Content grading for search

Exploring a conceptually simple marketing idea.

Can you write a piece of keyword optimized text ➳ Compare it against what’s already in the market? ➳ Measure for keyword usage, density and width ➳ all at once.

If you already know a tool that does this, feel free to add it to the comments.

If you’re curious, continue reading.

Writing is a difficult task. Not a lot of people can sit down and compose their thoughts. With daily disruptions: email, chats, zoom calls, cats and kids – its tough. Most marketing teams have decided to outsource this activity, including mine. Before they offload, they send the writers the brand and style guidelines.

What the usual process?

Dig through keyword data. Which keywords are getting you traffic, which ones are not? What are their rankings? One you have a better handle of this, based on your ranking for a keyword and budget you ask for an article. The length of the article decides the price. In a few days the writer sends you a draft to review.

Next steps?

Are you in a position to:
Compare the draft against a few articles already ranking well for this keyword?
Identify if the word length for this one is like the ones ranking well
Identify used or missed associated keywords (measure keyword width)
Identify keyword stuffing (measure keyword density)

How did we solve this problem yesterday?

Simple. You took the word of the writer, your content manager, editor or any person you believed was an expert at writing.
Dozen a dime! You'll find people on upwork, freelancer and elsewhere and take their word for it.
There's nothing wrong with trust. There's nothing wrong with measuring what you want to either.
I want to be able to take both: trust and measurement to the bank.

What's advertised?

I tried to do this with the conventional tools in my pocket: ahrefs, semrush, hemmingway app, editsaurus, etc. None of these tools can identify all the issues I'm looking to address.

A combination of keyword optimization (length, width and density), a small subset of semantic analysis and ranking comparison with the proprietary google search algorithm is what we are trying to do.

There are no Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) tools for this - or may be I couldn't find any. If you have one up your sleeve please leave it in the comments for people to check out.

How to solve this?

Paid tools that can help depend on how deep your pockets go. Here are some to consider: clearscope, marketmuse, topic, ryte and wordmetrics. Within the free trial period I tried some of them and settled on topic. They went easy on my budget and accepted monthly payments for an invoice. As an alternative to credit card payments.

What are the results?

results
Content on product signup pages went up against the target keyword. There was good coverage of the main keyword, fell short on many associated keywords. The word count was comparable to other top ranking pages. No keyword stuffing. There was a lot of room to improve. Plus ideas to cover keywords with other pages. And creative ideas to work specific words into the page copy.

Analysis of the support pages against target keywords returned interesting problems. Some of them broke the algorithm because of the javascripts on the page. This means the page has to checked for html structure and indexing. Check the structure using any free site checking tool. Check the indexing via google search console. Also the text scored high for keyword stuffing, less on keyword diversity. The length was comparable to the other high ranking pages. Well the writer met the basic criteria, congratulations!

Where can you see this in action in your life?

For one free trial you see this when you're optimizing your own resume. Remember jobscan? The system does something very similar. It grabs the text on your resume compares it to the text on job description. Then highlights the differences.

Minus the keyword optimization, ranking comparison and optimal length determination.