For all of you bloggers and article writers out there we are happy to introduce a new tool in our feature set called Content Assistant!
Content Assistant is not your typical on-page SEO optimization tool. Most of your usual tools (for example Yoast) are there to help you with things like optimizing meta descriptions, page titles, headings, etc… Content Assistant is different. The main goal of Content Assistant is to help you maximize the ranking and traffic potential of the target topic.
Rather than concentrating on the technical SEO aspects of our article, Content Assistant helps us break down what type of content Google is looking for within the top page results and allows us to get the most out of each article we create.
It is also not meant to replace the normal keyword research functions. Content Assistant should be loaded up after you’ve already figured out which keyword and topic you’ll be writing about.
Content Assistant In Action
Recently we decided to release our Brainstorm Tool for free. We created a landing page for it targeting the overall topic “niche ideas.” We put together a landing page that we thought was competitive for a first-page result. Our page hovered around the 4th and 5th page of Google for weeks.
On Sept. 4th we decided to use the page as a case study for Content Assistant. We optimized our landing page content as per the “Must Words” and “Recommended Keywords” suggested by Content Assistant. We increased the word count to be more competitive with the top page results. We also used the “Content Snippets” and “Questions” for quick research. After Google re-crawled the page our rankings immediately went up to 27th and then as of today have gone up to #14!
*Update*: This page has now ranked on the 1st page of Google for 4 years and counting.
We hadn’t created any other backlinks (the internal link seen above was created today after the rankings update to further try and help rankings).
Now we are not guaranteeing these sorts of results for everyone and there could be some other factors at play here as well. Without a doubt though Content Assistant helped. This is not the only page of ours where we’ve seen gains after using Content Assistant but for the sake of keeping things brief, we are only including this particular page as an example.
Getting Started With Content Assistant
If you’d prefer you can skip down to the bottom where we created a quick video overview that explains most of what is in this tutorial.
When you first open Content Assistant you will see the usual Keysearch search bar. Here is where you will type in your main keyword phrase or topic idea.
After you’ve clicked “search” it will go out and load all of the relevant data including the keyword difficulty score. You’ll notice there is a text area to work on your article as well as the right-hand column that contains the following tabs:
- Main
- Keywords
- Research
- Questions
- SERPS
Main Tab
The main tab gives you an overview of the stats for you your article. It shows you the keyword difficulty, the Word Count, Recommended Keyword meters and Must Words.
Word Count Meter
This meter will calculate the number of words in your article and compare it to the average word count of the top 10 Google results. The goal is to try and get our article word count close to or above the first-page average word count.
Recommended Keywords
This meter calculates how many of the Recommended Keywords we’ve used in our article. A safe goal is to try and incorporate as many “Must Words” as possible and around 40% of the total Recommended Keywords. More is always better though!
You’ll notice as we type any Recommended Keywords will turn from orange to blue, signifying that they are now found in your article and the Recommended Keywords meter will calculate the percentage found as well.
Must Words
Must Words (known as LSI keywords) are the most used phrases and keywords within the first page results of Google. We highly recommend including these in your article.
This feature is basically giving you an overall breakdown of what Google is really looking for in the top results. By including as many of these words as possible you are ensuring that your article is covering the overall theme of the topic and in turn giving Google what it’s looking for in a first page result for this keyword phrase.
Keywords Tab
The keywords tab shows Related Keywords and Top URL Keywords.
Related Keywords
Related Keywords are Google’s most suggested topics shown in order of relevancy. These are the keywords and topics you see at the bottom of the Google results when doing a search.
This is taking an even closer look into Google’s algorithm by showing us the phrases Google closely relates to the main topic. Since they are associating these other phrases with the main topic it most likely means that by including these keywords and phrases in your article you are more thoroughly covering the overall idea of your topic, which can only help with rankings.
Top URL Keywords
These are the top traffic getting keywords for the 1st ranked Google result for the keyword searched. This is something we examined more in-depth in our website traffic analysis post but to sum up here, by having a peek into the keywords driving the most traffic for the top result, we are seeing what Google expects to see in a top result for this keyword. We are also seeing other potential traffic driving keywords and phrases that we can include in our article to really maximize all of the ranking potential for the article.
Both Related Keywords and Top URL Keywords may be hard to fit in the article “as is”. If you can great! If not though, what you are really aiming for is to include the overall topic and idea of these keywords in your article. Don’t sweat it if many of these keywords are not lighting up blue and increasing the Recommended Keywords Meter. We are using them more as a guide rather than the Must Words which we want as many blue as possible.
Research Tab
Content Snippets
The research tab contains what we call “Content Snippets”. These are relevant snippets taken from web pages found in our database. They can help you quickly research your topic by skimming the snippets or by viewing the web pages that contain the snippets easily right within the popup window.
You can also choose to only view snippets from the first page results using the “SERP Top Pages” option if you prefer.
You can also load Content Snippets for any of the Recommended Keywords by clicking on the keywords within the Main or Keywords tabs. This will load the Content Snippets panel in the article text box area. Once you are done viewing the Content Snippets you can just click “Back to article” to go back to the article text box.
Questions Tab
These are popular questions found on your topic. These are questions taken directly from Google, Quora, and other popular question sites. Some might be good sub-headings for your article. Including a few of them may help gain featured snippets & overall topic relevancy.
Adding questions and answers in your articles is a great way to grab a lot more long-tail traffic and Google loves ranking pages that answer questions directly.
SERPS Tab
Here is where you can see an overview of the first page Google results, their titles and word counts. You can view the pages in our page view popup or click the link to open them in a new tab. This just gives you a nice quick view of the top results as a reference.
Final Thoughts
Content Assistant is not meant to replace your normal blogging tools. For me I like to write my article as normal, then copy the text into Content Assistant and build from there. Some of you may prefer to start your articles within Content Assistant. Either way, we highly recommend running your articles through to ensure you are maximizing their full SEO potential!
Content Assistant Video Overview
This video gives a quick walk-through of the features discussed in this article.
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