How to optimize your first SEO article on Letterdrop

✅ You’re new to Letterdrop, and want to do SEO research faster, draft blog content quicker, and get expert insights in your content with less work.

❌ You want AI to do the thinking for you. AI isn’t quite there yet and your customers aren’t going to want to read what it has to say.

❌ You want AI to write faster and like you. We will help you do SEO research and create content that ranks so you can drive qualified traffic. But if writing fast is the only thing you want, ChatGPT is pretty good. We have some AI tools to help, like style guide suggestions and inline AI shortcuts for your convenience.

❌ You want to build internal links or audit link health across your pages. Talk to our CS team to get this setup with Webflow, Hubspot, or WordPress Classic editor.

Welcome to Letterdrop! In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to create your first SEO-optimized article in under 1 hour, regardless of your familiarity with SEO. Here are the steps we’ll go through:

Total estimated time: 50 - 60 minutes

Before diving into creation, strategize around your target keyword.

If you’re brand new to SEO and just getting started, check out our guide on selecting keywords here that will get you real customers in the short term. Opt for bottom-of-funnel, low-competition, long-tail keywords. Ask yourself:

Once you’ve decided on your keyword, you can start writing your article. Open Letterdrop, navigate to "Website" in the menu, select "Posts” to open the blog editor. If you already have a post written that you want to optimize, you can copy it in. Otherwise, you can start writing, or use our outline generation tools to create a first draft.

Drop your draft into Letterdrop for editing to answer the search intent behind your target keyword and maximize your chances of ranking. Leveraging every feature of the SEO Optimizer will bring your blog to parity with competition, add unique insights they can’t copy, and address technical SEO. First, open the SEO Optimizer and enter your target keyword and click Analyze.

Take a quick look through the search intent — this should help you understand what the searcher is looking for, if you have the right format, and if it’s aligned with what your company does (this last part only works if you tell us what your company does in Settings → AI → Company Details).

Next, you should go through each section of the SEO Optimizer by scrolling down in the right-hand bar. You can read our full guide to these tools, but the most important features to leverage for ranking will be:

This part will outline the subjects addressed in the top 10 articles, ensuring your article reaches content parity.

Google is looking for an article that directly and comprehensively answers the search query. By understanding what pages ranking today are talking about, you can figure out what you might want to cover.

Check the sections you've addressed (highlighted in blue) and those you haven't (not highlighted). Review the uncovered information (white sections) to determine if adding them would benefit your article.

You can generate draft sections for any relevant topics by clicking the + icon, which will insert them into the editor at your current cursor position. It sources the information from the top pages Letterdrop found the information in. You should definitely edit this so that it makes sense in the context of your article and add your own unique perspectives here. It’s just a first draft.

This section will generate ideas that have not been covered by any of the existing top ranking pages. Use this as a brainstorming tool to discover unique perspectives to include in your article. This signals to Google that you're providing fresh insights that could be helpful to searchers.

Once you’ve found an unique angle you’d like to add, you can manually write it into the article as you see fit. Additionally, you can record a video talking about it using the Subject Matter Expert feature (more info below in step 3) to embed into the article.

This section provides recommendations to make sure your article can be easily parsed by Google. You can see more details on each of the recommendations by clicking on the dropdown arrow. Any sections that have an auto-fix available will have a "Fix" button you can click on. Clicking this button will insert the changes as suggestions in highlighted text that you can approve or reject.

Alternatively, you can click the “Fix all broken rules” button to insert all auto-fixable changes as suggestions, which you can accept or ignore. Recommendations that can't be automatically fixed, such as "Add an Image", will require manual action.

One of the most underrated tools you can do to help you rank is our Subject Matter Quote feature, which will help you add videos with subtitles from a subject matter expert (could be a teammate or external party) in a fraction of the time it would usually take.

In the blog editor, type slash “/” then clicking on the Subject Matter tool. You’ll be prompted to send a question to an expert.

They will receive an email prompting them to record a video response, which will look like this:

Once the video is recorded, you'll get an email notification.

The video will automatically include subtitles and your logo, all set for you to upload to YouTube and embed into the article you requested the video from.

You’re done! If you are on a Free Trial with Letterdrop, or don’t have your CMS integration set up yet, you can simply copy and paste your article over to your CMS to publish. If you do have your CMS connected, you can proceed by clicking on the “Next: metadata and scheduling” button in the top-right corner: