How to Create Fresh and Interactive Content with SEMrush

• Content Marketing
• SEO Tool

Here’s the thing – there are millions of posts published every day; WordPress alone witnesses about 70 million new posts produced each month. And every marketer wants to stand out from the crowd and drive huge lead magnets to their account with the help of the content they put out for their audience. BUT…

Are you doing enough for your audience?

Are you answering their questions?

Are you as a brand providing value to your audience?

If the answers to these questions are directing towards a ‘no’ then your content needs help. 

Admit it – when you as a consumer Google up something, how much time do you end up spending on the internet? You skim and scan through multiple sources until you find the right piece of information you need, and may also end up subscribing to that source to obtain more through daily newsletters. 

That’s it. I just put you in the shoes of the average Internet user. And therefore, you as a responsible and efficient marketer ought to ask yourselves an important question before publishing any piece of material to your audience – “Would I read this if I were a consumer?”

A research conducted in Canada revealed that on an average, people now generally lose concentration within 8 seconds due to digitalized lifestyle and multitasking. And the Internet is way past being a passive experience. Content is a strategic asset and you need to actively serve your audience with content that provides value.  And by creating valuable content you also get a bonus which could turn into leads successfully ie. engagement. You get them talking and your audience become your brand advocates. 

The infamous E-A-T principle says that …

Expertise: the page needs quality content written by a subject-matter expert.

Authority: the website needs to have authority on the subject.

Trustworthiness: the website needs to have authoritative links from other trusted sources.

So how do you know what your audience wants for providing quality content? In this article, we are mainly focusing on the methods by which you can extract useful insights into your audience from SEMrush. 

SEMrush has been quite in the limelight by scaling its abilities in driving useful and intelligent insights to fellow marketers doing research on SEO and content. Let’s learn how to use this ingenious marketing tool for deriving beneficial data about your consumers.

SEMrush Content Marketing Toolkit

Content marketers face quite a few challenges in their efforts to create unique and valuable content for their marketing campaigns. SEMrush provides a comprehensive toolkit with features and metrics that target and combat most of the key challenges likely to be encountered while preparing a strategy. But before we jump into SEMrush features, let’s have a quick summary of those challenges:

• Setting up a goal 

You need to have a purpose for creating content which must be duly aligned with your content strategy. It’s important to recognize why you are creating the content and what its outcomes are.

• Keeping it fresh

Your content can easily lose its spark if it’s not updated according to the latest terms. For example, we are currently going through a pandemic and the situation needs to be addressed along with how it affects the topic of the content you are creating.

• Understanding your target audience

This can get extremely tough without the right tools to identify your audience. You need to deliver your content to the right set of audience by knowing their interests, content preferences, etc.

• Measuring your campaign performance and impact

Of course, it’s a given that you need to measure the impact of your content marketing campaign to have insights on your key improvement areas, and more importantly, you need to be able to quantitatively demonstrate it.

How can SEMrush be useful?

The Content Marketing toolkit has everything you need right from content ideation to the measurement of its performance. Let’s deep-dive into each of its features which would get things done in a proficient manner.

Topic Research

This can efficiently put an end to the question – “what to write?” and of course, the solution to the first challenge. You can get content ideas on trending and debatable topics your audience is interested in. Just enter in any topic you want to talk about, suppose let’s say I want to know what my audience is interested in “food” these days, so I head to ‘Topic Research’ below the Dashboard tab on the left-hand menu and type in “mexican food” in the search bar and hit enter. You can also select the country you are targeting which is right beside the search bar. 

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What you’ll find next is an overview in the form of expandable cards about the topics you could write about. You can choose to prioritize the results by many options like –

Volume – view the most searched results first.

Difficulty – find out which topics require the least efforts to market

Topic Efficiency – to evaluate topics on the basis of both volume and difficulty

Also, there is an option called ‘Trending subtopics first’ which prioritizes topics that have been under discussion over the last 60 days and has the potential to expand its volume. And here, we solve the second challenge ie. to find fresh content topics for your audience. More specifically, if you pay attention to the bullhorn near each subtopic headline, you will see icons painted in green, blue, and light blue. Those resemble the resonance of the title which are prioritized on the basis of the number of backlinks it has. And, to get right into solving the pain points of your audience, you should really be using the ‘Questions’ section available in all the tabs except ‘Overview’. By doing that, you get to know what your audience has been up to on the internet and what they are specifically interested to know, and hence, thereby, solving the third challenge of understanding them.

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For more filtering of your results into detail, you can enter your domain, like suppose I want to get more info about the fast-food joints, so I type in a domain like zomato.com and I get cards ticked with the subtopics people are interested in.

You can expand each of those cards and to get a deep understanding, or you can head to the Explorer or the Overview tab itself where you can dissect topics on the basis of their Facebook engagement, total engagement, backlinks, etc.

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The tab right next to Overview is an interesting one ie. Mind Map. It gives you a visual representation of the same information given in the rest of the tabs, so if you prefer a more diagrammatic description, make use of this tab.

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SEO Content Template and Writing Assistant

SEMrush is all about being a market intelligence tool for SEO, and it has extended its optimization usability to this toolkit as well. The SEO Content template gives you recommendations based on your target keywords for producing SEO-friendly content that would rank in the optimum manner on SERPs. These recommendations are actually based on the top10 competitors on Google’s results which gets you an insight on what works best for them would actually work seemingly well for you. Also, you get suggestions on the places from which you can acquire backlinks, the readability and text length their content has, and the semantically related keywords which you need to carry in your content.

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The SEO writing assistant comes as an add-on for Google docs and WordPress wherein you can get a real-time content check for SEO friendliness and plagiarism. It helps in structuring, toning your voice consistency, ensuring enough number of valid links are present, and also recommend you titles, keyword inputs, etc. It’s true to its name, and it checks whether your content is good enough to rank on the SERPs.

Post Tracking

Here, we find the solution to the last challenge of content strategizing ie. tracking and measuring your content performance. Well, sure Google Analytics is the most preferred by most marketers to track their content performance, but SEMrush can get you information about your content if it has been published on external resources as well, which the former couldn’t. This needs you to add a project first which you’re working on and then you get to analyze any blog post or article that’s live on the internet. Add a URL or a group of links to view the number of backlinks, the estimated reach, and the number of shares your or your competitor’s content has on the web.

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The ‘Daily Changes’ button gives you daily updates on the performance of the post which is present on the graphic of Visibility Trend. By connecting the tool to Google Analytics, you can also view the referral traffic coming to your website which is an added bonus.

Brand Monitoring

Here is where you can measure the impact that your content has delivered. The Brand monitoring and the Post tracking feature is a part of Content Audit and you need to add a project first to be able to access the features effectively.

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The Brand Monitoring tool shows you whether or not you have delivered your message to your audience effectively and what do they have to say about it. It also gives you sentimental analysis which detects the mention’s tone.

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In addition to that, there are multiple filters that give you a clear view on the mentions about your website on the internet like domain traffic, tags, link to URL(it shows the link’s presence to your website, etc.) Link building opportunities can also be discovered by filtering the mentions by the link presence.

Conclusion

While preparing your content strategy, you need to be determined on providing value to your content consumers which goes a long way in building trust, driving more leads, and being recognized for your brand. 

Sure, it requires arduous efforts and skill, but with a Content Marketing Platform like SEMrush, I would say the job becomes less hard and produces effective results. 

If you want to learn more about the tool and get your hands-on experience, we have a 14-day free trial for you. Avail it now to your maximum benefit!

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