ok, so you might need some help. Here are some tools to get you started, regardless of your budget. No affiliate links below, for reference. Just tools we use ourselves, or have used at various points for clients.

Free Resources:

Google Analytics: monitor site traffic
Google Search Console: monitor organic impressions and clickthrough results
Google Keyword Planner: set your SEO goals
Microsoft Clarity: free and powerful heat mapping software
Character Count Tool: incredibly granular analysis of content and keyword usage
Kraken.io: image size optimizer
Hemingway App: writing analysis

Paid Resources:

SEMRush: suite of SEO and content analysis tools. Competitors include Moz and AHRefs.
Rank IQ: create content brief, analyze existing blogs, and get topic suggestions based on AI competitor analysis.
Grammarly: writing companion. Has both free and paid versions.
Claude AI: we mostly use this for repurposing existing blogs into other content forms, such as social media posts or video scripts.

Ok, so now you can go forth and create. I expect to see a lot of interesting, exciting, and successful content from you. Good luck!