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Optimize your article for SEO and readability
Optimize your article for SEO and readability

Make sure that search engines find your article and readers find it easy to digest

Gregory Claeyssens avatar
Written by Gregory Claeyssens
Updated over 3 months ago

Optimize content for SEO with AI-driven keyword suggestions and actionable SEO tips. Improve Google rankings, grow organic traffic, and outperform competitors. 🚀

Watch our Academy video 📹 on publishing your article:

Start optimizing your article

Step 1. Open a article inside the editor and click on the SEO and Readability score.

Step 2. You will now see the sidebar for optimizing your article. It contains two sections, SEO and Readability. Fill in the focus keyword or phrase you want to optimize your article for.

🔔 Note: Color coding is used so that you can easily identify which suggestions need action. Edit and show links are displayed if a certain part of the article needs to be added or changed. If you click on them, you'll directly go to the section you need to update.

The suggestions are updated in real-time and completing one results in the total score to increase. Try to aim for 100%!

Let's take a look at each section in-depth...

Topic suggestions

By selecting a "Focus keyphrase" for your article, you can let the AI generate interesting keywords to start or finetune the content of the article. The priority tells the influence the keyword has on your selected keyphrase.

Find out more in the dedicated article about AI keyword research 👉 Discover the power of AI for SEO!

Word count

The word count tab provides a great overview of the structure. Details about word count, characters and paragraphs can help to combine or separate blocks of content. This works wonders in combination with the Readability score below!

SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is crucial in getting your article found organically.

Add a focus keyphrase to tailor the suggestions to that. It is recommended to use the topic of the article as your phrase.

Now that the keyphrase is set, StoryChief will provide you with tips on how to improve your article. The 18 suggestions are listed below:

  1. Function words in keyphrase: a keyphrase should never consist only of function words (e.g. 'and', 'more').

  2. Keyphrase in the introduction: checks if the keyphrase appears in the first paragraph of the article.

  3. Keyphrase distribution: checks if the keyphrase is well spread over the article.

  4. Keyphrase length: checks if there is a keyphrase set and if its length is acceptable.

  5. Keyphrase density: checks for the number of keyphrase occurrences in the article and if this amount is acceptable.

  6. Stopwords in keyphrase: checks for stop words (e.g. 'but', 'how') in the keyphrase which is not always recommended.

  7. Links: Check if there are any links, if there are enough links, and if those links are not all no-followed.

  8. Keyphrase in meta description: checks if the keyphrase in the meta description and its amount (max 2).

  9. Meta description length: checks if there is text in the meta description and if its length is appropriate.

  10. Keyphrase in subheading: checks for use of the keyphrase in subheadings to the recommended amount.

  11. Link keyphrase: checks if the keyphrase is a link that is not recommended.

  12. Image alt attributes: checks if there are images if the keyphrase is used in the alt attributes and the amount.

  13. Text length: checks if the text has the recommended minimum length.

  14. Keyphrase in title: checks if the keyphrase is included at the beginning of the SEO title.

  15. SEO title width: checks if there is an SEO title and if it has the recommended width.

  16. Keyphrase in slug: checks if a keyphrase of more than half of it appears in the slug.

  17. Slug stopwords: checks if stop words are used in the slug which is not recommended.

  18. Language: checks a language as some assessments are language based.

Readability

This section will make sure that your article is easy to digest for your readers. A critical part of the writing process!

A total of 11 guidelines are given:

  1. Flesch Reading Ease: checks how readable the text is, based on the Flesch reading ease test.

  2. Language: checks a language as some assessments are language based.

  3. Paragraph length: Look for paragraphs that are longer than the recommended length.

  4. Passive voice: An active voice is recommended to be used in the text. It looks for sentences that have a passive voice. (Active voice example: Batman threw Joker from a building. Passive voice example: Joker was thrown from the building by Batman.)

  5. Consecutive sentences: checks for sentences that start with the same words and recommends mixing things up instead.

  6. Length sentence(s) meta description: checks if sentences in the meta description are too long.

  7. Sentence length: checks in the article for sentences that are too long.

  8. Subheading distribution: checks for paragraphs that are too long that could use subheadings instead. 

  9. Not enough content: if the article has less than 50 words advises to add more content.

  10. Transition words: looks for transition words in sentences and recommend the use of them if the usage percentage is too low. 

  11. Word Complexity: words with more than 3 syllables are considered complex. Checks for percentage usage of complex words.

🎉 You're done! The article is now SEO optimized and ready to conquer the world wide web. Grab a coffee and a cookie, you deserved it!

If you like to find out more, take a look at our other interesting articles below.

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