Semrush Tutorial for SEO Content Writing: Win the Google Game

Key Takeaways

winning the Google game requires a keyword strategy and content and lots of it so many SEO tools focus on strategy but how do you make the content actually work for you in this tutorial I'll walk you through sem Rush's content marketing tool set from A to Z so you know how to generate topic ideas structure your content and check your articles actually deliver the SEO result you want let's dive in we've partnered with s to get you a special 14-day trial of semrush Guru so to get it head to the following website you can click on the card in the top right or you can click the link in the description below from the homepage click on try it free to get started then you can start your trial by entering your email and your password and then clicking the create account button some Rush will ask you a few other questions and then you'll land on the homepage I'll see you over there so here at David's Donut Den we are launching a new store in the Seattle Washington area we have have to compete with the existing donut shops there and for us that means when anyone searches for donuts we show up higher on Google than they do let's see how semrush can help so step one is to examine what keywords are competitors rank for to do that we'll use S Rush's organic research tool now we know one of our biggest competitors is topot Donuts so I'll type in their URL topot donuts.com and then click the search button to reveal the keywords that they rank for there's there's a lot of information on this page but let's scroll down to what we're focused on keywords now it's not too surprising that the top keywords that these guys rank for are Top Pot Donuts so let's look at all the keywords that they rank for and see if there's any opportunities for us now semrush has presented this table of 3600 keywords but before we filter this down let me take you through the information we have for each keyword let's start with intent intent is search intent and there are four types that Rush categorizes n for navigational means that the user is searching for a specific site I for informational means that the user is searching for information or to answer a question C for commercial means that the user is researching a specific product or service and T for transactional means the user has intent to buy position is where this website appears on the search result page SF or surp features details what else shows up for this search result besides a link examples for the keyword Top Pot Donuts include site links reviews images videos X carousels knowledge panels and so on okay pay attention to these next three because they can be kind of confusing traffic counts the average number of monthly visits to this URL from users searching for this keyword volume on the other hand tracks the average number of monthly searches for this keyword traffic percentage is not a click-through rate it's the percentage of traffic that this URL receives from this keyword search compared to the total traffic that this URL receives in other words 22% of the total traffic going to topot donuts.com comes from Google search results for the keyword topot Donuts last but not least is keyword difficulty percentage and this is a proprietary metric from SIM Rush it's measured on scale from 0 to 100% the higher the percentage the harder it will be to rank organically for the this keyword the idea is when you're just starting out Target the lower percentages as they're going to be easier to rank for let's filter this list down because we're not going to rank for Top Pot Donuts up above I'll click on Advanced filters and I want to get rid of any keywords including the words Top Pot so first I'll change this include to an exclude and I'll type in top here then I'll add another condition where I'll also change include to exclude and then I'll add pot as the second keyword to exclude then let's click a y to make the changes now this is starting to look better let's next filter the keyword difficulty down to the easy keywords only to do that open up the keyword difficulty filter and then enter a custom range from 0% to 30% as you see these are what the very easy and easy keywords go for then click apply finally let's sort this by volume so we know the most searched keywords time to go through the list what have we got I'm going to keep track of the good ones and I recommend that you do too first up is best donuts near me it's got really good volume and it definitely applies to us so let's log it Pink Box Donuts that's a different brand feather boa we don't sell those vegan muffins don't sell those we don't do custom donuts donut sign probably not for us doughnut holes near me this sounds good too so let's log it dut holes near me the next one apple fritter near me also makes sense coffee Donuts also a good one best donut shop near me I hope you get the idea and now that we've selected some keywords we need to figure out how to write content about them this is where Sim Rush's next tool the keyword strategy Builder comes into play I'm going to move this list off to the side for now we'll come back to it later and then scroll up until on the left side you see keyword strategy Builder click on that link to enter the tool now before I tell you what this does let's get those keywords back from earlier we're going to use these keywords as seed keywords to generate an entire content strategy so if you're following along you can copy these keywords and then paste them in the box that says enter seed keywords now the keyword strategy Builder recognizes that you don't just want to rank for these keywords you want to rank for all related keywords too so when I click create list the keyword strategy Builder is going to go out to sem Rush's database search for all the related keywords to these five seed keywords and then suggest a list of pages and subpages that I should write to bring in the maximum amount of traffic so let's click create list now this is going to take some time you see it's going to take maybe up to 15 minutes so I will see you in a little bit okay we are back and semrush has found over 3500 related keywords with a total monthly search volume of almost 3 million we also have this bubble diagram below which helps us optimize our content for all of these keywords let me show you how it works so your content for these keywords is clustered into topics and each of these groups of bubbles represents a topic each topic has a representative pillar page which most keywords cluster around and then subp pages that logically relate to that pillar page we can see we've got 10 total topics here so let's invest tigate what semrush has suggested scrolling past the topical overview bubble diagram we can see each of the topics as I mention each topic has a representative pillar page and subpages associated with it let's click collapse all topics to compare them now looking through this list we can compare topics based on their total search volume and their average keyword difficulty remember that a keyword difficulty below 30% was considered easy and between 30 and 50% was considered possible the first topic which looks really enticing is this fresh donuts topic with a search volume of almost 1.5 million and an easy keyword difficulty let's check this out when we expand the topic we immediately see the pillar page and several sub pages to create let's try to spot check this quickly now this pillar page Donuts Bakery sounds a bit vague so let's click on it to inspect the keywords that semrush has grouped into this page in addition to the keywords you can also see the sites which rank high for these keywords let's collapse this pillar page and look at some of the sub Pages as we look through the list we can see other brands other locations Washington DC Boston Dallas really only a couple of terms here best homemade donuts near me free donuts today near me although that's not going to be much help for the business baseball Donuts near me Let's click on show more to look at what else semrush has and here we see Yum Yum Donuts donuts Nashville Arizona donuts donuts Austin it's looking like this is not the right topic to invest in so let's collapse this topic and look for another one with a higher opportunity next up is specific doughnut types so let's expand that now we're starting to get some interesting ideas filled Donuts near me protein Donuts near me bacon Donuts near me pumpkin Donuts free donuts Halal Donuts notice also some of these markers like high relevance where a page matches some of the seed keywords we provided around originally and high potential like this one up top where the page has high ranking potential because the keyword difficulty is Sol low and has good search volume now you can keep looking at all of these pages and subpages and find things that might work for you but at some point you got to write some content I'm sure you've seen this button on the right hand side called Write content so let's click it and see what we can do for the filed Donuts near me page here we have two options to write our articles the first one is content Shake AI this is a semrush app to automate writing your articles in your brand voice we'll cover this one in another video on the other hand the SEO writing assistant makes sure that the Articles you write will bring in the traffic that you want let's select the writing assistant and then click apply next we need to choose do we want SEO insights for desktop readers or phone readers let's stick with desktop and then click Send keywords to open the writing assistant with this pane on the left you can start writing your article or you can paste in an article you've already written and refine it I have an existing article that I need some guidance on so I'll paste it in here immediately on the right hand side you see that this article gets scored on three out of four dimensions readability SEO and tone of voice let's check out each of these and follow it up with looking at originality so first readability when you scroll down you can see the major issues first off you can see the readability and the number of words compared to other articles which rank highly for these keywords then you scroll down more and you start to see the real issues like my title is longer than 60 characters and that could mean it's truncated when displayed in search results I've also got hard to read sentences and complex words which are highlighted in purple directly in the article now semrush doesn't just tell you the issues it also has some tools to fix those issues for example we've got some tough to read sentences up here so I'm going to highlight them and then click on the rephraser tool with this tool I have several options rephrase simplify expand and summarize I'll choose simplify because I want to keep this simple to read then click the simplify button the summerish AI has taken these long complex sentences and turned them into something that is simple and easy to read let's click replace and close to update the original article next let's check out SEO our score was pretty bad here so let's scroll down and check out the issues SEO is about using keywords both Target keywords and recommended keywords because we use so few of these keywords our score was pretty low the SEO score also tracks other issues like adding images and ALT attributes adding links and adding keywords in your title let's next look at the tone of voice Score first s Rush evaluates the tone of voice of the article it can be casual neutral or formal as long as it's consistent throughout you'll also get some recommendations to change some sentences if their tone differs from the overall tone of the article next up is originality semrush has tools to check for plagiarism which will penalize you in search results to do that click the check it for free button it'll take a minute or two fortunately looks like this one is 100% original before we go much further it's important to point out this article is actually incomplete I've got a lot of information here about Don but I don't have a clear call to action in fact I usually get writer block when it comes to sales copy so I need some help this is a perfect use case for the composed tool I can prompt the semrush AI to write content according to my needs after writing the prompt you can select the text and then click the compose button the AI eliminates your writer's block and allows you to keep moving I'll reject these changes for now and then show you the last tool called ask AI you can find the ask AI button under the compose button when you click it you can ask the semrush AI anything the advantage of conversing here is that this AI has all of the best practices of SEO loaded into it so for example I can ask how can I make this article better click ask and then you'll get the response in the document in a few seconds and now you have an action item list to make this article even better with these tools you should be well equipped to fight back against writer's block and and blank page syndrome remember you now have access to an extended 14-day trial of semrush Guru using the link in the description below leave us a like and consider subscribing as it really helps us with the algorithm I'll see you next time