If you write an assigned article, you need to keep the draft focused on the reader and question in the brief. Copywriters can use OppAlerts to research questions and check drafts against their intended subject. Content Optimizer supports the draft check.
Choose the category before you write, not after
You select up to three categories, one from each taxonomy: a subject, an audience, and where relevant a product or a city.
Choosing afterward invites picking whichever category the draft turned out to match, which measures nothing. Choosing first states an intention the finished piece can be checked against, which is the only thing that makes the check meaningful.
Choose the specific category rather than the safe general one. A broad parent category returns a comfortable result and tells you nothing, because most writing in the field sits somewhere near it.
Check for an unexpected category match
The report returns the ten nearest categories per taxonomy and shows where your selected one falls.
Your category absent from the top is the useful outcome. It usually means one of three things, and each has a different fix:
- Written from the supplier's side. The commonest case. Accurate, competent, and addressed to the wrong person.
- The opening drifted. Background grew and now occupies a third of the piece.
- Two subjects in one page. Both covered adequately, neither the clear focus.
Focus on the first few results. Later categories may be the closest remaining matches without being relevant, so ninth place is not necessarily useful.
Work in sections
The editor accepts 8,192 bytes and refuses longer text rather than trimming it. That is roughly 1,200 to 1,400 words of ordinary English; accented characters and other scripts reach the limit sooner.
The editor refuses long text because scoring only its opening would misrepresent the whole article. Later sections may no longer match the intended topic.
For a long piece, check the opening separately from the body. Drift starts at the opening more often than anywhere else, and checking it alone frequently locates the problem in one paragraph.
The phrase list, and the discipline it needs
The report separates phrases present in your draft from phrases associated with your category that are absent.
Treat the second list as a description of what writing in that category usually involves, and ask which of them you have a reason to discuss. Some will be irrelevant to your piece.
Inserting terms to move the number produces worse writing every time, and the measurement cannot detect that it happened. If you cannot write a full sentence a reader would benefit from, the phrase does not belong.
What the score is not
Not accuracy, not quality, not a ranking or citation signal, and not keyword coverage. It is a distance between your writing and a category, and it has no view on whether the writing is any good.
A dull piece firmly about its subject scores well. That is a limitation to hold in mind, not a reason to distrust the reading.
Where the questions come from
If you are also choosing what to write, question research draws from AI answers, search results, related searches, news and prospect pages. Keep the phrasing as collected: two questions about the same subject can want different answers, and tidying them into keyword phrases loses that.
During revision, use the category comparison to locate an unclear explanation, then check that the edit answers the reader’s question.
See Content Optimizer, what each taxonomy is good for, or checking a draft.