SEMrush Content Marketing Tool

Thankfully, in the modern age of content marketing, technology has helped the marketer perform these tasks that are critical for reaching their goal but with relatively less effort & time.

With the availability of powerful content marketing toolkits, marketers can manage different aspects of their content marketing from one place ⎯ saving them time, efforts and money.

“According to CMI research, 29% B2B marketer reported that they have increase spending on the right technology in past 12 months”

Leading SEO tool company SEMrush has developed an all-in-one content marketing toolkit to help with all the areas of content marketing.

In this tutorial, we will find out how this tool can help you with developing a successful content strategy and creating content that resonates your audience.

What is Content marketing?

Content marketing is the process of planning, creating, distributing and publishing content on a consistent basis for an ideal audience profile. 

Typically, the goal with this marketing effort is to drive organic website traffic, increase brand awareness and engagement, generate sales leads, or drive purchases and revenue.

Why is Content Marketing important?

Simply put, when done well, Content marketing gives a great ROI.

And unlike other forms of digital marketing (like SMM, PPC or PR), content marketing can continue to deliver the result for your business/blog over the longer period of time.

For example, unlike a Facebook ad or PPC ad, a well written and marketed blog post can continue to drive organic traffic, brand awareness and leads for years.

This is why according to HubSpot research – Marketers who prioritize blogging are receiving 13x more ROI than those that don’t.

However, with plenty of strategic tasks involved in a content marketing campaign, it becomes very hard for marketer/blogger to create content that resonates with the target customer’s mind.

From the strategic analysis to the implementation, to the first positive results; the journey is not always smooth, and the process is often onerous.

This is when an all-in-one toolkit like SEMrush content marketing toolkit comes into great help.

How SEMrush Content Marketing Toolkit can help you?

First thing first, what exactly is this content marketing toolkit?

The SEMrush Content Marketing Toolkit is a suite of tools designed to assist content creators and marketers in planning and executing effective content marketing campaigns.

Here are some content marketing related key tasks this tool will help you with:

Now before I deep dive into each tool, I want you to sign up for SEMrush 7 day free trial.

This way you can test each content marketing tool on your own for free of cost and decide whether it suits your need or not.

So, are you ready to deep dive into the content marketing toolkit? Let’s get started:

#1. Find Proven Content ideas with Topic Research Tool

A great content begins with a great idea – Something that your target audience is searching for and interested in learning more about.

Whether you are new into content marketing or an experienced content marketer, finding good content ideas can be challenging.

But it doesn’t have to be.

If you have the right tool, you can generate endless content ideas to keep your writing team busy creating compelling content for weeks or even months to come.

SEMrush Topic generator module is an excellent tool to discover a ton of useful content (or topic) ideas based on keyword or competitors.

To get started, sign-in to your SEMrush account and select Content Marketing Toolkit from drop-down menus in the top-left corner.

Once you are into topic research module, enter keyword related to your niche and select your preferred country database.

As soon as you hit the “Get Content Ideas” button, SEMrush will analyze all the possible content ideas and display top-scoring content ideas based on your keyword.

From here, you can further explore more content ideas in multiple modules, including:

• Cards
• Explorer
• Overview
• Mind Map

Each of the above-mentioned modules has its own characteristics and benefits, which I will discuss below. Moreover, you also get the flexibility to prioritize topic recommendation based on:

• Search Volume – Topics with the most search volume will appear first.
• Ranking Difficulty – Topic ideas with maximum difficulty to rank in the search engine will appear first.
• Topic Efficiency – Ideas that are closely related to your keyword will appear first (Best Option)

1.1 Explore Topics Via Card

Under Card view, SEMrush will present you hundreds of subtopic cards based on your keyword that you can explore to find more content ideas.

On top of each card, you will be also able to see the search volume to understand the extent of audience interested in a particular topic. The higher the search volume, the more popular the topic is among your audience.

Further, you can expand a topic card to see the list of headlines along with relevant questions based on your topic.

Question tab under each card is also worth giving attention, as it uncovers what question people ask regarding the topic of your choice.

You should watch out for question, especially if you are optimizing your content for mobile or voice search.

Once you like any content idea, just click on the “add to favourites button” beside the idea. This will collect all your ideas into the Favourite tab where you can review them one by one and proceed with the best ones.

Not to forget, if any content idea is from another website, you can click on the URL to directly jump on competitor’s post and see what they have done right and how you can create something better.

Quick tip: Want to find Viral content Ideas?

Enable “Trending Subtopic First” option to check most popular subtopics over the last 60 days across the internet.

This means the number of the article under these subtopics is growing, and it could be a great opportunity for you to follow the trend and create viral content.

1.2 Explore Topics Via Explorer

The Explorer tab will break down your selected topic by the subtopics, relevant content ideas, backlinks, Facebook engagement and total shares.

Facebook engagement is basically the number of time that page was shared on Facebook. Similarly, Total share metrics is the number of total social media engagement combined with the total backlinks.

Since each of these metrics is very easy to sort, so you can easily find out most engaging content ideas based on your desired metrics.

1.3 Explore Topics Via Overview

Overview section basically a concise version of what you see in card view. Here you’ll find the top 10 headlines, followed by a set of related questions, cards, and searches.

1.4 Explore Topics Via Mindmap

In case you are a visual person, you’ll find the Mind Map view more useful. Although, the topics are pretty much same, but you’ll get essentially a more visual presentation of your topics.

Your main keyword here works as the core of the mind map, and subtopics are arranged in the form of spokes.

As soon as you click on any spokes of the mind map, it will show a set of relevant headlines and questions.

1.5 Export your content ideas

By now you should have added a few potential content ideas into the favourite tab. So, now it’s time to export them for further action.

For exporting your idea, go to Favourite tab. There you will see all the ideas that you have sorted for future use.

You can export all of them into an Excel sheet by simply clicking on the green export to XLS button in the top right corner.

The XLS file will bring you all your favourite content ideas with six different columns (which include Potential resonance, backlinks, content idea, topic, subtopic, and search volume).

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#2. Map out your content plans With Marketing Calendar

Once you have created a list of content topics for your future contents, it’s time to create an editorial plan, according to which you’ll distribute all future contents. 

“Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.”

To help you manage your editorial schedule and collaborate with team members, SEMrush provides “Marketing Calendar” module in their content marketing toolkit.

A good content marketing calendar can help with many things including:

You can access the marketing calendar module from the left sidebar menus under the management section.

With the help of this tool, you can plan a new campaign, set publishing dates, promotional channels, and assigns tasks to different team members.

So, let’s have a look at how we can efficiently use this tool to get the maximum benefits:

2.1 Create a New Campaign

Click on + Create a campaign button to create a new campaign. Enter a campaign name, set campaign duration and finally choose colours for better differentiation (in case you’ve multiple campaigns).

Now you’ll see your campaign’s time frame appearing on the calendar with the colour of your choice.

Now, it’s time to move on to creating and managing different campaign activities:

2.2 Add Activities to Calendar

Activities are basically building blocks for your marketing calendar. You can use them to set weekly deadlines and goals, share files, and create recurring activities on a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis.

To create a new activity, click on any date in your calendar or on the “New activity” button appearing in the top right corner.

Then give it a name, select campaigns, and set a deadline.

2.3 Manage activities

To manage the activity, click on the “open in editor” button.

Activity editor will allow you to set weekly deadlines and goals, share files, and create recurring activities on a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis.

Each activity (task) can have a description (work statement), relevant attachment (like example of a well-performing content on that topic) and comments (ideas on how the task can be fulfilled easily)

You can also set multiple tasks within each activity. This can be also used as creating a checklist and assigning different tasks to different team members.

Note: If you are already using Google calendar for planning your campaigns, you can easily import Google calendar’s data to sync with SEMrush as a .ICS file.

2.4 Track Your Campaign Progression

Monitoring and tracking campaign progress is very important for a well-structured content strategy.

SEMrush content tracking and progress reporting is very similar to what you get on a high budget planning tool like Asana or Trello.

You can set the status of each task by assigning them a tag from in progress, require approval or Done.

This tag will help you and your team stay on the same page about the status of your campaign activities.

Note: You can also connect your Google Analytics and Search Console account with SEMrush to see the actual performance of your campaign. (I’ll discuss more on this in few minutes)

#1. Create SEO Friendly Content With SEO Content Template

Making sure your content is SEO friendly from start will save your time and resources for optimization at the end. As well as it will give you a clear picture of where your content belongs in the Google SERP.

This is why, you should analyze your top competition and conduct keyword and LSI research, even before writing a piece of content.

With this research and data, your goal is to increase your chances of ranking high in Google and eventually attract organic traffic to your website. 

If you have a few SEO skills or simply just want to save time for other important things, SEMrush SEO content template feature will make simple for you to write SEO friendly content.

Here is how it works.

To better understand how the SEO Content Template tool works, let me show you an example:

Let’s say I want to write an article about “how to make money with blog”. So, I opened the SEO content template tool and entered “how to make money with blog” as my keyword.

Now SEMrush will analyze the top 10 website’s content ranking for my keyword (how to make money with blog) in Google search in a specific area.

Based on my target keyword, SEMrush has prepared content template for me which includes:

1.1  list of my top 10 rivals ranking for the same keyword

Since the whole concept of SEMrush SEO template is based on the top competitor’s strategies, the first data you will get is a list of clickable URLs of your competitors ranking in the Google Top 10 position.

You can check out each of your competitor’s content to get an idea of how they have created and structured their content.

1.2  LSI keywords to include in my content

LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) Keywords are basically words or phrases that are in a related to each other conceptually.

From the SEO point of view, having more LSI (semantically related) keywords present in your content means that your content provides more contextual background on a topic to Google, and therefore perform better in the search result.

1.3  Target websites to try to acquire backlinks from

Backlinks are super important for SEO as they represent a “vote of confidence” from one site to another.

In fact, in most cases the higher relevant backlinks you have, the higher your content will rank in Google.

This is why SEMrush will analyze your top 10 rival content’s backlins profile and give you a list of website where you should also try to acquire backlinks from.

1.4  Average Readability Score

A readability score is basically a number that tells you of how easy your content is to read.

The higher the readability score, the higher the text is to read and the better chance it has of performing well.

SEMrush’s readability score is based on the average length of words and sentences in your content, using a formula known as Flesch-Kincaid test.

1.5  How long my article should be

There are several theories on the internet describing the correlation between text length and search engine ranking.

Generally, the longer the content, the higher it will rank in search engine.

However, this theory is not relevant in every case. For example, if you are writing an article about “how to create an Instagram Profile“, it doesn’t make any sense to write a 5000 words article.

This is why SEMrush’s recommend average text length based on already ranking content in the top 10 positions of SERP.

1.6  How my competitors have used target keywords

Next, to save your time and simplify your research, SEMrush allows you to check how exactly your top 10 competitors have used each of your target keywords on their webpages.

Just click on blue “show more” link to open the full text and check each keyword. Keywords are highlighted with orange colour to make your research easier.

1.7  Basic On-page SEO recommendations

If you have been beating the content marketing drum for a while, you must be knowing the importance of On-page SEO practices.

To help you keep them in mind while creating your content, SEO content templates reminds you to use your target keywords in your title, H1, meta-description, body and stick to the recommended length of your title and meta-description

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#2. Optimize your content for Google and real users

If you want to rank on Google’s first page, you’ve to make sure your content is fully SEO optimized before publishing.

SEMrush has built a tool called “SEO writing Assistant“, that will check in real-time how SEO friendly your content is while you are creating.

So, with this tool, you can be confident that you have created an SEO optimized content before publishing.

2.1  Getting Started

SEO writing Assistant is available as both an add-on for Google Docs and Plugin for WordPress.

The tools work exactly same to same on both the platform, so whether you should use add-on or plugin will completely depend on which platform you use for writing content.

2.2  Creating new recommendations

Now whether you are using plugin or Google Doc add-on, the very first thing you have to do is add a target keyword under the SEO section of the tool.

This will help the tool to judge how well your content is constructed to rank in Google for the target keyword.

You can add multiple related keyword to increase the relevancy of the analysis.

When you’re finished, click on the ‘Create SEO Content Template’ button.

2.3  Overall Score

Once you hit the “Create SEO Template” button, the first thing you’ll notice is the score graph at the top.

The overall score is a real-time metric which grades the quality of your article based on 4 different scales: Readability, SEO, Originality, and Tone of Voice.

This score graph is a good place for you to identify strong and weak point of your content.

The closer the score is to 10, the more optimized your content is. You’ll be also able to see the specific metrics that are affecting your score by clicking on any of the 4 scales.

2.4  Readability

Once you click on the readability metric on the graph, SWA (Semrush writing assistant) tool will show you all the different metrics that affect your overall reliability score.

These includes content readability, title issues, word count, and content issues.

As I mentioned above, readability score is an estimation of how easy your content’s words & sentences are to read.

In simple term, it is all about long sentences and complex words that are hard to read and pronounce.

So, if your article has readability issues, SWA will highlight those sentences and words that needs improvement.

2.5  SEO

Similar to readability, clicking on the SEO graph will show you the different metrics that make up the overall SEO score.

• First you have to make sure you have entered the right and relevant target keyword for your content in the “Target Keywords” box.

• Next, SWA will give you a list of words that are semantically related to your target keywords. Adding these keywords into your article will increase the relevancy of content. Not to forget, SEMrush also shows you average monthly search volume and ranking difficulty of each keyword by just hovering over them.

• Then you’ll get “Link Issues” which basically let you know about any broken link present in your article.

• SEMrush writing assistant also checks your article for Keyword stuffing. If any of the target keyword has been used too frequently in the content, it’ll be highlighted with orange.

Quick Tip: Try to avoid using a keyword more than 3% of your total content length, as google is very strict about keyword stuffing.

2.6  Tone of Voice

Having a consistent tone in your content marketing campaigns is very important.

SWA comes with a AI powered voice tone checker tool that measures your content tone and gives it a score ranging from casual, somewhat casual, neutral, somewhat formal to very formal.

Right tone for your content will ultimately depend on the type of content you are creating. For example, if you are writing an article about “business strategy”, you are probably going to want it to be more formal.

2.7  Originality of content

The originality metrics looks for plagiarism in your content.

It will check the total percentage and number of copied sentences in your article based on the existing article available on the web.

If big portion of your content is copied, it will be highlighted any you’ll need to change them. This way you can ensure your content is 100% plagiarism free and deserves to rank on the 1st page of Google.

#1. Automate your Social Media game

Just creating and optimizing your content for SEO is not enough – well-organized distribution is essential to its success.

By distributing your content or brand messages across multiple channels, your target audience will get a clear picture of who you are and how you can help them.

Luckily, SEMrush offers a bunch of tools for social media marketing, link outreach, and PPC advertising for distributing your content across multiple channels

All of their tools are designed to make your content distribution as easier as it could be.

Their Social Media Toolkit is a good example of this.

As we all know distributing content and message across different social media platforms can be time consuming. This is why SEMrush has developed a tool to automate posting to multiple social media platform to save resources and ensure accuracy in timing.

Here’s how it works:

• Connect your Social media accounts: Open Social media toolkit and click on the ‘Connect’ button and follow the on-screen instruction to set up your account.

• Create Your Post: Click on any slot appearing in the calendar or the ‘New Post’ button in the top menu.

• Schedule your post: Now enter your text, image, links and choose a preferred time to schedule. SEMrush also shows you the best time to schedule based on your past engagement metrics.

• Analyze your content’s performance: SEMrush also shows a wide range of analytics data for your social media account. These data help you in understanding what your audience is liking and how you can improve your social media campaigns.

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#2. Track Your content performance using Post Tracker

In the modern days of marketing, you shouldn’t take for granted the importance of monitoring your content performance.

Because it’s not just crucial for how your current campaign perform, but also to find the weak spot for the future adjustment of to your content strategy.

SEMrush’s Post Tracking tool allows you to measure your content result from different standpoints.

2.1  Tracking your article

First of all, you have to select “Post tracking” tool from the left side menu. Now you have to enter the URL of the post you want to track and hit “Start tracking” button.

Now, you will be taken to the post tracking table where you can add up to 50 articles per project.

At the top of the table, you will see the six different metrics that show the combined performance of the group’s article.

Here are all the performance metrics you’ll get for your article:

This performance metrics will give you a good idea of how your content marketing campaign is going and what you need to improve for higher ROI.

For example, if you see some of your content is lacking in backlinks or shares, you might add them to your priority list when it comes to improving overall visibility.

Quick tip: Want to check the most influential Twitter users who like your content?

Click on the “top contributor” option appearing under the share tab of each tracking article.

It will show you the most influential Twitter profile who shared your particular post.

If a particular post from your campaign was shared by some big Twitter profiles, you’ll want to contact them and build relationship for bringing mutual exposure to your website in the future.

2.2  Track Article Keyword Rankings

Tracking position of your website for your target keyword in Google SERP is very easy and straightforward with SEMrush.

You can add Keywords to your campaign by clicking on the “add keyword” button appearing under the Keyword column in the tracking table.

The tool allows you to track up to 5 keywords for each article and if you don’t know what keyword to track, SEMrush will recommend top 10 keywords for your article that you can choose to add.

Daily tracking update data will give you an overview of how your content strategy helping your keyword ranking progress over time.

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#3. Monitor your brand presence using Brand Monitoring

Finding your brand mentions on the web on a daily basis can be a time-consuming and tedious task, especially if you are running a big brand.

But SEMrush’s Brand Monitoring makes tracking and analyzing your brand mentions fast and easy.

With the help of this tool, you can easily assess your overall brand reputation, analyze mentioning resource authority, and find new partnership opportunities.

It’s not only about your own brand mention tracking, but you can also monitor your competitor’s brand mention to get a sneak-peek into their strategy or monitor any industry topic discussed online to spot trends.

3.1  Getting Started with Brand Monitoring Tool

First, you have to add a keyword you want to track (like your website name). You can also type your competitor’s brand name to check where they are getting mentioned on the web.

During the setup process, you can add up to 3 main keywords, 5 additional keywords and exclude up to 5 keywords that you want to avoid from tracking.

Finally, you need to choose language and country, if you want email report then make sure to select that option and then click “start tracking“.

3.2  Discover Link Building and Promo Opportunities

Reaching out to the right mentioners will give you an opportunity to convert simple mentions into backlinks.

To find the unlinked mention, go to Mention tab and use “No link” filter to check all the mentions which are not linked with your website.

You can further use various advance filters like Domain authority, BM score, etc to find more relevant and authority link building opportunities.

3.2  Discover Social Media Mentions

You can use Twitter and Instagram filter in your Brand Monitoring mentions feed to check who mentioned you on social media.

This will help you get a sense of your online reputation and find networking opportunities with big influencers.

The tool updates new Twitter mentions every 30 seconds to make sure you’re never out of the loop.

Auditing your website’s content may not be a glamorous activity, but it is absolutely necessary to get the most out of your content marketing campaigns.

A content audit will tell you what is working for you, what not and where your opportunities lie to further leverage your existing content to get most out of it.

1.1  How to get started

Navigate to content audit tool appearing under content marketing tool in left sidebar.

Now you need to enter your website URL and let SEMrush built your domain structure based on your sitemap.xml file.

Once SEMrush collects your sitemap data, you need to choose the desired section of your website and click “start audit” button.

Depending on the number of pages being tracked, SEMrush will take some for gathering the data and generating audit report.

Once the data collecting process is complete, you will get a list of all your contents in a table format.

The table will show you all the necessary data like H1 tag, author, word count, total social shares, backlinks, etc for each of the contents.

From here you can go through each content one by one and check if any of those content needs any improvement and once you are done analyzing a piece of content, you can mark their workflow status as ‘analyzed’.

1.2  Combining audit data with Google analytics

You can connect your Google Analytics account with SEMrush to get all the content metrics in one convenient place and track content performance accurately.

Depending on your Google analytics and content adit data, SEMrush will break down all your content into four groups.

Action to take: All the post /pages under this group are a big sign of low-quality posts. Consider completely removing them or rewrite them to make most out of it.

Action to take: Analyze the top 10 posts on your topics in SERP and check what they have done better than you.

Action to take: These articles need little more marketing effort (in terms of social media, backlinks, etc) to start thriving.

Action to take: These articles need little more marketing effort (in terms of social media, backklinks, etc) to start thriving.

To help you streamline your work with the underperforming content, SEM rush offers statuses and tasks that can be assigned to each content.

Just click on the “Start Analyzing” button in any group, and you will jump to the workflow section with a preview of one of your content.

SEMrush is not only limited to Content marketing, it is an all-in one digital marketing toolkit.

This means, along with their content marketing toolset, you’ll also get all a set of the toolkit for SEO, social media, paid advertising, and competitive research. (40+ advance toolkit on each plan)

But since we are talking about “SEMrush content marketing toolkit” exclusively in this article, so I am going to cover the pricing and feature distribution of content marketing toolkit only.

SEMrush offers 3 monthly plan:

• Pro – This plan will cost you $99.95 per month (16% Discount, $83/mo on annual billing)
• Guru – You will be charged $199.95 per month (16% Discount, $166/mo on annual billing)
• Business – This plan will cost you 399.95 every month (16% Discount, $333/mo on annual billing)

Now you must be wondering, what is the difference between each plan?

Well, SEMrush gives you distinct feature access to you depending on the subscription plans you choose.

Here is the feature distribution of content marketing platform in a table format for your better understanding:

As you can see, the higher the subscription place you’ll choose, the more access and feature you will get.

For a beginner blogger and solo marketer, “PRO” plan will be enough. But if you are a professional content marketer or running a small business “GURU” plan will be a perfect fit for you.

FAQ On Content Marketing Toolkit Of SEMrush

The Bottom Line: SEMrush Content Marketing Toolkit

Content marketing is currently the most effective marketing technique for driving traffic, making subscribers, and converting into sales.

But getting it right is not easy for everyone.

You need a powerful tool that can help you with taking systematic and data-driven approach for your content marketing campaign.

SEMrush is the industry-leading digital marketing tool with a large index of keywords, backlinks and ad copy.

Their content marketing toolkit is providing a good set of tool that helps you research, plan, create, promote and audit your content marketing campaign quickly and effectively.

Personally, I’ve been using their tool for more than a years for both of my blogs. In fact, if not daily, then every alternate day, I find myself logging into SEMrush to check my own site’s SEO health, keyword rankings and doing competitive research.

Now it is your turn

There you have it: my comprehensive review of SEMrush Content marketing toolkit.

Now I would like to turn things over to you:

Have you ever tried the SEMrush tool before?

If so, what are your overall impression for their extensive set of digital marketing tools?

Let me know your thought in the comments section below.