3 Ways to Balance Creativity & Search

Optimization in Content

SEMrush

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This is a  sponsored post written by SEMrush. The opinions expressed in this article are the
sponsor’s own.

What is the hardest thing in the process of content writing?

As a writer in the modern world of content marketing, you have to:

 Take care of text optimization.

 Make it a perfect fit for your audience’s needs.
 Somehow stay creative.
Balancing these things might make even the most creative writer feel discouraged.

Here are three ways to avoid losing your muse and ensure that your content will get the right
attention from people and search engines.

1. Research Your Audience Pains & Gains

You might have a perfect idea for the topic. You might think it’s an absolutely brilliant thing to
write about. But what if no one else thinks so?

The best way to prove it is to ask people around… or Google.

Use the keywords related to your niche to see what people discuss. Good sources can be:

 Quora.
 Reddit
 Other social media networks.

From these channels, you might get not only the idea of what people are interested in but also
what language they use when they talk about a particular topic. Don’t hesitate to use it in your
content.

The second way is to monitor what external blogs and media are writing about your chosen
topic. You can also use Google for this – or get a little help from a content software.

With a Topic Research tool, you might get the complete set of information for choosing the topic
with the highest relevance and ranking potential.

All you need is to enter the keyword and you’ll get an overview of:

 The most trending subtopics based on the number of monthly subtopic mentions, search
volume and difficulty.
 Headlines that most people link to.
 Questions people ask on the subtopic on forums.
The information you acquired can give you an understanding of whether your perfect idea is
actually perfect based on data.

2. Check Competitors’ Performance

A clever man learns from his own mistakes, the wise man learns from the mistakes – and
successes – of others.
Luckily, there are plenty of places to learn from, starting with your competitors’ posts. But what
should you look at?

There are a couple of things to compare:

 What subtopics under a particular topic do they cover? Do they have any gaps that are not
covered yet and where you can “reserve a seat” for your company expertise? That might
be a good hint about what ideas are worth writing (especially if on the previous step you
realized that this idea gains interest from people) and what is already “occupied” by your
rivals.
 How well does their content perform? What articles are getting most of the links and
social shares? What positions are these articles occupying in the SERPs? If you want to
turn the information you gathered into actions, use the SEO Content Template to plan
your article based on the analysis of your rivals’ content that appears in Google Top 10.

The tool provides you with clear SEO recommendations for future content, based on your initial
topic/subtopic idea:

 What keywords you should consider adding to your text based on the analysis of how
your competitors use these keywords in their content.
 How difficult the storytelling language should be to keep a reader interested. Check the
section in the tool, called Key recommendations, which will give you semantically related
keywords to enrich your text with advice on the readability score to stick to, text length,
and sites to get backlinks from.
At this stage, you not only have the proven topic idea but structurize the future text according to
the SEO requirements and competition on the SERP.

3. Ensure Your Content Compliance with SEO

Requirements
Now, when you supported your idea with data and got the whole template form the future
content, you can relax! (Well, that’s almost true.)

Writing is such a creative process that even with a clear plan you can step away from following
your muse.
There is a solution to ensure your previous efforts realized accordingly – automatically check if
the final version of your content complies with SEO-recommendations using SEO Writing
Assistant.

Just install the add-on in Google Docs or WordPress, and check in real time how SEO friendly
your text is.
There are several features to help you evaluate your new piece:

 Overall score is a live metric that shows the article quality calculated on the basis of
such factors as readability, words, target keywords. The closer the number is to 10, the
better optimized your text is for search.
 Readability evaluates how difficult it is for a reader to understand a text based on
recommended Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease score.
 Words calculates the number of words in your text and sets you a goal according to the
average word count of your rivals’ content.
 Target keywords are the core of your text. Check the recommendations regarding their
volume and difficulty.
 Recommended keywords are words semantically related to your seed keywords. Once
you use them in your content, they will be highlighted with green in the doc.
 Title shows you recommendations for your headline.
 Plagiarism checks your text for plagiarized content.
These are the most important metrics that show how good your content is optimized and whether
it is ready for the battle on Google’s Page 1. And this is the final step where you polish your
creative idea.

Summary
At first glance it may seem like creativity and search optimization in content writing are not
compatible. However, as shown above, there are a couple of tricks that will help you not only
balance this two parts of content creation, but also create content easily and effectively.