Semrush Content Marketing Platform Review: How to Use it to Create A Winning Content Strategy?

What’s the BIGGEST challenge most content marketers and bloggers face? If you said “creating engaging content” – you’re absolutely right.

Content is king. No matter what industry you are in, if you want to get better results, you need to create high-quality content that connects your target audience.

But here’s the thing: creating engaging content is NOT easy.

You need access to the RIGHT content marketing tools for topic research, content creation and tracking your content’s performance.

What if there’s only ONE tool that helps you with all these content marketing-related tasks?

Let us introduce the “Content Marketing Toolkit” from Semrush. It’s an all-in-one content marketing platform that helps you with;

• Content planning
• Content creation and optimization
• Measuring your content performance and so on

Try 14-Day Free Trial of Semrush Guru Account Today

In this detailed review of Semrush Content Marketing Platform, let’s find out what it is, how it helps you along with its features, pros, cons and alternatives. Are you ready? Let’s get started!

How to Use Semrush Content Marketing Platform: A Simple Guide for Beginners

What exactly is “Content Marketing Toolkit” from Semrush?

Content Marketing platform (or Toolkit) from Semrush is a content marketing tool which can be used for topic research, content optimization, content performance tracking and so on.

If you’re looking for an all in one tool to manage your content marketing, content toolkit from Semrush is definitely for you.

Features List:

Here are some of the awesome features of Content Marketing Platform from Semrush.

So what are you waiting for?

Find Traffic Generating Post Ideas Using their “Topic Research Tool”

Great content starts with a great idea. You need to discover the proper topic ideas that your core audience cares about. Otherwise, it’s almost impossible to create content that goes viral online.

Content marketing toolkit from Semrush gives you access to “Topic Research Tool” which provides you a ton of useful content (or topic) ideas no matter what industry you are in.

Topic Research tool generates you a lot of useful content ideas based on keywords, trending topics, related searches, questions people ask and so on.

Once you’re on the Content Marketing dashboard, go to Topic Research and enter any topic or keyword. Hit the “Get content ideas” button to continue. You can also pick your preferred database of your choice.

Semrush content marketing tool gives you a ton of topic ideas based on that keyword.

You can explore more topic ideas in the following ways.

• Cards
• Explorer
• An overview
• A mind map

You can also prioritize your content ideas in 3 following parameters:

• Volume to see the most popular topics first
• Difficulty to see the most difficult keywords (difficult to rank for)
• Topic Efficiency to see the most efficient topics (with high relevance to your target topic or keyword)

If you’re using “Cards” (default view) to explore new topic ideas, make sure to pick a relevant topic card to explore further. Here’s how it looks like when you click on any card.

As you can see above, it will show you headlines along with relevant questions based on your topic.

You can add your favorite topics or headlines to “Favorite Ideas” list that you can see later, export them or create SEO optimized templates.

You can also notice above that it will show you various metrics like;

• Subtopic volume (search volume)
• Difficulty and
• Topic efficiency

Here’s how the Mind Map view looks like;

Want to spy on your competitors’ domain to see for which topics they are currently ranking for? You can do that easily by entering a domain name.

As you can see, you can now see for which topics Neil Patel’s website currently ranks in the top 100 Google results.

Create SEO-Friendly Content Using their “SEO Content Template”

Finding great topic ideas is one thing and creating well-optimized SEO-friendly content is another thing.

Fortunately, Semrush content toolkit offers you “SEO Content Template” that helps you easily create well-structured and SEO-friendly content.

Here’s how “SEO Content Template” works.

• Enter a keyword that you want to rank for
• Semrush analyzes content on the Google’s top 10 ranking pages for your target keyword
• You’ll get recommendations to create a better piece of content

Enter your target keywords into the “SEO Content Template”, choose your preferred country, city or region and click on the “Create SEO Template” button to continue.

Instantly, it starts analyzing your top10-ranking rivals for your target keywords.

As you can see above, you’ll find;

• Top 10 rivals for your keywords
• Key recommendations (based on those top 10 rivals on Google)

You should focus on these key recommendations as they offer you a ton of valuable suggestions to create a perfect SEO-friendly copy.

You’ll discover semantically related keywords, backlink sources that you can try to acquire, average readability score, and recommended text length.

If you scroll further down, you’ll also get the best recommendations to create a perfectly optimized blog post.

See that? You’ll be getting suggestions on where to include your target keywords in order to get better rankings in Google search results.

“SEO Writing Assistant” Provides You the Best SEO Recommendations

SEO Writing Assistant from Semrush checks if your content follows the best SEO practices.

It provides you suggestions to optimize your content based on Google’s top 10 ranking pages for your given keywords in a given location. You just need to set your target keywords to get the best recommendations to improve its organic rankings.

Semrush offers an in-built SEO writing assistant editor where you can copy-paste your text to find the best SEO practices. Or you can grab their add-on for WordPress or Google Docs for free.

• Click Here to Download Semrush SEO Writing Assistant Plugin for WordPress (Free)
• Click Here to Download Semrush SEO Writing Assistant Add-On for Google Docs (Free)

When you use the SEO writing assistant to analyze the text, it gives you an overall score (out of 10). Here’s how it looks like;

Using their SEO writing assistant, you will get the following things.

• Readability (overall readability score along with word count, title issues and content issues)
• SEO (it gives you a list of target keywords along with recommended keywords with keyword metrics such as difficulty score, link issues etc)
• Tone of Voice (it checks the tone of voice so you can maintain consistency)
• Originality (can be used as a plagiarism checker as checks the total percentage of your text that is not similar to other sources)

Here’s how it looks like;

As you can see above, the closer the number is to 10, the more optimized your content is.

Try to score 9 if you want to better optimize your content for both search engines and your target audience. If you’re already using Google Docs to create content, you’ll love SEO writing assistant from Semrush as it’s NOT only free to use but it offers you excellent suggestions to optimize your content for higher search rankings.

“Brand Monitoring” Helps You Track Any Website

Brand monitoring is extremely important. Whether you want to turn your “name mentions” into backlinks or get notified whenever someone mentions your name/brand/website online, “Brand Monitoring” helps.

Semrush content platform offers you a Brand Monitoring tool that helps you easily track daily mentions of your brand or website.

It provides you the ability to track specific domains for brand mentions daily and it can also be integrated with Google Analytics so that you can easily measure the amount of traffic you’re getting from link mentions.

Here are some of the benefits of using Brand Monitoring.

Here’s how it looks like;

As you can see above, you can monitor all your web mentions (on specific dates) along with the domains that are mentioning your website, brand or product.

Create an Editorial Plan

Consistency matters a lot. Creating a successful website or business takes time. You need to create consistently on a regular basis. Here’s where developing an editorial plan for your content helps you a lot.

To create and manage your editorial calendar, Semrush developed a tool called “Marketing Calendar” which can help you manage your content ideas in a calendar well in advance.

You can use their Marketing Calendar for so many things including;

• Save all your content ideas or draft ideas at one place
• Avoid publishing similar content (which might lead to keyword cannibalization)
• Create a content strategy and schedule your posts months in advance
• Maintain a consistent blog posting frequency

Here’s how it looks like;

As you can see above, you can schedule your posts in advance, create a new campaign to manage your content ideas, export your ideas and so on. If you really want to build a successful blog, you need to make sure to develop a solid editorial plan for your content so you can schedule your posts in advance.

Revise And Improve Your Content With “Content Audit Tool”

The best way to get more out of the Content Audit tool from Semrush is to connect your GSC (Google Search Console) and Google Analytics to get the important data including pageviews, sessions, bounce rate etc.

This tool gives you two main functionalities including;

• Auditing your on-page website’s content
• Auditing your off-page content (with “post tracking”)

Firstly, let’s talk about their Content Audit tool which can be used to audit your blog’s existing content. Based on that, you can either update your old content or develop a new content strategy to boost your overall conversions.

You can configure the tool by selecting the subfolders in your sitemap, or adding URLs manually (up to 20,000 pages).

Here’s how it looks like;

Once you run the content audit, it will list all the content on your site so you can analyze each one of them. You can check the workflow status to see the status of your blog posts.

It will display all the essential on-page factors like H1 tag, author, word count, total social shares and so on.

Measure Impact With Their “Post Tracking”

Post Tracking is an integral part of their Content Audit tool which helps you easily measure your off-page content impact.

You can add an existing blog post’s URL to track the post performance. Here’s how it looks like;

As you can see above, you’ll see various metrics like;

• URL (you can see a list of all the URLs you’re currently tracking, you can also add or remove URLs)
• Referral traffic (tells you the number of traffic that came to a post from a source outside of a search engine like Google)
• Keywords (shows you the number of your target keywords that your posts are ranking for in the top 100 search results)
• Shares (number of social shares your post is getting)
• Backlinks (number of backlinks your post is getting)
• Estimated Reach (shows you the number of people that viewed your content)

All in all, Post Tracking helps you track your individual blog post URL’s keywords, referral traffic, shares, backlinks and so on.

Semrush Content Marketing Toolkit Pros & Cons

Here’s the list of pros and cons of Semrush content marketing platform.

Pros:

Cons:

Pricing: How Much Does It Cost?

Semrush currently offers the following 3 monthly subscriptions.

1. Pro – $139.95 per month
2. Guru – $249.95 per month
3. Business –  $499.95 per month

If you want to save more on their subscription plans check out Semrush Coupons and Offers or go with their Annual plans as you can save 17% on all their 3 plans. Here’s the pricing structure with their annual billing.

1. Pro – $117.33 per month
2. Guru – $208.33 per month
3. Business – $416.66 per month

Important thing to remember

You’ll get full access to the “Content Marketing Platform” only on their Guru and Business plans. On their basic plan which is Pro plan, you’ll get very limited access.

As you can see above, if you want unlimited access to the Content Marketing Platform, you need to purchase their Guru or Business account.

With the Guru account, here’s what you’ll get;

• Unlimited topics to research
• Up to 800 SEO content templates
• Up to 20K pages to audit
• Up to 5 countries to track
• Up to 50 posts to track
• You can add 1 calendar
• Up to 5 plagiarism checks per month

With their Business account, here’s what you’ll get;

• Unlimited topics to research
• Up to 2000 SEO content templates
• Up to 20K pages to audit
• Up to 10 countries to track
• Up to 50 posts to track
• You can add unlimited calendars
• Up to 10 plagiarism checks per month

Want to try Semrush free for 14 days? Use the following link.

Grab your 14-day FREE Semrush Pro account (worth $139.95)

Semrush Content Marketing Platform Alternatives

Here are some of the cheaper alternatives to Semrush’s content marketing toolkit.

1. BuzzSumo

When it comes to content marketing tools, BuzzSumo is widely popular as it provides you content insights to generate topic ideas in almost any industry.

BuzzSumo is widely used to generate content ideas, create top performing content, monitor your content performance and discover influencers in any niche.

Here are some of the features of BuzzSumo.

How much does it cost?

BuzzSumo offers 4 pricing plans which are listed below.

1. Pro (with this plan, you can add up to 5 users which costs you $99 per month where you can add up to 5 projects)
2. Plus (with this plan, you can add up to 10 users which costs you $179 per month where you can add up to 10 projects)
3. Large (with this plan, you can add up to 15 users which costs you $299 per month where you can add up to 10 projects)
4. Enterprise (with this plan, you can add up to 30 users which costs you $499 per month where you can add up to 10 projects)

All the plans include unlimited searches.

You can try BuzzSumo free for 7 days.

Try BuzzSumo Today

2. ContentStudio.io

ContentStudio.io is another popular content marketing tool used by over 30K people worldwide to discover, plan and schedule high performing content in any industry.

Here are some of the features of ContentStudio.

How much does it cost?

ContentStudio.io is available in 4 pricing plans.

• Pro (best for solo marketers and it costs you $49 per month and you can add 1 blog per platform along with up to 10 social accounts)
• Small (best for businesses and agencies and it costs you $99 per month and you can add 10 blogs per platform along with up to 25 social accounts)
• Medium (best for businesses and agencies and it costs you $199 per month and you can add 20 blogs per platform along with up to 50 social accounts)
• Large (best for agencies and it costs you $299 per month and you can add 50 blogs per platform along with up to 150 social accounts)

Click here to try ContentStudio.io

3. Content Explorer from Ahrefs

If you want to find top performing content with advanced search metrics, you should definitely give a try to Content Explorer from Ahrefs.

Just enter any topic or keyword in their Content Explorer and you’ll discover a list of most popular web pages based on those topics or keywords.

Here are some of the features of Content Explorer from Ahrefs;

How much does it cost?

Ahrefs offers you the following pricing plans.

• Lite (great for beginners and you can add 1 user which costs you $99 per month where you can add up to 5 projects)
• Standard (great for small businesses and you can add 1 user which costs you $179 per month where you can add up to 10 projects)
• Advanced (great for agencies and you can add 3 users which costs you $399 per month where you can add up to 25 projects)
• Agency (great for agencies and you can add 5 users which costs you $999 per month where you can add up to 100 projects)

Ahrefs doesn’t offer any free trial.

Click here to try Ahrefs Now

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FAQs on Semrush Content Marketing Platform

Here’s a list of some of the frequently asked questions around Semrush content marketing toolkit.

Helpful Resources:

• SpyFu vs Semrush

Final Thoughts About Semrush Content Platform

Creating engaging content is the key to building a successful blog or business online. Here’s where Semrush’s Content Marketing Platform comes into handy. It helps you with everything from managing your content ideas to optimizing your blog posts, tracking your content performance and so on.

So what are your thoughts on the Semrush content marketing platform? Do you feel it’s the best platform to create a solid content strategy? Share your views in the comments below.