Write better SEO content using Yoast's Content Analysis Tool.

Whenever I build a WordPress website I like to install a plugin called Yoast SEO. In my opinion it’s the best WordPress SEO plugin out there, it does a whole bunch of stuff that helps improve the SEO for a website. One really cool feature that most clients find helpful is the Content Analysis tool that that helps clients write content that can help improve the keyword use for the page.

How it works

Let’s say you want your WordPress site to have a high search engine ranking when somebody Google’s “Freelance photographer”, so you wanna add a blog post that contains those keywords. Go ahead and create your post and write something that’ll contain those keywords. In our example a good idea for a post would be “10 tips for hiring a freelance photographer”.

When you create and edit this post you’ll find this panel called Yoast SEO just underneath the content editor (the field where you usually add in all your text content). Type one of the keywords into the focus keyword field, in our example I’ve keyed in “freelance”. Notice how the Content Analysis tool actually gives you all the tips, it tells you what to do!

Right now in our example the light is red, obviously this means we’re not doing very well. As you might of already guessed we want it to be green.

Making the light turn Green

Green obviously indicates that the post has got a good number, balance and use of the focus keyword “freelance”. So let’s go through some of the items in that that list!

“No meta description has been specified…”
“The page title contains 12 characters, which is less than recommended”

Now to fix up these two, we can edit the meta description and title by using the snippet editor above.

You’d also notice the another light, changes red, orange and green depending on how well you write your title and meta description tags. In addition to color signalling, this tool will also give you hints on how much more or how much less you need to write.

The light is still red, so let’s keep going…

“The text contains 0 words. This is far too low and should be increased…”

OK, in my example I haven’t written anything yet, but as soon as I start writing stuff into the content editor, that light will turn green. So I’ll start writing.

As you can see I’ve creating a header and included our focus keyword in there, once you start playing around with the content analysis for a while you’ll learn a whole bunch of stuff about writing SEO content.

Get the drift?

More keywords

After we made the light green for the keyword “freelance” we can do all the same things after we change the focus keyword to “Photographer”. Pretty cool huh!

Closing statement

Don’t forget there’s plenty of other factors that’ll help improve your search engine rankings, such as how popular your website is and how it’s coded.

Last modified: February 6, 2018