How to Create SEO-Friendly Content with SEMrush

We have discovered that out of over 200 ranking factors that Google takes into account, 67 of them are related to content creation. So the challenge for content marketers is to create SEO-friendly content that is compelling at the same time. We can help you do both!

To boost your inspiration and to help you optimize your content, SEMrush created the complete workflow for content marketers which includes:

• Finding new content ideas.
• Discovering what people search for related to your topic.
• Finding headlines that resonate with your target audience the most.
• Detecting the best performing competition for your topic to learn from.
• Exploring an approximate word count and text difficulty for your topic based on your best rivals in Google.
• Finding the right copywriter for your future content.

You can get all this information by simply typing a keyword into our content tools. One of our tools can even check how well you optimized your text right in your Google document or WordPress account. So keep reading to find out which tools can help you create SEO-friendly content. 

So, let’s see how to create SEO-friendly content using our Content Marketing Platform step-by-step:

1. Research Your Topic: Get Inspired to Write

In a perfect world, a writer is always highly motivated, and their thoughts magically form into an engrossing piece of content for readers. And, the content is perfectly optimized for Google bots at the same time.

In the real world, even the greatest of us struggle with writing and some face writer’s block. Don’t try to overcome it by just waiting until you feel inspired; get inspiration from what people talk about.

Whether you are dealing with writer's block or just looking for fresh ideas for your content, try Topic Research. It will give you subtopics with the highest search volume, questions people ask, and headlines that resonate with your audience’s needs based on a rough topic or a keyword you have in mind.

2. Find Your Angle: Narrow Down a Topic

You may have an idea of what you are going to write about, but what angle should your writing take? Starting with research is one of the best practices when learning how to write SEO friendly content. To begin researching your topic, all you have to do is to type a keyword or a phrase you want to examine more.

The topic research tool will show you cards with subtopics that may give you a different perspective on a topic you are focusing on.

Depending on your goal, you can prioritize subtopics by:

• Volume to see the most searched results first.
• Difficulty to find out which topics require less effort for promotion.
• Topic efficiency to see topics based on both volume and difficulty.

You can also identify trending topics which are most popular over the last 60 days across the web.

See What People Ask

Knowing what people search for may lead you to an even better writing idea — answer questions and become the resource people need. Every subtopic card in Topic Research has the ‘Questions’ section, which is filtered by highly used "question" words.

Below you will see ‘Related searches’, which are adjacent topics that may broaden your research. If you click on any of them, it will bring you to a separate topic research area. Make sure you have added some questions to your favorite ideas (just click the plus sign) to get back to them later before you start new research.

3. Find the Perfect Headline

The more the topic resonates with your audience, the bigger the chance they will want to read your content. Every subtopic card in Topic Research offers you article headlines related to your topic with the most backlinks.

Hover over the megaphone icon next to a headline and the popup data will tell you how strongly the headline resonates with your audience based on the number of backlinks the article has. Save your favorites, so you don’t forget them.

Topic Research Bonus: If you are a visual person, try using the Mind Map — it has all the same information, but in a more creative way.

4. Optimize Your Content Length & Language

Now that you have some ideas on what to write about and have a headline in mind, it is time to go to the next stage — content creation. However, there are often a few things the writer considers:

• Figuring out the right content length.
• Determining how difficult the language/vocabulary should be.
• How to help people find the content in the endless list of Google links

We have developed the SEO Content Template to help you answer these questions. The content creation software is basically a custom list of clear SEO recommendations for your future content, but it gives you a lot more. 

You can set up your SEO website content template right from your ‘Favorite ideas’ section in Topic Research, or just go directly to the tool and type in a keyword or topic you have in mind.

Learn from Your Rivals

Forewarned is forearmed. When you know exactly what your competitors are writing, you can always cover a gap in the topic or develop a story from a different angle to make people want to read it.

The SEO Content Template’s data is based on your top 10 rivals in Google who target particular keywords you have set up in the tool. The first data you see is a list of your top 10 rivals in Google for each keyword.

You can also see how your competitors use your target keywords in their web content. No need to open multiple browser tabs — you have all the information on a single page.

Decide What Language to Use and What Length to Stick To

Experienced writers know what content length works best for their target audiences, and based on demographics, they understand how difficult the storytelling language should be to keep an audience reading. But what if you need some help in these areas?

SEO Content Template will give data you need — check the section of the tool called ‘Key recommendations’; it will provide you with semantically related keywords to enrich your text with, a readability score to stick to, text length, and possible sites to get backlinks from.

Get More Actionable SEO Tips

We all know how important is it to get the best possible visibility in Google search results, but for those without a lot of SEO experience, some valid recommendations could help them learn how to create high-quality content and have a better optimization strategy. 

The SEO Content Template offers tips on the length of your page title and meta-description and suggests that you use your target keywords in your title, meta-description, H1, and in the text itself. 

5. Ensure Your Content is SEO-Friendly Before Going Live

To have optimized content that will work for you, there needs to be an SEO plan before the content is written. Research and choosing the right topics and keywords is where you start; then you need to start writing. You have two options, have someone create content or create it yourself— we have tools for both.

Finding the Right Writer to Create Your Content

To help you with this struggle of searching for a professional writer, we created the SEMrush Content Marketplace; here, you can order optimized content written by fast, reliable, and experienced copywriters. To order an article, go to the SEMrush Content Marketplace and choose a type of content based on word count. 

Next, make a payment for your future content piece and fill in the brief data. After your brief is sent, you will receive a title for your future article. When the title is approved, a copywriter will begin creating an article and send it to you optimized.

A Tool to Help You Optimized Content the Content You Create

One of our top content tips is to ensure that it is fully optimized before publishing. We have a tool that will check in real-time how SEO-friendly your text is while you are creating it, right in your Google document or WordPress account — the SEO Writing Assistant. With this tool, you can be confident that you are creating optimized content, and, when finished, that you are ready for publication.

SEO Writing Assistant is an add-on for Google Docs and WordPress which connects your SEO Content Template to your Google document or a WordPress account to analyze how well your text complies with the SEO recommendations we have provided you with previously.

SEO Writing Assistant Set Up and Use 

• To set it up, download an add-on for Google Docs or a plugin for WordPress, or make a quick content check in the SEMrush interface.
• If you are using Google Docs, click on ‘Add-ons’ on the top of the menu and select ‘SEO Writing Assistant’. The add-on will open up on the right side of your document.
• After you tap on the blue ‘Free’ button, you will be sent to a new Google document. Next, click on ‘Add-ons’ on the top of the menu, and select ‘SEO Writing Assistant’. The add-on will open up on the right side of your document.

Note: The writing assistant will add the SEO Content Template you most recently created in your account or prompt you to create a new one.

6. Use Optimization Compliance Metrics

All the metrics are interactive, which means they are updating live based on the changes you make in your text.

Exploring our compliance metrics is the perfect way to improve your writing and create optimized content. Here are some things it will help you with:

• SEO metrics show how well your content is optimized for your target keywords, suggests additional keywords, detects linking issues, and alerts you about keyword stuffing. 

• Readability is the ease with which a reader can understand a written text. SEO Writing Assistant analyzes your copy’s complexity and identifies hard to read sentences, long words, and paragraphs in your copy. 

• Originality checker detects the total percentage of copied words in your text and identifies original sources of content from across the internet. 

• The tone of voice compliance feature makes sure that every content piece complies with your overall brand voice — casual, neutral, or formal — or let our algorithm identify it.

As in the SEO Content Template, all of the above metrics are based on your best-performing rivals in Google’s top ten, which saves you time browsing search engine results for your keywords.

In Conclusion

Learning how to write SEO friendly content is not easy, but we hope that our Content Marketing Platform will streamline your text creation and page optimization process. It was designed to help you with the ideation process as well as learning how to optimize website content for SEO.

Your next step will be to check your content performance after it is published to see what all your efforts resulted in, but that is another story.