SEO Writing Assistant

Google Docs Add-On

Find SEO Writing Assistant in the G Suite Marketplace and click on the ‘Install’ button. You will be taken to a new Google document. Give your permission to run the add-on and locate it in the ‘Add-ons’ tab. When you select ‘Show’ the SWA will pop up as a sidebar to the right of your document.

Set up SEO Writing Assistant

WordPress Plugin

Log in to your WordPress admin account and search for SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant in the Plugins section, or follow this link. Once you find it, click on ‘Install now’. Next, go to your ‘Installed plugins’ and activate SEO Writing Assistant. Go to the Page or Post you want to optimize and click on ‘Connect SEO Content Template’ by logging in to your SEMrush account. You can drag your SWA panel to the right-hand side if you wish.

WordPress plugin

To start analyzing your content with SWA you’ll have two options:

Using an existing SEO Content Template (this will be the SEO Content Template you most recently created in your account)
Creating a new recommended set directly from Google Doc

Creating New Recommendations

To create a new template, all you have to do is enter your target keywords, location, and device (desktop or mobile). When you’re finished, hit the ‘Create SEO Content Template’ button.

Once you get your recommendations, the first thing you may notice is the score graph at the top. This graph is an excellent place for you to identify the weak points of your article. The overview score is broken down into 4 different scales: Readability, SEO, Originality, and Tone of Voice.

Changing Recommendations

If you want to adjust your recommendations you can change your target keywords, location or device, click on the pencil icon next to your keywords.

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Next, type in new keywords and change your location up to city level, device or language. And don’t forget to click on the ‘Change keywords’ button on the bottom when you’ve made changes.

Note that changing target keywords will create a new SEO сontent template and your current recommendations will be lost. A new template will take new keywords from your SEO Ideas limits. If you want to know how many SEO Ideas units you have in your account, you can review your limits from your Subscription Info page.

Just below the keywords and title, you will see if all of the links in your document are link correctly.

Overall Score

As mentioned above, the overall score will be provided directly above the interactive chart at the top of your metrics. The overall score is a real-time metric which grades the quality of your content by taking into account all of the elements below.

The closer the number is to 10, the more optimized your text is. You are able to see the specific metrics that are affecting your score by clicking on any of the four different scales.

Readability

Once you click on the readability scale on the graph, SWA will expand to show you all of the different metrics that affect your readability score. These include readability score, word count, title issues and content issues.

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Readability is the ease with which a reader can understand written text according to the Flesch reading ease score formula. Try to match the target number, which is an average for your top 10 competitors on Google.

Using the readability score will help you create a text that is user-friendly. Naturally the more readable a piece of content is, the more likely a user is to read through the entire thing.

This feature is available for English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Dutch. You can set your own target readability manually by clicking on the pencil’s icon.

Words will calculate the number of words in your text and will set a goal according to the average word count of your rivals’ content.

You can manually edit your target readability score and target word count by clicking on the pencil icon new to readability. Keep in mind that whenever you manually edit these targets your overall score will update accordingly.

Title Issues will provide you feedback on the title of your article. It can let you know if your title is over the Google character limits, as well as if you should add more words to attract more users.

Content Issues lets you see any issues with the actual content of your article. This includes long paragraphs, hard to read sentences and complex words. If you have these issues on your content SWA will show you exactly what sentences or words could be rewritten or replaced in order to help your score.

SEO

Just like with readability, clicking on SEO will expand to show you the different metrics that make up the SEO scale.

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Target keywords are the core on which all the recommendations are based. You can change them at any time to change the topic or get more precise tips for your content. To change them, click on the pencil icon directly to the right of the target keyword widget.

Recommended keywords are words that are semantically related to your seed keywords. Once you use them in your content, they will be highlighted with green in the doc. Hover over any of them to see each keyword’s monthly search volume and keyword difficulty score.

This makes it easy to gauge which keywords would be most beneficial to target due to their low difficulty (low competition). If you see (n/a) next to your recommended keyword’s volume or difficulty, it means we don’t have this data in the database.

You can also download some extra recommendations from SEO Content Template in a Word doc format if you click on the link at the bottom of the tool.

Link Issues will let you know if you have any broken links in your content. SWA will point on this link so you know exactly what you need to fix.

SEO Writing Assistant also checks your text for keyword stuffing. If any keyword you target is used too frequently in your text, you will see a warning. This keyword will be highlighted with orange in the ‘Recommended keywords’ and ‘Target keywords’ section. Hover over it to see the details.

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Try to avoid using a keyword more than 3% of the whole text, as keyword stuffing can result in punishment from Google.

Tone of Voice

Another feature of the SWA is the ability to gauge a document’s tone of voice. The tone of voice depends on the words you’re choosing to use, the rhythm, the word order, and pace.

Your tone can be considered very casual, somewhat casual, neutral, somewhat formal and very formal. Not only can you see where your text lies on this scale, but you can also see your document’s most casual and most formal sentences.

You can set or change your target tone of voice by clicking the pencil icon in the top right corner.

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The target tone you ultimately choose will depend on the type of content you are writing. If you are writing an academic piece you are probably going to want it to be more formal than a blog post. If some of your sentences are differing from your overall tone of voice, SEO Writing Assistant will point those sentences out for you so you can change them if you see fit.

Originality

The Originality metrics look for signs of plagiarism in the text. It can determine the total percentage and number of copied words for an article based on other articles found on the web. It even goes as far as to identify the original sources of content from across the internet so you can verify any plagiarized text.

If you have a high percentage of copied words, you’ll need to go back into your text in change them. This way you can ensure you’re not at risk of plagiarism. Once updated you can recheck your originality to see where you stand.

There may be times when using the plagiarism checker where you want to exclude a certain domain. If this is the case for you, all you need to do is click on the eye icon directly to the right of the text source. This will then exclude that domain from being included in the plagiarism check.

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A good example of this is if you are working on updating a piece of content on your own website or blog. Because this content already exists on your site while you are updating it, it will be seen as plagiarized. Just click the exclude domain and problem solved.

Change Design

With the SEO Writing Assistant constantly working to improve on its features and services, it also lets users change its design. By default, your design will include the overall score graph at the top. However, if you just want a simple view of the metrics and recommendations, you are able to change its design.

To do this, navigate to the right of your email address and click on the menu. From here simply click on switch design. Once this is down you will see the design change so that it is only showing you the recommendations and no longer has the graph.

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Limits

The keywords you use to generate your content templates will be taken from your SEO Ideas units and depend on your monthly subscription. Free users and users with a Pro subscription can generate a template only once.

Guru users have 800 SEO Ideas units in a month
Business users have 2,000 SEO Ideas units in a month

SEO Ideas units are shared between three tools:

SEO Content Template (check how the limits for this tool work)
SEO Writing Assistant
On Page SEO Checker (check how the limits for this tool work)

Every time you generate a template for one keyword — whether in SEO Content Template or directly in SEO Writing Assistant — one SEO Ideas unit is charged.

SEO Writing Assistant limits 1 If you generate a template for two keywords simultaneously, two SEO Ideas units are charged respectively, and so on.

SEO Writing Assistant limits 2 If you enter the same keyword several times, one SEO Ideas unit is charged every time you do this, as the new template will be generated based on the current SERP.

When you send your template from SEO Content Template to SEO Writing Assistant and open it in Google doc, no extra units are charged apart from those you’ve used in SEO Content Template, unless you edit your target keywords.

SEO Writing Assistant limits 3 If you edit your target keywords right in the SEO Writing Assistant, the new template is generated and you are charged with the respective number of SEO Ideas units — the target keyword amount equals the SEO Ideas unit amount charged.