Content Optimizer Guide

Content Optimizer is a tool that produces content briefs for copywriters to optimize the text of a document by analyzing the number of keywords and phrases in competitor documents that are ranked at the top of the Google search engine results. The Content Optimizer gives advice on SEO text and recommendations for keyword occurrences, which can be used as part of the content briefs. 

The analysis starts with “Create New Task”:

The following page will appear:

First, enter the name of the task.

Then, select a search region. Choose the city for which you are optimizing the page for which you need a content brief. 

The supported search engines are Yandex and Google in Russian and English. The Google SERP will not appear immediately; you need to wait until it is loaded.

Here, enter the keywords to be analyzed: one group of keywords for optimizing on one page (hereinafter referred to as the “cluster”).

For the analysis to be of high quality, you must comply with the mandatory requirements for keywords (cluster):

The cluster must conform to the hard clustering method at Accuracy 3!

Completeness – The cluster should preferably include all of the most high-volume keywords for your product/service: high-volume tails (+ buy, + price) and synonyms: for example, “plastic windows” and “PVC windows”, or “washing machines”, “buy washing machine”. The recommended number of keywords is 3-6. You can use just one keyword, but first, you should check if it has any synonyms. If there are synonyms and you have forgotten them, the analysis will be useless.

It is not necessary to add different permutations of keywords, only the most frequent ones. (“Buy air conditioner” and “air conditioner buy” do not need to be added separately; the first one is more frequent, so you can just add that one. 

All cluster keywords should be of the same type, either for optimization on the home page or on an internal one (it is done automatically if keyword clustering is done).

If the keywords are the same, but there are not enough general URLs, try to increase the depth of analysis (see the top of Step 2 below). You can add up to 15 URLs. As soon as there are enough general URLs, it will be possible to analyze.

A maximum of 10-20 keywords may be submitted, but it is not recommended to do it often because the results will be less accurate. It is optimal to submit up to 6-7 keywords. 10 is allowed only if you are promoting an informational site.

If there are higher-volume keywords in the cluster, it’s better not to use low-volume keywords. Too many keywords lead to distorted results!

If everything is filled in correctly, click on “Next Step”, and go to Step 2 of the settings.

Step 2 of the settings – Part 1

Choose a mode: URL or HTML file. If the page you want to analyze already exists on the web, you should enter the address of the page here. If the page or site has not yet been published, but you need to analyze the design elements and/or structure, or if you want to check the text that has already been prepared but not posted to the site for compliance, then click on “Upload HTML file” and upload your page. The format of the upload file is UTF-8 encoded HTML. If you want to apply changes, click the “Add URL” button.

Warning! Any blocks or text which are blocked from indexation by “noindex” or “<– noindex –>” tags will not be analyzed by the Content Optimizer.

Empty HTML file template

Here you can enter the URLs of sites you want to exclude from the analysis, for instance, amazon.com or wikipedia.org. Enter one per line, then click on “Add URL to block list”, and all the pages of that site will be deactivated. 

You can set an arbitrary top depth here (no more than 15 is recommended). This option is recommended when there are not enough pages of the type you want (commercial or info, main or internal) in the top 10. For example, if the top 10 is half-occupied by main pages, but you need to analyze more internal pages, increase the depth of the top to include more internal pages in the analysis. Sometimes it makes sense to analyze the top 12 instead of the top 10, in case the top accidentally includes sites that got there for reasons other than textual factors (those sites will have to be excluded).

Here you need to choose what type of pages you will analyze: main or internal. If you are optimizing the home page, choose main; if it’s something internal, then choose “internal only”. If you don’t have a website yet and you can’t determine which page a given group of keywords will lead to, take a look at the Google results below. If it’s the homepage (more than 7), it is recommended to drive the keywords to the homepage.

The checkbox activates the “analyze only common URL between keywords” mode. If 2 keywords are entered and they have 5 common URLs in the results, only those will be analyzed. It is not recommended to use if the total common URL of your type (main or internal) is less than 5. This mode may only be useful for some High Volume keywords.

In brackets is the number of common URLs between these keywords according to the HARD method. If this number is less than 3, no further analysis is recommended! If you are certain that you have recently been clustered by HARD and the system shows only 2 shared URLs, then analysis can be done.

Step 2 of the settings – Part 2: Viewing and managing the TOPs

In this screen, we can see the Google results for each keyword, and add/remove URLs from the results. Our task here is to select only direct competitor sites and documents for analysis, discarding the impurities (informative, Wikipedia, etc.).

What you may need it for:

• Removing sites from the output that didn’t get there due to textual optimization. These could be sites like Wikipedia (hanging in the top due to authority), but also informative articles that are spiked with commercial keywords.
• Analyze only the URLs that you add yourself. For example, if you only want to analyze selected competitors, or a different search engine (e.g. Bing.com)

Warning! If you have entered several keywords, there will be several such tables and you need to clean the output for all keywords!

By clicking this button, you can upload your own set of URLs for that keyword. Your URLs will not replace those of the top ones but will be added to them.

A counter showing how many URLs will eventually be analyzed for this keyword. It is not recommended to leave less than 5 URLs! If there are less than 3, the task will not be able to run!

A checkbox will activate/deactivate the URL. Active URLs are highlighted in green. The analysis only works for active URLs!

Clicking here will open the URL in a new browser tab.

The URL and snippet header of each result are in the TOP for this keyword.

By clicking on the icon, this domain gets blocked. All results from this domain for all keywords will be removed! You should immediately remove sites such as Wikipedia, or informational sites (if you’re promoting a commercial one).

Here ends the TOP-10, and below this line begins the TOP-20.

If everything is filled in correctly, press “Next step”, and go to the 3rd screen of the settings.

Step 3 of the settings – Content Brief for Copywriter

If you tick this check box, you will not receive a Content Brief, but only a tabular report. This is not recommended, as the Content Brief is free .

By clicking here, you will be able to add your template for the Content Brief to the copywriter (if you require it).

If you don’t need to use your own Content Brief format and the standard one is enough for you, just click on “Create new task”.

The “Create new task” button launches the task analysis.

Next, you will see a confirmation window, and once started, you will be taken to the task list:

Task name

The date of creation and status of the task. The status “Ready” means that the analysis is completed.

Links to download analysis results:

• Link to Excel spreadsheet report – “standard report”
• Link to Word report – “Content Brief for Copywriter”

A link to download a text file that will contain the SEO-Text of your page. This is useful for understanding which parts of your page the Analyzer refers to the SEO-Text area so that it is clear where you need to make changes.

By clicking here you can re-analyze the task with new data for your page, but with old data from the top. This is to check the changes you have already made. For example, say you have already rewritten the text on the page according to the Content Brief, and want to check whether it now meets the requirements, without putting it on the site. You save your page to an HTML file, change the text in the file and upload it to the parser. This will re-analyze the task and the results in the reports will change.

Report files and recommendations

In the report, the first column contains the words and key phrases to be used or removed, and the following columns contain recommendations for the number of occurrences of these phrases in the various document areas of competitors, as well as in the page you are optimizing.

The first column with the keyword is as follows:

Important notes on occurrences of keywords (MUST READ!):

In this report, in an easy-to-understand format for the SEO specialist and copywriter, only the content from “The difference between the top and your page” is displayed, i.e. recommendations, as well as additional words from the topic and examples of competitors’ Titles.

This file contains the text that is from the “SEO-Text” zone of your page that you have submitted for analysis. This is useful for understanding which parts of your page the Analyzer is referring to in the “SEO-Text” zone so that it is clear where changes need to be made.

A “standard” Excel report

Task name and date of creation

The URL of the page that you are analyzing

Key phrases themselves

They cannot be changed! (changing the order of words in the query, inflection, etc.)

If keywords are specified in commas, you can use any of them (preferably different).

Keywords on different lines do not overlap! For example, if the system recommends making 2 occurrences of “plastic windows” and 2 occurrences of “windows”, then the word “windows” will be repeated 4 times.

Zone size in word count.

Zone size in characters (approximate). It’s better to count the number of characters yourself, then multiply the number of words by the average word length in your topic.

All occurrences are independent of each other and are not included in each other! For instance, if the system finds 3 occurrences of the word combination “plastic windows” and 2 occurrences of the word “windows”, then the word “windows” will be repeated 5 times in the text.

All occurrences must not be placed side by side in the text, but only 2 or more words apart, or even better, in separate sentences. For example, if the system has found 1 occurrence of the word “plastic” and 1 occurrence of the word “windows” in the text, then they cannot be written as “plastic windows”! You can either write “plastic, wooden and aluminum windows”, or spread these words out in different sentences (the second option is preferable). You can write “plastic windows” together only if the system has given you this exact occurrence.

All occurrences consisting of several (2 or more) words must not be separated by dots, exclamation marks, question marks (and other symbols that signify the end of a sentence)!

It is forbidden to rearrange the words in any found occurrences and to change the word forms for occurrences if it is not explicitly stated in the system recommendations.

Document zones in the report:

“Competitor data from the top” (green) – occurrences defined by the top (benchmark).

“Seo-text” – the main text of the page, the largest text block (commercial text or article body). Usually written by a copywriter, it carries a semantic core.

“Text fragments” – small pieces (or fragments) of text. Usually have a service function. For example, product specifications on the shop listing, tables, addresses in the header or footer, or other text ‘bundling’.

“Anchors for outbound links” – in this area all texts (anchors) of links placed on the page (outbound) – both external and internal are taken into account. Links in “noindex” are not counted, and links in “nofollow” are counted.

“H1” – occurrences in the h1 tag.

“Title” – occurrences in the title tag.

Warning! The recommendations in the “H1” and “Title” zones are for reference only; do not rely on them! Title and H1 are highly recommended to be optimized manually!

In the remaining columns the zone codes are the same:

“Your page data” (blue) – the entries found on your page

“Difference between the top and your page” (grey) – the difference between your page and the top, i.e. direct recommendations on how to change your page. If the number is positive, then this number of occurrences of this keyword must be added; if negative – removed.

1b. On the sheet “Additional words from the subject” there are subject words and phrases from competitors’ texts (frequency N-grams). They can be used to create a Content Brief for the copywriter.

1c. The sheet “Examples of competitor URLs and Title” contains examples of competitor Title tags and their page addresses to help you manually optimize these tags.

“Report as Content Brief to copywriter” in Word format

.TXT file (SEO text) – Example text of your page

Attention! Tasks that have already been created can be re-analyzed. This allows you to check the changes on the page.

Re-analyzing is free!

Guidelines for bulk uploading tasks to the Content Optimizer

For people who create 20-50 tasks every day in the Content Optimizer, we created a special Batch Creation feature. It is available by clicking on the “Task operations” button on the Content Optimizer tool listing – select “Batch Creation”:

In the popup window, upload an Excel file with the specified tasks and click on the “Create Tasks” button:

Upload file

Let’s look in more detail at how to correctly prepare an upload file for batch creation in the Content Optimizer. The file looks as follows:

We have deliberately separated the tasks in yellow to make them clearer. The arrows indicate the data that MUST be specified in the file in strict order, as shown in the screenshot. Let’s analyze the data in the table in detail:

• Column A – the name of the task.
• Column B – the official ID number (identifier) of the data collection region for Google. For example, 1023191
•  in Google in New York. A complete list of Google IDs can be found here.
• Column D – keywords for which you want to prepare a Content brief or optimize an existing page. Each keyword is on a new line. You can add a maximum of 10 keywords per task. The recommended number of keywords is 5.
• Column I – the depth of the top 10, i.e. the number 10.
• Column J – leave it by default.
• Column K – Here you specify the search engine with which you will work, Yandex – Yandex, Google – google.
• Column L – indicates country domain, e.g. .com.
• Column M – indicates the language of the text analysis.
• Column N – here you specify the URL of the page for analysis.

There is nothing complicated here. You can always download a ready-made template; just substitute your own data and upload it to batch create tasks.

After you click on “Create Tasks”, they will appear on the listing after a while and you will be able to track the status of each of them.

Important: We recommend adding a maximum of 100 tasks per batch to increase data processing speed.