Create Content That Stands Out From the Competition With Semrush Content Marketing Tools

Content marketing is an important part of digital marketing. Using a solid content marketing strategy can help you create the most relevant content that your audience is looking for and optimize that content to make it easily discoverable by them. If you’re a small business owner or a digital marketing agency, you may not have the time or the resources to thoroughly research content topics and figure out where you’re going wrong with your existing content. 

What you need is a platform that provides all of these content marketing tools under one roof, so that you can do your research, plan your content distribution to align with marketing campaigns, perform content audits to learn what needs to be improved, and finally, track the performance of your content in search engine rankings as well as social media. Let’s find out how Semrush Content Marketing Tools can help you do all that and more!

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is the process of creating content and distributing it in a way that your current customers, as well as potential customers, can easily discover it. This content has to be relevant and useful to your target audience, and it has to be optimized in a way that makes it friendly to search engines. 

Such content could be in the form of a blog post, educational infographics, a white paper, newsletters, video content, or even social media posts. Whatever the content format is, it has to be engaging content that signals your expertise in the subject matter and also provides some value to your audience. This will result in generating traffic to your website landing page that features the content.

Why Content Marketing Is Important

Content marketing is a great inbound marketing tactic, allowing your potential customers to discover your content naturally and let them come to you instead of the more traditional advertising methods. This usually happens when your target customers use search engines to ask questions and find solutions to their problems. 

Help Your Target Audience Find Your Products and Services

If you create great content that answers questions and provides useful information that is relevant to your industry niche, this can attract your most ideal customers to your website landing pages. When they arrive seeking answers, you have a great opportunity to also let them know what products or services you’re offering. They may not be in a buying mood at the start, but now they know you’re in the business, and you can definitely follow up on these leads to convert them later.

Build Trust With Your Customers

Smart content marketers will utilize their content to not only provide answers to sought-after questions but also to impress their audience with their unique industry knowledge and expertise. By providing value to your prospective clients, you too can build and develop a relationship with them, which will help you later in the sales process when selling your products or services.

Improve Your Brand Awareness

As your ideal customers get attracted to your website due to the valuable content you’re creating for them, the awareness of your brand, as well as your products and service offerings, will steadily increase. Improving brand awareness is a crucial step in digital marketing and one that will help you become a name that can be trusted in your industry niche. This will also help boost your sales in the long run.

To help you achieve all of this, including finding your audience, building trust, and raising brand awareness, you can use content marketing platforms like Semrush.

The Semrush Content Marketing Platform

Using content marketing platforms can help you create relevant content as well as show you how to optimize it so that it stands out from your competitors and rises to the top of search engine results pages. Semrush has created a content marketing platform that houses all the necessary tools you will need to carry out a successful content strategy. Semrush content marketing tools cover all aspects, from generating new content ideas, to content planning, to content creation, and measuring content engagement after it is published. 

Generating Fresh Content Ideas Using Semrush Topic Research

If you’re starting your business, you may have some idea of what your potential customers are interested in, but you may not have a complete picture. You may not know what your competitors are focusing on either. You could manually visit your rival’s blogs, check what sort of content topics they’re writing about, and try to understand what is resonating with the target audience. Or you could use content marketing platforms like Semrush, which include tools like Topic Research, to receive all the useful information with a few clicks. 

You can simply enter a topic or target keyword you’re interested in, and Semrush returns you with the most popular topics that are related to your query, questions, and suggested article titles. There are multiple ways of browsing all this information, with the ‘Cards’ view being the most useful as it groups everything into neat subtopics. You can sort the information based on search volume, keyword difficulty, or topic efficiency. The last option sorts based on most volume and least difficulty, making it a handy tool to figure out an easy place to start. 

Semrush has included color-coded bullhorn symbols to indicate the topic’s resonance among its audience based on the number of backlinks it has. You can add any of these topics and questions to a list of favorites, using the information to come up with article titles or even structure your articles. 

Finally, Semrush allows you to enter a domain and your topic or keyword to see what your competitor is writing about. You can get an understanding of what is reaching your audience and what is irrelevant. You can learn from their successes and failures, and cover the most appropriate topics in your content marketing plans. You may even find a content gap that you need to fill in. For more on competitor analysis, check out Gain an Edge Over Your Rivals With Semrush SEO Competitive Analysis.

Content Planning with Semrush

Once you have decided which topics to prioritize, the next step in content marketing is to lay out a plan for your creative content teams to follow. Content marketers need a good plan that assigns multiple writers, editors, designers, and whoever else is required to carry out the content creation, as well as deadlines to make sure they deliver on time. 

If you already have a project management tool like Trello, you can immediately create tasks from the Topic Research tool and assign them to the relevant team members. This task gets sent to your Trello board if it’s integrated with Semrush. If you’re a small company that has not currently invested in a project management tool, then Semrush has you covered. 

They have provided the Marketing Calendar Tool, which can help you with project management and planning. Your marketing teams can keep track of color-coded marketing campaigns with this tool. Your team members can easily follow their daily tasks, meet deadlines and share content briefs, links, digital assets, or whatever else they need to collaborate and get the job done. 

Creating and Optimizing Content with Semrush

When creating content, you need to make sure that search engine optimization (SEO) is a part of your content strategy. This is because simply creating great content is not enough. It must be relevant, useful to the target market, and friendly to Google’s search engine algorithms. Only then will your content be visible and rise to the top of search engine results. Semrush has provided two SEO tools to help you out.

Semrush SEO Content Template

Among Semrush’s key features is the SEO Content Template, which is a tool that lets you create an optimized brief that includes all the relevant information a writer needs to get started, including the topic, target keywords they need to include in the article, target word count, and structure. All you have to do is enter your chosen keywords, and Semrush returns with recommendations on semantically related keywords you can use, backlinks you should be trying to acquire, a readability score, and text length. 

These recommendations are based on the top 10 Google search results for the keyword you chose at the start. These semantically related keywords offer search terms and topics that are closely related to your target keyword and can give clues as to what else your audience is interested in. To learn more about keyword research, read Perform Keyword Magic with the Best Keyword Research Tools from Semrush.

Backlink opportunities are also highlighted, and gaining them from their respective owners could display a high level of trust for your content in Google’s eyes. Content writers now have clear guidelines to follow. Content marketers have an idea of what sort of link-building needs to be included in their outreach strategy and use email marketing tools to achieve this.

Semrush SEO Writing Assistant

After you or your team members have written the content, it would be useful to let the Semrush SEO Writing Assistant take a look at it. This content marketing tool checks the structure of the article, how easy it is to read, the keywords that have been included, plus many other factors and rates them. 

You can intuitively see whether the content is SEO-friendly and whether the copy is readable compared to the Google top 10 competitors. Semrush even analyzes the tone of voice that was used, so you can check if it’s consistent with your brand. There is an originality score that can help you avoid plagiarism, and the tool even detects issues with your anchor text. 

The scores and recommendations provided are interactive, meaning they will change in real-time as you edit your copy. This allows you to fix any issues with your content before you publish it, and optimize it for Google’s crawlers so that your content becomes more visible in search results. The SEO Writing Assistant can be used on the Semrush interface, as a Google Docs add-on, or as a plugin on WordPress, depending on which you prefer. 

Measure Performance of Your Content with Semrush Post Tracking

The best content marketing tools don’t just help you create content; they should provide methods to analyze how that piece of content is performing. You can, of course, use Google Analytics to do this for content on your web pages, but what if you’re a digital marketing agency delivering content for multiple client websites? Semrush Post Tracking allows you to track the performance of your own website as well as third-party websites from the same interface.

You can manage different projects for your clients and add the URL of the web page where you wish to track the content inside the relevant project. Afterward, Semrush will display statistics like how many times your post was shared on social media platforms, how many backlinks you have earned, and the estimated reach of your post. You can also connect your Google Analytics to view how much referral traffic is being brought to your web pages.

Evaluate Content Published with Semrush Content Audit

If you’ve been creating content for some time, you may have existing blog posts that were created before you started using the Semrush content marketing tools. If you wish to re-evaluate these older posts, you can use the website content audit tool provided by Semrush. When you add your domain, Semrush will automatically use your sitemap.xml file to obtain the list of web page URLs of your website to audit. You can choose which ones to perform the content audit on, or you can upload your own list of URLs. 

You can now see the metadata for each blog post, allowing you to instantly fill in any missing meta descriptions. You can view the number of times the content was shared on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. You can also see the number of backlinks bringing visitors to your post. By linking with Google Analytics, you can get additional insight into user behavior like bounce rate or how long a visitor spends on your post. Connecting with the Google Search Console can give you an idea of how many search queries are being generated. 

Most helpful of all, this website content audit tool even breaks down your content into four categories. ‘Rewrite or remove’ shows where you need to prioritize with a complete rewrite of the articles or to delete them entirely. ‘Need to update’ highlights articles that require significant updates, and ‘Quick review’ shows ones that can be fixed with a few smaller revisions. ‘Poor content’ shows articles with an insufficient word count that will be disregarded by search engines. Based on these filters and the amount of traffic that is arriving at these landing pages, you can use Semrush to create your own website content audit checklist and prioritize which content needs your urgent attention. 

Start Creating Content With Semrush

You’ve learned what content marketing is and how it helps you reach your target market, build trust through customer engagement, and increase your brand awareness in your chosen field. As a content marketer, you also have an understanding of what a content marketing platform like Semrush is capable of. 

You can use Topic Research to generate fresh ideas from trending topics or see what your competitors are talking about. You can then use Semrush’s inbuilt project management tools to assign work to your team members to make sure they deliver on time for your upcoming marketing campaigns. Your creative teams can then write and optimize the required content using the SEO Content Template and Writing Assistant features.

You can review your existing content with the Content Audit tool provided by Semrush to fix issues that prevent it from reaching the intended audience. Finally, you can measure the performance of your new posts with Post Tracking to see how they’re doing on social media and how much traffic they’re bringing in. All of these content marketing tools can help you refine your marketing strategy, and Semrush is highly recommended as one of the best content marketing platforms out there. You can find more at Semrush Content Marketing Tools.