Your Guide to Using the Semrush Content Marketing Toolkit for Content Creation and Marketing

Content creation is one of the key points in search engine optimization. To make Google bot love your blog, your content must be compelling, SEO friendly and updated regularly. For this, you need a workflow that saves you time and effort, and which you can access at the click of a button. And that’s where the Semrush Content Marketing Toolkit comes in!

Every SEO professional knows that Google considers over 200 ranking factors for determining SERPs positioning. But did you know that over 60 of those factors have to do with your content?

That’s right.

Content creation is one of the key points in search engine optimization.

To make Google bot love your blog, your content must be compelling, SEO friendly and updated regularly. For this, you need a workflow that saves you time and effort, and which you can access at the click of a button.

And that’s where the Semrush Content Marketing Toolkit comes in. It is a complete workflow for content creators, designed to make the content creation process a walk in the park.

Well, sort of 🙂

The SEMrush content marketing toolkit is one of 6 Semrush toolkits – SEO Toolkit, Advertising Toolkit, Social Media Toolkit, Competitive Research Toolkit, Management Toolkit and of course, the Content Marketing Toolkit.

All of these toolkits are amazing Semrush tools.

Our focus in this Guide is the Semrush Content Marketing Toolkit. We will use it interchangeably with the Semrush Content Marketing Platform.

Semrush Content Marketing Toolkit

Semrush’s Content Marketing Platform has some amazing tools. They are designed to help content marketers create content that resonates with their audience as part of their overall content marketing strategy.

The tools can also help you to manage your tasks and save you time.

This toolkit makes it super easy to create and enhance your current content. With the tool, you can find content gaps very easily. Most importantly, you can also research, write and audit content using this toolkit.

In this article, I will show you how to supercharge your content creation strategy and content marketing plans by using the SEMrush content marketing platform. In particular, we will consider how to use the SEMrush content marketing toolkit to:

1. Find ideas for creating fresh content
2. Audit and enhance your present content
3. Develop a strategic editorial plan
4. Create content material that is search engine optimization (SEO) friendly
5. Track both your onsite and offsite content performance
6. Measure the impact of your content

But first, let’s take a quick look at the characteristics of the SEMrush content marketing toolkit.

The 7 Main Features of the Semrush Content Marketing Toolkit

The content marketing toolkit is available on the Semrush Guru price plan, and has some stunning features.

These 7 features are highlighted red in the image below.

If you’re ready, let’s go through them one by one.

#1. Topic Research

SEMrush Template for sales team

The topic research tool designed to help you create an effective content plan tailored to the interests of your target audience.

With this tool, you can find popular content ideas based on the needs and requirements of your audience. You will also be able to uncover new topics to help you create compelling content in line with your content strategy.

To access the topic research tool, simply click on the Topic Research tab to the left of the Content marketing dashboard.

You will then be presented with the screen below, which is where you can generate ideas for your content.

How to get the most from the topic research tool

The Topic Research Tool is particularly useful in three areas:

Popular subtopics

In a just a click, you can discover the most popular subtopics that reverberate well with your target audience. You can then arrange them in terms of difficulty, volume, topic efficiency and even trends.

Popular headlines

You will be able to uncover hundreds of headlines for any topic you are researching. The tool will sort these by the amount of backlinks for each articles.

Questions

With the tool you can discover the frequently asked questions around the topic you’re researching. These will be generated from the questions people ask in various online communities appropriately filtered.

#2. SEO Content Template

The SEO content template is designed to help you generate a brief template for optimized content focused on your target keywords. You receive a personalized template for search engine-friendly content that’s optimized.

And the amazing thing about this, is that it can be done in just a few clicks.

How to use the SEO content template

Simply click on the SEO Content Template tab to the left of your dashboard and you will see the screen below.

Next, enter your target keywords into the box. You then receive personalized SEO recommendations to help you write SEO friendly content. Usually these recommendations will be based on your top 10 competitors who are ranking for those keywords.

This tool works with the SEO writing assistant.

#3. SEO Writing Assistant

The SEO writing assistant is an awesome tool. It basically integrates your SEO  Content Templates into your Google Docs or WordPress editor to grade your new content’s SEO value. And this can be done in real-time.

The tool is located to the left of your Content marketing dashboard. When you click on the SEO Writing Assistant tab, you’re presented with this screen.

Click on the green Get Recommendations button to get started.

As you can see from the image below, you have a new screen with the quick checker. Type or paste your article into the box. Next, enter your target keywords in the box on the right. Finally, click the blue Get Recommendations button.

How to put the SEO writing assistant to work

The writing assistant will help you in 4 areas: readability, SEO-friendliness, originality and tone of voice.

SEO friendliness

The SEO writing assistant will check your content against key SEO metrics. These include length, linking, keyword stuffing and readability. Other areas are target keywords, with a suggestion of semantically related keywords to include in your text.

Tone of voice consistency

You can check the tone of voice level of your text. Is your tone of voice positive, negative or neutral? Is it consistent throughout the text? Does it match your brand voice.

Plagiarism check

Is your text original? The plagiarism check will detect the total percentage of words that are copied and give a score based on the uniqueness of your content.

Readability score

The tool will highlight any portions of your text that are hard to read. It will then give you actionable advice on what changes to make.

As you can see from the image below, when we put this article into the Writing Assistant, it was assessed in those four areas.

#4. Brand Monitoring

Quick question.

What does your brand say about either you or your business?

A brand is a name, design, symbol or any other unique feature that identifies and distinguishes a person, group, product or service. Brands are used in business,  marketing, and advertising for recognition and, crucially, to create and store value.

The SEMrush content marketing toolkit makes it easy to track any brand mentions online. This can be your brand mentions or even your competitors’ brand mentions.

The tool is available to the left the Content marketing dashboard. Click on the Brand Monitoring tab, and you will be taken to the screen shown in the image below.

Here you can set up brand monitoring. Simply enter the brand name, their domain and click the green Set up button.

You can check the estimated reach of the brands. You can also analyze mention sentiment and track referral traffic.

In a nutshell – What you can do with brand monitoring

There are at least four smart uses you can put this stylish tool to. Here they are:

New promotional opportunities

Want to know who mentions you on online forums? Well you can! In fact, you can also uncover who mentions your competitors and any keywords on forums, the internet, and social media like Twitter and Instagram.

“Mentioner’s” authority

Why just know who has mentioned you when you can assess their authority?

With this tool, you can evaluate the people who have mentioned you in terms of their social weight and what SEMrush calls “mentioning resources”“. Your “mentioners” are assessed by traffic, estimated reach and overall trustworthiness.

Sentiment analysis

It gets even more interesting.

In just one click, you can filter your “mentions” by sentiment -positive, negative or neutral. You can also set the tool to track your general sentiment.

Backlink opportunities

This tool can help you find backlink opportunities. It does this by revealing who is linking either to your brand or your competitors’ brands, and and how often they do so.

#5. Post Tracking

Want to check the performance of articles published on external sites? The post tracking tool enables you to this and more.

The tool enables you to accomplish many tasks. Track social engagement metrics and backlink count. You can also measure daily keyword rankings and referral traffic.

The tool is located to the left of the Content marketing dashboard. When you click on the Post Tracking tab, you’re taken to the screen in the image below, where you can enter the url of the post or article and start tracking.

What more you can do with post tracking in the SEMrush content marketing platform

Here are four ways you can use post tracking to track the performance of articles you’ve published on external resources.

Content performance

Evaluate the overall performance of your externally published content. The tool enables you track up to 50 articles that have been published on third-party. This can be those published either by you or your competitors.

Estimated reach

This tool will reveal the estimated reach as well as the referral traffic of your external content.

Google ranking

By simply adding target keywords, the tool will help you track how your articles and posts rank in Google’s SERPs.

Social shares

Want to see how your content did across various social media platforms? The tool ill reveal the number of shares the content got across various social media channels.

#6. Content Audit

Need to analyze a huge amount of existing content and discover what type of content works best?

Welcome to Content Audit.

With the content audit tool, you can conduct a thorough audit of your website’s content using personalized criteria.

As you can see from the image below, the content audit tool is available on the Content marketing dashboard. Here you can customize your content audit based on real-time metrics.

To get the most updated results, you need to connect your Google Analytics account and the Google Search Console.

How to make the content audit tool do the hard work for you

Here are three things you can to with this awesome tool.

Content performance

You can evaluate, analyze and review the performance of up to 20,000 pages of existing content. This will be based on data extracted from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, backlinks as well as social shares.

Content sets

This snazzy tool will automatically break down all your existing website content into four categories for future work:

• Rewrite or remove
• Need to update
• Quick review
• Poor content

Simply amazing!

Tasks

This tool allows you to set and discuss your tasks with your team members. You can then track and measure the performance content progress directly using the SEMrush software.

#7. Marketing Calendar

The marketing calendar helps you organize your work. With this tool, you can manage your content calendar and marketing campaigns in one place.

Not only that, the marketing calendar also allows you to work with other members of your team, create tasks and track their progress in real-time.

It is located to the left, under the Management dashboard.

With marketing calendar you can track your campaign performance. You can also collaborate very easily with your colleagues.

Three ways marketing calendar can save you time and effort.

Planning and managing your content strategy does require a lot of time and effort. This elegant tool is designed to save you time and effort. It achieves this in three ways:

Activities

You can plan. The calendar help you plan content creation activities and set deadlines (publication and marketing) with an endless number of associates, partners, colleagues etc.

Tasks and teammates

Do you have a team? You can assign tasks to any member of your team. You can even and track their progress in real-time.

Notifications

To help you keep on top of your work (campaigns, activities and tasks), the tool provides notifications that you can customize and track.

Step-By-Step: How to Supercharge your Content Creation & Marketing Strategy with the Semrush Content Marketing Toolkit

As indicated earlier, we will now take a more detailed look at how to use the SEMrush content marketing toolkit to turbo charge your content marketing strategy.

We will look at this in 6 different ways.

Ready to dive in? Awesome!

Let’s go for it.

#1. Find ideas for creating fresh content

You always need fresh content that’s compelling.

This serves three purposes. It introduces new readers to your content, brings back your existing readers for more, and keeps the Google bot happy.

But how do you get a constant source of instant ideas for compelling content that is unique and drives traffic.

The Topic Research Tool is designed to to give you content ideas that strike a chord with your target audience.

The tool works in four ways. Let’s check it out

In our analysis, we have used the topic “bluehost”. When we enter this keyword into the topic research tool, we are presented with an enormous amount of invaluable data which we can view in 4 different ways.

Cards

We can view this data as cards. To do this, click on the Cards tab (red arrow below). From the image, you can see that we are given 6 different research data on our topic “bluehost”. The data is presented in card format.

Explorer

Next, we can view the research data on our topic as an explorer. To do this, we simply click on the Explorer tab (red arrow below).

Explorer presents our data as subtopics with content ideas. It also gives us information about Facebook engagement, number of backlinks and the total number of shares for each subtopic.

Overview

We can also have an overview of the data on our research topic. To do this, we need to click on the Overview tab (red arrow below). This gives us the top 10 headlines on our research topic based on backlinks. We are also given 10 interesting questions on our research topic.

Mind Map

Finally, we can also view the data on our research topic as a mind map.

To access this information, we just need to click on the Mind Map tab (red arrow). With the mind map, we have headlines, four types of questions (What? Is? Which? How?) There is also information on related searches to our research topic.

#2. Audit and enhance your present content

Fact: Google expects you to keep your content fresh and update.

And with the Content marketing platform, you can always conduct a thorough audit of your existing content using criteria that is personalized.

The Content Analyzer tool is designed to keep your content fresh and up to date. To get the most out of the tool, you need to connect it to Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

Now you can evaluate your existing content to discover what works well and what needs to be enhanced and improved.

As you can see from the image below, the tool has a stylish tool called Content sets.

Content sets will automatically break down all your existing website content into four categories for review and improvement:

• Rewrite or remove
• Need to update
• Quick review
• Poor content

You will need to connect to Google Analytics for the tool to work.

#3. Develop a strategic editorial plan

Planning and managing content creation and marketing generally requires a lot of time and effort.

The Semrush Marketing Toolkit has a tool that saves you both time and effort. A tool that makes planning your content creation and content marketing as easy as ABC.

It is the Marketing calendar.

As you can see from the image below, the calendar is visually presented.

The marketing calendar is designed to help you do three things:

• Plan. You can plan your content creation, publication and marketing right in this tool.
• Assign. You can assign and delegate tasks to your teams.
• Monitor. You can have a global overview of all your activities and track and monitor them through customized notifications.

#4. Create content material this is search engine optimization (SEO) friendly

With the SEMrush Content Marketing Toolkit, you can easily follow the best practices of writing content for the internet.

You can unlock the SEO potential of any article including how original the text is. And the awesome thing is that you can do this in real time.

And both the SEO Content Template and the SEO Writing Assistant combine not just to improve your article’s readability. They also work together to provide actionable recommendations in comparison to your top competitors.

The SEO Writing Assistant is designed to make your articles SEO friendly.

When you type or paste your article into the Quick Checker, the SEO writing assistant immediately goes to work.

It gives you feedback on your article in four main areas: readability, SEO, originality and tone of voice. It also gives you an over all score out of 10. For parts of this article, we received an over al score of 9.0/10 (perfect) as you can see from the image below.

And there’s more.

Below you can see a detailed breakdown of the feedback from the SEO writing assistant. You receive a score based on each of the following areas

Readability

You receive a score based on the difficulty of your text in comparison to what your target audience expects.

Title issues

Does your title have the right amount of words? Are the characters within Google limits?

Content issues

Is you text optimized for clarity of reading?

SEO

Have you used your target keywords in your text?

And here’s something I love.

You’re also given a list of recommended, semantically related keywords that you can add to your text. This is aimed at enriching your text, in order to get better SEO results.

Alt attribute issues

Have used images? Do your images have alt attributes?

Link issues

Have you used an optimal number os links? Are all your links correct?

Tone of voice

Is your tone of voice, casual, neutral or formal? Are you consistent in your tone of voice throughout the article?

Originality

There is a plagiarism check to find out if your text is original.

#5. Track both your onsite and offsite content performance

To help you keep track of your content performance, the Semrush Marketing Toolkit helps you find the most relevant platform for content distribution.

In addition, you can assess potential traffic and reach. And you can also analyze your brand presence.

The tool is Post Tracking. And it allows you to track up to 50 articles published on third-party websites.

I used the tool to analyze 3 articles I recently wrote for Thrive Global.

As you can see from the image below, when you click on the Post Tracking tab, you’re presented with a ton of valuable information and data. These include shares, keywords, backlinks and estimated reach.

#6. Measure the impact of your content

Ever wanted to evaluate the impact of your externally published articles? Or even those published by your competitor’s?

Now you can!

The Content marketing platform helps you measure the impact of any of these articles in terms of social engagement, traffic and search rankings.

The tool to use if Brand Monitoring.

As you can see from the image below, when we put Smart Blogger into the brand monitoring tool, we are immediately presented with an insane amount of useful data.

Frequently Asked Questions on the Semrush Content Marketing Toolkit

Now to the Q&A section.

Wrapping Up – Semrush Content Marketing Toolkit

The Semrush Content Marketing Platform is an array of snazzy and spiffy tools designed to help you:

• Find topics that your audience cares about
• Create a content creation and marketing plan
• Write an article and optimize it to make it SEO-friendly
• Analyze mentions of your brand or any brand for that matter
• Measure and analyze results
• Improve your existing content

Have you tried the Semrush content marketing toolkit?

What are your thoughts?

Join in the conversation on-line and be sure to tag us on Twitter at @astutecopyblog