A complete overview of the Semrush SEO writing assistant

Writing content that pleases both Google's algorithms and actual people is a challenge. You have to hit all the right keywords and technical marks, but you also need to sound like a human, not a robot playing an SEO game. It's a challenge every content team is familiar with.

The Semrush SEO Writing Assistant (SWA) is a popular tool that tries to solve this problem. It acts as a real-time coach, giving you feedback right inside your document to help you optimize while you write. This article will give you a complete overview of what SWA does, how much it costs, and where it might not be the best fit.

While having an assistant to polish something you've already written is helpful, what if you could skip the drafting process in the first place? Some platforms, like the eesel AI blog writer, are designed to generate entire publish-ready articles from just a keyword, handling the creation process from the very beginning.

What is the Semrush SEO writing assistant?

Think of the Semrush SEO Writing Assistant as a smart editor that plugs into your existing writing process. Its main purpose is to provide live feedback to improve your content in four key areas: SEO, readability, tone of voice, and originality.

The biggest draw is its convenience. It works where you already do your writing, with add-ons for Google Docs, WordPress, and even MS Word. This means you don't have to constantly jump between your document and a separate SEO tool.

At its heart, SWA analyzes your text and compares it against the top 10 pages that are already ranking on Google for your target keywords. This data-first approach powers its recommendations, offering specific, practical suggestions to improve your content before you publish. It’s built to remove some of the guesswork from on-page SEO.

Core features of the Semrush SEO writing assistant

The tool organizes all its suggestions into four main categories. These contribute to an overall content score that grades your work on a scale of 10, giving you a quick look at how well-optimized your article is.

Readability analysis

This feature scores your content's readability based on the Flesch reading ease formula and shows you how it compares to the top-ranking competitors. The goal is to make sure your content is easy for your audience to read and understand.

It looks at a few important things:

• Word count: It lets you know if your article is shorter or longer than the average of the top-ranking content.
• Title issues: It will warn you if your title is too long to show up correctly in Google's search results.
• Content issues: It flags things like long paragraphs, complicated sentences, passive voice, and difficult words that might confuse readers.

It also has an AI-powered "Simplify" function within its Rephraser tool, which can help you rewrite clunky sentences on the spot.

SEO recommendations

This is the core function of the tool. You provide your target keywords, and it gives you suggestions based on what's already performing well for the top-ranking pages.

The "Recommended keywords" feature is especially handy, suggesting semantically related terms (like LSI keywords) to help you build topical authority and signal to Google that you've covered the topic in depth. It also includes a keyword stuffing warning, which is a nice feature to keep you from over-optimizing and potentially harming your rankings.

It also performs a few other technical SEO checks:

• Link issues: It scans your content for any broken links that could create a poor user experience.
• Alt attribute issues: It reminds you to add alt text to your images, which is important for accessibility and image SEO.
• Title issues: It checks to make sure your main target keyword is included in your page title.

Tone of voice analysis

Keeping a consistent brand voice can be difficult, especially when working with multiple writers. SWA attempts to help by analyzing your tone on a formal-to-casual spectrum. You set your desired tone, and the tool flags any sentences that seem to deviate from it. It's a simple but useful way to ensure your content sounds consistent. It also helps you write more concisely by identifying filler words and suggesting clearer alternatives.

Originality and plagiarism checker

For editors who manage freelance writers or content agencies, this feature is a huge help. It scans your text against the entire web to check for duplicate content and gives you an originality score. This helps you confirm that the content you're about to publish is unique. You can also exclude specific domains, which is useful if you're updating an existing post on your own site and don't want it flagged.

AI-powered writing tools

SWA also comes with a few AI features that operate on a credit system called "Smart Writer Words." These include:

• Rephraser: Allows you to rewrite, simplify, expand, or summarize any selected text.
• Compose: Generates new text based on a prompt you give it (this is only available in the main Semrush interface and the Google Docs add-on).
• Ask AI: A quick way to get answers on a topic without having to leave your document (also limited to the Semrush interface and Google Docs).

Semrush SEO writing assistant pricing and limits

This is a really important point: the SEO Writing Assistant isn't a product you can buy on its own. It's part of Semrush's larger SEO Toolkit and is only included in their Guru and Business plans. If you're on their basic Pro plan, you can't use it.

This makes the cost of entry pretty high. Based on Semrush's current pricing, you'll need one of these plans:

• Guru: $249.95 per month
• Business: $499.95 per month

On top of that, the features inside SWA have their own monthly limits. It's worth knowing that these limits are shared across several tools in the Semrush platform, so your usage in one tool can impact your limits elsewhere.

The fact that SWA is bundled into an expensive, all-in-one platform is a big thing to think about. If you only need a content optimization tool, you'll be paying for a lot of other features you might not need.

Key limitations of the Semrush SEO writing assistant

While the Semrush SEO Writing Assistant is a solid editor for improving content, it has some basic limitations, especially for teams needing to produce more content from the ground up.

It's an editor, not a generator

This is a critical difference to understand. SWA is built to help you improve text that's already been written. It doesn't handle the initial research, outlining, or drafting for you. The user is still responsible for creating the first draft. It polishes; it doesn't create. If your biggest bottleneck is the time it takes to write that first version, SWA won't solve that problem.

The risk of optimizing for a score

Score-based tools can sometimes present a challenge. It can be easy to focus on achieving a perfect score by changing sentences and swapping words to satisfy the tool's metrics. This can sometimes result in content that is robotic and formulaic, checking all the SEO boxes but lacking a unique voice.

To test it I took all its suggestions and implemented them, so the article had an SEO score of something like 9.8 (out of 10) based on the semrush algo. It then tanked out of the SERPs lol

Reddit

No automatic asset creation

Modern blog posts are more than just words on a page. They need images, infographics, tables, and media like videos or social proof to keep readers hooked. While SWA can remind you to add alt text to an image, it doesn't create or find any of those assets for you. Sourcing visuals, building tables, and embedding relevant media are all manual tasks you still have to handle, which adds more time to your workflow.

High cost of entry

We've already mentioned this, but it's a major factor. To get full access to the SEO Writing Assistant, you need a Semrush Guru subscription, which starts at a steep $249.95 per month. For freelancers, small businesses, or marketing teams with a limited budget, that's a big investment, especially if you only need the content features and not the whole SEO suite.

From refining to generating: An alternative for scaling content

The Semrush SEO Writing Assistant is effective for its intended purpose, but it doesn't address the initial creation of a first draft. This is where a different kind of tool comes into play. An AI blog generator like the eesel AI blog writer is made to automate the whole process, taking you from a single keyword to a publish-ready post in minutes.

From a single keyword to a complete post

The workflow is completely different. With SWA, you write first and then optimize. With eesel AI, you just start with a keyword or topic. The platform then handles the research, creates an outline, and writes a fully structured blog post. It takes care of the manual drafting phase that SWA is designed to improve, freeing you up to focus on strategy and promotion.

Automatic assets and social proof included

The eesel AI blog writer also generates and embeds assets right into the content. This includes AI-generated images, data tables, and infographics. It also finds and embeds real social proof, like relevant YouTube videos and actual quotes from Reddit discussions, which adds a layer of credibility that text alone can't provide.

Designed for a human-like, optimized tone

eesel AI is built on a model that has been trained for over a year to produce content that sounds genuinely human and is engaging to read. It's optimized from the start for both traditional SEO and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), making sure your content performs well in new search formats like Google's AI Overviews.

Simple, transparent pricing

Unlike Semrush's bundled plans, the eesel AI blog writer has a straightforward model: $99 for 50 blog posts. There are no hidden fees or huge monthly bills. Best of all, it's completely free to try, so you can see the quality of the content for yourself without any commitment.

Assistant vs. generator: Which is right for you?

Ultimately, the choice between these two tools depends on whether your team's biggest challenge is refining existing content or creating it from scratch.

• The Semrush SEO Writing Assistant is a great tool for refining content that's been written manually. It’s ideal for teams already using the Semrush ecosystem who have writing resources but need help with on-page optimization.
• The eesel AI blog writer is for teams that want to scale their content production. It automates the entire creation process: from research and writing to adding assets: so you can publish high-quality content faster and more consistently.

To see how these features work in real-time, it can be helpful to watch a walkthrough. The video below provides a detailed tutorial on using the Semrush SEO Writing Assistant, showing how to implement its suggestions directly within your content.

A video tutorial explaining how to use the Semrush SEO Writing Assistant for content optimization.

The takeaway

To put it simply, assistants are for making your own writing better, while generators do the writing for you. For those looking to automate their content creation process, a generator can be a powerful solution.

Ready to see how AI can create a complete, SEO-optimized blog post from just one keyword? Try the eesel AI blog writer for free and generate your first article today.