What an SEO content editor should actually do
The category has drifted. A lot of what ships as an SEO writing tool is a word processor with a term list bolted to the side, where the term list came from a model that was asked to imagine which words a page about this topic might contain. That is a plausible list. It is not a measurement, and it cannot be checked.
A content optimization tool earns the name when three things are true: the targets come from the live SERP rather than a static rubric, every target is traceable to a source you can go and look at, and the scoring updates fast enough to change the sentence you are currently writing. Anything slower turns into a report you read after the fact, which is a different and much less useful product.
- Targets pulled from the results ranking for your exact query and market
- Ranges instead of single numbers, because ranking pages disagree with each other
- Scoring in the browser, so the feedback arrives while the draft is still soft
- Every number traceable to the pages it was measured from