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SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant
Looking for an SEO writing assistant? Writing a piece of content that ranks high in search results is difficult, but the SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant can make your life easy.
With the help of this content editing tool, you can optimize content by checking its SEO effectiveness on a real-time basis. It will suggest keywords as you write your text.
To produce good SEO content, you need to consider the various ON Site SEO factors like knowing search intent, keyword research, content organization, plagiarism, content originality, readability, and engagement score, etc.
A busy blogger or content creator always has too much writing to deal with. Therefore, this content optimization tool comes in handy in optimizing the blog posts in a short time.
SWA lets you know in advance the essential SEO suggestions. It will generate a list of recommendations to adjust your copy for better search engine ranking.
Based on the analysis of the latest data of the top 10 competitors in your niche for a particular target keyword, it predicts how your content will perform in search results.
In this article, you will learn about search intent and what is SEO writing, how to use the SEMRush writing assistant tool to make content more search engine and user friendly.
With the help of SWA, you can optimize articles in a faster and easy way. Not only can you make content more readable, but also target semantically related keywords that can increase organic traffic potential.
Table of Content
2.How to make SEO writing perfectly with SWA?
2.2 Topic and keyword research
2.3 Proper structure for writing
1.What is SEO writing?
In digital marketing, content is still king. All over the world, content marketers are busy producing fresh content constantly to attract, educate and convert their prospects.
But they face the biggest challenge of creating quality content that is loved by both search engines and prospects.
A piece of content that is informative, well organized, engaging, and interesting is good for consumption by the users.
But if not optimized for search engines, can not bring organic free traffic from Google.
On the flip side, if you over-optimize content, reading will be difficult and hurt page ranking. Google can penalize for over-optimization and keyword stuffing. The readers are also less likely to convert.
So, creating a good SEO copy needs a fine balance between the requirements of two different users (humans and search engines).
Around, 7 million blog posts are published daily by bloggers and content marketers. However, not all these articles are SEO optimized. Hence, web pages that do not appear on the first page or rank very low receive almost zero visitors from Google.
Did you know it is the first page in SERPs that handles 90% of organic traffic?
So, if your goal of content marketing (along with conversion) is also to drive free search engine traffic, then you can not ignore the power of SEO writing.
Not optimizing for SEO means you are missing free organic traffic opportunities from search engines.
2.How to make your SEO writing perfect?
SEO content creation starts with research of target audience, their needs, and the keywords.
So, before writing any single word, you should ask yourself, who are your readers? Are you creating a piece of content that provides the solution to their problems?
What are the questions or queries that they type on Google?
And the most important thing is that you should write content keeping in mind the search intent. The same content will not be good for all 3 types of search intent.
For example, the content should be different for those who are seeking only information about a product than those who want to buy.
Therefore, knowing user intent before writing is important. It is nothing but to understand the real motive behind a search query. This helps in creating relevant content to get targeted traffic.
To get a high search rank, you need to optimize your content for search intent. The keywords for you are trying to rank should match the intent of the search query.
The importance of user intent is immense from an SEO perspective. Content that is more oriented towards it can also rank for multiple keywords apart from your target keyword.
If your content exactly addresses the searcher’s intent, then he would not browse other websites to satisfy his needs. The bounce rate will also be lower.
When people find relevant content, they develop an interest in reading and spend more time that gives a strong positive signal to Google for a high search ranking.
There are three types of user intent:-
Informational- When a search query seeks more information or detail. “What is Corona?”
Search queries having informational intent can also include modifiers like the tutorial, guide, etc.
Navigational- In this case, the user is already familiar with a brand name but not sure about its exact URL, and therefore, he wants to access that website by typing on Google.” Pinterest support"
Transactional- When the user wants to buy or make a purchase. In the transactional search query, the user already knows about the product and wants to access the product page to complete the purchase. “iPhone 12 Pro.”
To know search intent, type your seed keyword on Google and watch the search results on its first page. From the analysis of SERPs, you can figure out what kind of content the people are looking for who type that search term.
If you find videos in SERPs for your target keyword, content in text format will not perform better because search users expect video than text format for that keyword.
With innovative technologies, search engines are becoming smarter day by day. They better know the intent behind a query and show relevant content types. Therefore, it is wise to check the titles and descriptions of the web pages displayed on the first page.
So once you figure out search intent, it should further guide your topic and keyword research processes.
Sometimes bloggers struggle to find new ideas for writing. Writing about a topic your audience is not interested in would be simply a waste of effort and time.
You can use the SEMRush topic research tool to discover new ideas and headlines that resonate with your audience.
For trending ideas and inspirations, Pinterest can be an excellent source. People visit this visual social platform to find new products and services. Not only learning Pinterest marketing will help you discover new topics for writing but also boost website traffic.
Why do you need to do keyword analysis?
To find answers in Google, people type search terms. Google looks for these phrases on the web page and shows the most relevant pages.
If your content misses these words from the key places, then there is a high chance that your web page will rank lower in SERPs.
Therefore, finding keywords before writing is an essential task. But again, while researching keywords, you need to keep in mind your website authority, search volume, and keyword difficulty.
Target those search terms that are comparatively easy to rank. Popular search terms have very high search volume and keyword difficulty. It is easy for a high authority website to rank for such highly competitive keywords.
If you write content for a new website with low authority and a weak backlink profile, discovering long-tailed search terms will be profitable.
But how can you discover keywords? Google is itself a great free keyword research tool you can use to brainstorm. When you type on the search bar, it will automatically suggest popular and related keywords. It lists queries that are popular and frequently used by other users.
The other places on Google where you can look are “People also ask” and featured snippets.
If you have already written content on similar topics, then Google Search Console can be one of the easy sources to find new profitable keywords. This free Google tool helps in observing website performance.
Go to the performance page and sort the search queries from low to high click-through rates. Find keywords that have a lot of impressions but very low CTR.
You may find search terms that are ranking well even if you have not targeted them in your content. These terms may be your new profitable keywords.
The SEO world is full of many keyword research tools. Once you are done with brainstorming, you can use Ubersuggest and SEMrush keyword magic tools to target valuable keywords by analyzing search volume and keyword difficulty.
During the keyword research process, you notice that search queries with a very high monthly search volume will have keyword difficulty of over 50. To rank for these competitive terms, you need quality backlinks from high-authority websites.
Search terms having keyword difficulty below 30 are easy to target. You will find that long-tailed terms have less competition and are easy to rank.
So, a smart SEO strategy for a new website will target search queries that are at least 3-4 words long. They are more close to search intent too.
Once you have finalized target keywords, you can assess their SEO potential by using SEMRush writing assistant. It will show you an SEO graph by analyzing your top 10 rivals.
It will inform you in advance, the SEO effectiveness of the terms you will use and suggest LSI keywords. By incorporating these suggestions, you can further improve your SEO score.
You may have a good content idea to write, but if not presented with a proper format, people will face problems in reading. This can increase bounce rate and hurt your site SEO score.
It should not be messy and boring. On the flip side, logically arranging information and facts makes reading easy and engaging. Web pages that provide a great user experience also rank well.
So, to make a blog post more effective, it should have the below format.
1.Headline
Internet users have a very short attention span of just 8 seconds. Most of the people, by looking at the headline, decide to read an entire article.
Therefore, making them interesting is the most important SEO requirement.
For crafting an enticing title, you can use free SEO tools like HubSpot topic generator and Co schedule headline analyzer.
2.Image
Just below the headline, insert a quality image that captures your main content idea.
According to various reports, 80% of people just skim the written content and only 20% read it. An attractive image can infuse interest in reading.
Including visual likes images and videos can increase dwell time and shares on social media.
3.Introduction
An introduction gives an overview of the content that you have covered in your article. In this section, you can make promises to solve your audience’s problem.
To write an effective introduction, you can use a question, personal story, or interesting data. At the start of the first line, use your primary keyword for that you want to rank.
The introduction should compel your audience to go through the article. You can also give an outline of the key topics of the article.
4.Body
In this section, you discuss everything in a detailed way. To make the text of the body more engaging, you can divide it into headings and sub-headings.
Not only do headings tags make content more appealing but also help Google in understanding it.
Not all people read articles line by line. Instead, they look for headings, bullet points, important facts, and bold lines to skim through the content.
Create an outline and try to arrange subtopics in a relevant and cohesive manner. All the paragraphs in the body should be relevant to the main idea of your writing. And there should be an organic connection between different paragraphs of the body.
Whatever promises you have made at the beginning of the article should be fulfilled here.
5.Conclusion and Call To Action
Here, you can summarize the entire article in a few lines. But those lines should be strong and show a way forward. You need to tell them what to do next. Inspire your audience to take action that you desire.
6.URL
Although URL is not an element of the article structure, its optimization yields good SEO results and enhances user experience. So it indirectly helps in improving SEO.
Sometimes users type URL names directly into the address bar of browsers to access the relevant webpage.
It is easy for them to remember and type names that are short and closely related to the content idea.
Include your main keyword in the URL Name and avoid numbers.
Based on the analysis of top competitors, the SEMrush content editing tool quickly assesses SEO potential and recommends necessary changes.
So before publishing any piece of content written by your copywriters or freelance writers, you can check the SEO quality of their work.
You can quickly check for SEO score, just paste your text and enter the target keywords.
Once you click on the “Get recommendations“ button, the SWA tool will quickly analyze your text’s SEO and user-friendliness.
After analyzing target keywords, it will show a score for your content.
Content having a score close to 10 will be highly optimized. This overall score is calculated by considering 4 different scales, such as SEO, Readability, Originality, and Tone of voice.
In the graph, click on the SEO scale, it will expand all the metrics that are used to calculate SEO score.
Target Keywords
All the recommendations for improving the quality of your content by SWA tool are based on these seed keywords.
If you change target keywords, SWA will generate a new set of recommendations.
Recommended keywords
These are semantically related to target keywords.
Optimization of the text for keywords that are related to primary keywords will enhance online visibility and organic traffic.
Targeting a single keyword is an outdated SEO approach you need to include more variants in the content so that you can rank for multiple keywords and build topical authority.
SWA makes it easy for you to discover alternative search terms. If you have already used them in your text, they will be highlighted in green color.
By hovering over them, you can check whether they have high or low monthly search volume and keyword difficulty. Such useful insights can help you choose more beneficial alternative search terms.
Keyword stuffing
While adding keywords to the write-up, you should not dilute its aesthetic. There should be a delicate balance between the volume of keywords and readability.
It will also let you know whether you have overused some keywords. In both recommended and target keywords sections, you can spot keyword stuffing in orange color.
You can also see the number of occurrences for an overused keyword and recommended count. Using a word more than 3% of total words in the content can invite Google penalty.
Broken links
Broken links are not only bad from an SEO perspective but also irritate readers. SEMrush SEO editing tool helps in identifying broken links before you publish the content.
You can download an SCT template containing a list of top articles analyzed for each of your target keywords.
In this SCT doc, you can also find a list of websites from which you should try to gain backlinks to improve page rank for your article.
You will also find recommendations to improve page title, meta description, and how your competitors used target keywords in their web pages.
Alt attribute for images
Image SEO is equally important as other types of SEOs. Image SEO not only makes your content more engaging but also drives additional traffic from image searches.
Alt tag which is also known as alternative text displayed when somehow browsers cannot load the image.SWA reminds you of missing alt tags for images in your article.
While optimizing copy for SEO, the importance of readability can not be ignored. An article can not be search engine friendly unless it is written for humans.
SEMrush content writing assistant checks the readability of an article based on the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease score. The readability score tells how it is easy or difficult to read a piece of content by your target audience.
Click on the readability scale on the graph, you will see a readability score and other related metrics such as length of the article, title, and content issues.
The tool analyzes top rivals and, based on the average length of their articles, sets a target word count for you.
It lets you know whether you have forgotten to include a title for your article or not. You can add more words or remove them from the title as suggested by the tool.
To make content more readable and user- friendly, this automatic SEO content checker detects hard-to-read sentences, long paragraphs, and complex words. It will show what sentences and paragraphs you need to rewrite to make the content more reader-friendly.
Original content enhances the credibility of the website in the eyes of both users and search engines. Excessive duplicate content can be harmful to search ranking.
With this tool, you can check the work of your team and freelance writers for plagiarism. The originality check of SWA is based on Copyleaks plagiarism checker.
It can highlight the copied content so that you can make necessary modifications without wasting too much time.
Along with the percentage of copied words, it can also show the links to the original sources.
The tone of voice plays a crucial role in establishing healthy communication with the readers. It is the way how you deliver your message to them.
So, the language, style of the writing, and structure of the sentences should be according to your target audience.
For example, if you are writing for a non-specialist, it should not contain difficult and jargon words.
If your audience is specialists such as doctors, lawyers, you can use industry-specific terminology.
If you want to maintain your brand’s tone of voice across all the articles, you can set it in the tool and then you can easily identify those sentences that are written in a different tone.
3. SWA Add-on & Plugin
Using SWA is simple, you can download SEMrush Writing Assistant Add-on for Google Docs from Google Workspace Marketplace.
After installation, you can access it through Add-on Tab on Google Docs. Click on the Show button to analyze your Google Doc’s content for SEO suggestions.
You can access the WordPress plugin for SWA here for SEMrush writing assistant.
With a free SEMrush account, you can only create one recommended set.
4. Conclusion
SEO Writing Assistant by SEMrush is well integrated with Google docs and WordPress. The different SEO metrics are calculated based on the large volume of keyword data and taking ideas from top competitors. The tool is helpful, but a little expensive.
Besides making content modifications as suggested by SWA, you also need to implement ON-PAGE and OFF- PAGE SEO tactics to get maximum online visibility.