Select Page
8 Content Marketing Strategies to Boost Sales and Stay on Top of the Competition

8 Content Marketing Strategies to Boost Sales and Stay on Top of the Competition

It’s hard to get your content noticed with so much going on in the world. Without a strong content marketing strategy, it’s nearly impossible. Almost every major brand is generating content across multiple platforms. Every. Single. Day.

How can you beat the competition at the game everyone is playing? It starts with a well-constructed content marketing strategy. That means providing a substantial volume of vivid visuals and compelling content.

Here are 8 content marketing strategies you can use to break through the noise and get your content noticed.

Include Visuals To Increase Engagement

According to research, and everyone’s intuition, ads on social media perform better with pictures. The numbers suggest that a Twitter ad gets 150% more engagement with a visual. For Facebook, it’s 230%! 

If you want your content marketing strategy to drive traffic, those numbers are a big deal. But where do you find these images? There are plenty of ways to find free stock photos. A simple Google search will lead you to a few of the largest portfolios. Just remember that each marketing channel comes with unique sizing requirements

Optimizing your content to get noticed means optimizing your content for each channel. You can make that job easier by converting your images to vectors, so the image maintains its quality while changing its size. You can find free vector graphics software to get this done.

Image source

Make Your Photos Pop With Photo Editing Tools

It’s not a secret that people are more likely to look at pictures than read a wall of text. But your photos have to be high quality to compete. That’s where photo editing tools come in. With these tools, you can quickly and easily turn an amateur photo into a work of art. You can remove unwanted background objects, clear up blurry photos, and even convert an image into a professional design. So don’t fall into the trap of thinking that stock photos will get the attention you’re looking to generate.

image source

Create Quality Content With Artificial Intelligence

Consumers expect a high volume of content from you. The trick is keeping up with content creation while maintaining quality standards. One option is to utilize AI. 

Did you know you can use artificial intelligence (AI) software to create high-quality images for your brand? You might not think it’d work for you, but take a look. Including some AI art in your content marketing can be a lifesaver.

While putting the computer to work for you, consider also letting it write some of your copy. There are some outstanding blog generators available these days. But remember, these are tools that work alongside your team members. They still can’t replace humans. However, they can help you speed up your content generation with the right workflow.

This is where a tool like WordLift really shines. WordLift is an AI-powered SEO tool that analyzes your text and adds structured data to your content without requiring any extra work or technical knowledge. This way, your content becomes more understandable for search engines and can rank better in SERPs. This way you’ll get more organic traffic to your website, reach a more qualified audience and increase your sales.

image source

Streamline The Publication Process

A successful content marketing strategy starts with creating quality content. But you also need fast and efficient processes to get it published. One strategy to consider is minimizing clicks between generation and publication. 

Services like Wordable.io can make that happen. Instead of your team writing content drafts in Google Docs and then spending hours copying and pasting them over to your WordPress site, Wordable simplifies the process to a single click. Individually or in bulk, Wordable optimizes and formats your folders and docs in seconds. Their website even sports a free ROI calculator to see how much time and money you’ll save by using their tool!

image source

Include High-Quality Video

One of the best ways to increase engagement is by using video. Video works whether it’s a short clip on TikTok or a 30-second spot on network television. It’s a great way to get a niche business in front of potential customers. 

But don’t sleep on the power of a solid video pitch. Check out this video by TSplus describing how their remote support software works. 

Your content marketing shouldn’t be all fluff. You can also help customers learn about the advantages of your product over the competition. Providing valuable information to people considering a purchase should also be part of your marketing strategy.

Emphasize Free Delivery

Customers love fast, free shipping. That’s especially true when customers are worried about their purchases arriving on time. According to a recent study, 73% of consumers are more likely to buy things online if shipping is free. That statistic should encourage you to consider implementing free delivery in your content marketing plan. 

But don’t make a promise you can’t keep. Instead, consider partnering with a local same-day delivery courier service to guarantee you can follow through. In fact, you might even highlight that partnership as part of your content marketing to give the promise more credibility.

image source

Stay In The Know With Business Analytics

No strategy is complete without a way to measure its success. Part of your marketing strategy must evaluate what’s working and what’s not. Make sure you know how to use your website traffic monitoring tools before getting too far down the road. It’s probably also a good idea to do some A/B testing or at least keep track of which ads are getting engagement. If you want to really dig into the business analytics side of things, check out a digital report builder. These powerful software packages can provide a ton of strategic insights at the click of a button.

Give Something Away

Whatever you’re selling, from vitamins to virtual assistant services, you’re competing for attention. One bold strategy to consider is to give something away. Seeing the word “free” tends to grab people’s attention. You can use that to your advantage.

If you’re on a small budget, your prize could be what you sell. But, to get more impact, consider using a raffle or sweepstakes rather than a simple free product or trial. That way, you only have to give away a limited amount of product while still offering the chance to get something for nothing to a wide audience. 

The prize could be a fancy dinner at a local high-end restaurant. Or, if your budget allows, you can even give away a trip to an event in Tulum, Mexico, to generate some buzz. Develop a content marketing strategy around whatever prize you want to give away. That strategy might just be enough to get the customer’s attention and direct them to your website.

Conclusion

Content marketing is a critical step for any business. The challenge is getting noticed among the thousands of marketing efforts overlapping your own. The content marketing strategies offered here should give you a better chance at breaking through the noise, boosting sales, and staying on top of the competition. 

12 Digital Marketing Tools You Should Use

12 Digital Marketing Tools You Should Use

The boom of digital channels and the advancements in technology have disrupted traditional marketing methods and transformed the role of marketers. Today, marketers need to use different types of digital platforms to advertise products/services and generate sales.

It requires them to be more data-driven, agile, and innovative than ever before. That’s where digital marketing tools come into place. They allow marketers to execute highly effective marketing campaigns, measure their progress, and make data-centric decisions.

From SEO optimization and analytics to social media management and email marketing, you can find all types of tools on the market. Using these tools can help you improve your digital marketing efforts and generate 50% more interactions with end-users as compared to traditional marketing.

In this article, we’ll discuss some of the best digital marketing tools that will help you stay ahead of the competition and achieve your goals.

Social Media Management Tools

According to recent statistics, 4.89 billion people across the globe use social media, which is more than 60% of the world’s population. It simply means that you’re missing out on a lot of potential customers if you’re not using social media to market your services/products.

It’s also important to note that 78% of marketers who use social media marketing generate more sales than their peers. Therefore, it’s important to utilize the power of these platforms and the best way to achieve that is to use a social media management tool. It will allow you to reap the following benefits.

  • Streamline your social media marketing efforts by allowing you to manage all your accounts from one dashboard and schedule posts in advance.
  • Automate repetitive tasks, such as tracking mentions of your brand, LinkedIn outreach, creating reports, and replying to common customer queries.
  • Allow team members to work together easily, regardless of their physical location. This improves collaboration and facilitate the workflow.
  • Use detailed social media analytics and reports about your campaigns and customers’ preferences, opinions, and feedback to monitor your marketing efforts and improve your strategy.
  • Respond to customer inquiries and complaints quickly and efficiently to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
  • Maintain consistent branding across all social media channels by ensuring that all posts are aligned with your company’s messaging.
  • Stay on top of industry trends, share relevant posts/information timely, and build up your digital presence.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a popular tool that allows you to manage all your social media accounts using a single dashboard. You can use it to schedule your social media posts in advance, monitor brand mentions, track performance, and manage social media teams effectively.

Hootsuite supports almost all popular social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

SocialBee

SocialBee is another powerful social media management tool designed for entrepreneurs, businesses, and agencies looking to enhance their social media presence.

It comes with an easy-to-use interface for scheduling, organizing, and sharing content on different social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Analytics Tools

An analytics tool provides you with valuable marketing metrics, such as website traffic, user behavior, and conversion rates. It allows you to analyze the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, identify their strengths and weaknesses, and make improvements for enhanced ROI (Return on Investment).

Example

Let’s suppose you have an e-commerce store that sells athletic shoes. You’ve been running several digital marketing campaigns to drive traffic to your website. However, you’re not sure which of these campaigns is performing the best and generating the most. This is where the analytics tools come in.

It will allow you to see how many people are visiting your site, which pages they’re visiting, how long they’re staying on each page, and where they’re coming from (like search engines and social media).

Analytics tools also allow you to see how many people are taking specific actions on your site, such as making a purchase, signing up for your newsletter, or filling out a contact form.

This information will help you analyze which digital marketing campaigns are driving the most traffic and conversions to your site. You can also see which pages on your site are performing the best and which ones need improvement.

It will help you make data-driven decisions on where to invest your marketing budget and optimize your campaigns to improve sales.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a powerful tool that helps you track your website traffic and discover how visitors interact with your site. It provides valuable data about your customers’ demographics, behavior, and preferences, which you can use to optimize your site and marketing campaigns.

This tool will help you set up goals, measure the success of your campaigns, and identify areas where you can improve user engagement to drive higher conversions.

Hotjar

Hotjar provides you with insightful data about how users interact with your website and apps. With features like Recordings and Heatmaps, you can see where users are clicking, scrolling, and pausing on your site, and identify where they’re experiencing issues or dropping off.

It also provides you with feedback features like surveys and polls to gather insightful data about customers to improve their experience.

SEO and Content Marketing Tools

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and content marketing are two of the most important digital marketing strategies. According to recent statistics, 72% of digital marketing professionals believe that high-quality content is the most effective SEO tactic. Statistics also show that 58% of digital marketers say that original written content outperforms video and audio formats.

That’s why it’s crucial to create high-quality content for your target audience and the best way to achieve that is to use SEO and content marketing tools.

They will provide you with valuable insights into keyword research, competitor analysis, backlink tracking, and on-page optimization to improve the quality and effectiveness of your content. This way, you will be able to optimize your websites and improve search engine rankings to drive more organic traffic and generate more leads.

If your target audience is located beyond the border and you want to perform competitor analysis using an SEO tool, consider using a VPN service. It will allow you to examine the local versions of your competitors’ websites and access resources with regional restrictions.

It will help you find relevant keywords that you can use in your content to target the right audience. There’s a wide range of VPN tools available in the market that you can use. However, two of the most popular ones for businesses are ExpressVPN and NordVPN, so choose the one that suits you better.

Entity-based SEO

While using SEO and content marketing tools to optimize your content, you should specifically pay attention to entity-based SEO. It’s relatively a new approach to search engine optimization that focuses on understanding entities and their relationships.

Important Note: Entities are basically people, places, things, and concepts that search engines can identify and understand to provide more accurate results against search queries.

Example

Entity-based SEO involves optimizing your content around entities to improve its relevance and context to search engines.

Let’s say you’re running a brand that sells sneakers online. You have a blog post about the latest trends in sneakers, and you want to optimize it for search engines.

With traditional keyword-based SEO, you would focus on targeting keywords like “sneakers,” “trends,” and “footwear” to make sure that your article appears in search results for those terms.

However, with entity-based SEO, you would take a more holistic approach. You would identify the key entities in your article, such as the brands of sneakers you’re discussing, the materials they’re made from, and the styles that are currently popular.

You would then create content that not only targets those specific keywords but also provides valuable information about those entities, including their relationships with each other.

By doing this, search engines like Google will better understand the context of your content and deliver it to the most relevant audience. For example, if someone searches for “Nike sneakers,” and you’ve optimized your content to include information about Nike as an entity, your article is more likely to appear in their search results.

In short, it will increase the relevance and visibility of your website in search results. It’ll resultantly drive more targeted traffic to your website, which will lead to higher engagement, more conversions, and more revenue.

WordLift

WordLift is an AI-powered entity-based SEO tool that automates the heavy lifting for you. You can use it to add structured data to your websites, build custom knowledge graphs, make content readable for search engines, and engage clients by providing a better user experience.

Unlike other SEO tools like SEMRush which only work as keyword research tools, WordLift helps you ensure that your business’s data is recognized and searched by modern search engines like Google. It also offers a dynamic system to provide contextual information and automatic recommendations to your website users to improve their experience and increase sales.

SEMrush

SEMrush is a comprehensive digital marketing tool that offers a wide range of features to help you with your SEO and SEM strategies. It comes with a keyword research tool that allows you to identify relevant keywords for your website, analyze competitors’ SEO strategies, and create SEO-friendly webpage and blog content.

It also offers many other useful features like backlink analysis, organic traffic insights, content audit, and competitive research, to help you stay ahead of the curve.

HubSpot Marketing Hub

HubSpot Marketing Hub is a centralized platform that consolidates multiple content marketing tools into one place. It offers a powerful form builder, popup tools, live chat and chatbots, and a WordPress plugin for marketing.

In addition to these tools, it also provides an excellent CMS (Content Management System) and marketing automation tool to create a comprehensive content marketing program.

Email Marketing Automation Tools

A key digital marketing trend businesses should adopt is email marketing. According to recent statistics, email marketing has an average ROI of 3600%. It means that for every dollar spent on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $36. The best way to make the most out of your email marketing efforts is to use email marketing automation tools.

They allow you to create and schedule email campaigns in advance, segment email lists based on specific criteria, and automate email workflows depending on user actions. You can use them to send personalized and relevant content to your potential customers/subscribers to increase engagement and conversion rate.

Example

For instance, if a subscriber has repeatedly clicked on links in your emails related to a specific product/service, you can use this data to create a targeted campaign to promote that product/service.

Similarly, if a subscriber hasn’t opened any of your emails in the last month, you can add them to your re-engagement campaign to win back their attention.

Not only will it increase your email marketing efficiency to drive higher ROI but it will also save you time and effort to spend on more important marketing tasks.

MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing automation tools out there. It allows you to create and automate professional email campaigns and track their performance.

The tool comes with pre-designed email templates, a drag-and-drop builder, integrated analytics tools, and a content studio to store images and files that you need to use in emails.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact is a user-friendly email marketing automation tool that is perfect for beginners in email, text, and social media marketing. It offers easy list management, drag-and-drop templates, time-saving automation, and hundreds of customizable templates and layouts.

It allows you to manually divide your contact lists by email activity, tags, ecommerce activity, and location to create and automate email campaigns against them.

Project Management Software

Project management software allows you to plan, track, and execute your marketing projects effectively. They help you organize different tasks, manage resources, ensure communication between members, and track the progress of your marketing projects easily. It allows you to identify potential roadblocks and take necessary actions to keep the project on track.

Here are some tried and true tips to use a project management tool to manage your team’s workflow effectively.

  • Define Clear Objectives: A project management solution is most effective when objectives are clear. So, make sure that all team members understand the goals and objectives of your project. It’ll help them work toward the same goal.
  • Collaborate Effectively: Using a project management tool provides you with a platform where everyone, working on a marketing project, can collaborate effectively. But it’s important to encourage your team members to share ideas and communicate with each other regularly to improve collaboration.
  • Track Progress: The tool will allow you to track progress in real-time but it’ll be your responsibility to check the project status regularly. It’ll help you identify how much time your team members are spending on tasks so that you can allocate resources more effectively.
  • Use Automated Workflows: Most high-end project management tools allow you to automate repetitive tasks. Take advantage of this functionality to reduce the workload and free up time for more critical tasks.
  • Use Reporting: Use the project management tool’s reporting features to track progress and make informed decisions. It’ll also help you identify areas that need improvement and take corrective actions.

ClickUp

ClickUp is a marketing project management software that allows you to manage marketing tasks, campaigns, docs, and clients in one place. It features highly customizable views such as lists, Kanban boards, Gantt charts, and calendars, making it easy to visualize marketing tasks.

It comes with a native time tracker to help your team members log the time they spend on each task. Additionally, you can also use it to create custom reports and monitor the progress of your projects conveniently.

Asana

Asana is another project management software that helps you manage marketing campaigns and workflows. It offers a user-friendly interface that allows you to manage tasks, assign responsibilities, and track project progress.

It also allows you to create and customize projects and workflows, set due dates and priorities, and add comments and attachments.

Conclusion

Marketing has become increasingly complex, as now there are multiple channels, mediums, and techniques available to reach customers. Therefore, it’s important for every marketer to use multiple tools to optimize their marketing strategies and achieve desired outcomes.

We hope that the information and tools, discussed in this guide, will help you find the tools that suit your needs and goals to succeed in your marketing endeavors.

Content SEO 101: Essential Best Practices for Effective Optimization & Quality

Content SEO 101: Essential Best Practices for Effective Optimization & Quality

On March 29, I was a speaker at an SEO MeetUp organized by WordLift in Rome.

My talk was titled “By people, for people. Doing SEO in the time of AI. – A journey between E-E-A-T and GPT in search of quality”.

In this article, in addition to the slides from my talk, I would like to take a deeper look at the topics discussed to take stock of what role SEO plays today and what guidelines should be set for consulting work. I believe that it is important to take time to reflect, especially in a scenario that is changing radically and at great speed with the explosion of tools based on generative AI.

What is SEO?

When there are changes, it is important to go back to the basics on which our activities are based. Therefore, I would first like to establish a principle, which is also the vision that I try to convey to customers.

Usually it is said that SEO is a branch of web marketing, and one could certainly argue that this is indeed the case if we consider the usual situation where activities are aimed at sales and competition in the market.

However, I think this attribution falls short. For me, SEO has something to do with communication.

SEO is communication.

The typical scenario we have in fact is as follows:

  1. People have needs and express them through searches.
  2. The search engine is the tool that acts as a mediator. Today, Google, the most used search engine in the Western world, is more of an ecosystem than a search engine, because we no longer interact with the simple search bar, but there are different access points to a system of services through which our requests and searches are articulated – think Discover, News, Lens, YouTube, Maps, Assistant with voice search, etc.
  3. Websites serve a purpose and with their content and resources, they are meant to fulfill that purpose and satisfy the needs of users.

Among these communication topics there is SEO and there are us consultants.

Our work has to do with communication, because it deals with:

  1. Understanding how people search and what their intentions are based on the needs expressed.
  2. Understanding what the search environment looks like through its guidelines and thorough reverse engineering.
  3. Studying strategies and tactics for a site to best communicate its resources.

The goal is to meet the needs of both those who search and those who want to be found.

Regardless of the technological scenario in which we operate, this relationship is always valid. We have people with real needs who seek satisfactory answers and resources that can/will be found (and that we hope will be of quality or will become so).

I wanted to highlight these concepts because I have been in the SEO industry for a long time and have caught the hype around generative AI. It seems that the trend is to look for the easiest solution that can be effective in the short term, but at the expense of quality and satisfaction. This is a major weakness in an online project and means it will fail, if not harm it in the long run.

SEO is complexity and uncertainty, it’s a lot of ‘it depends’, but it’s certainly not a button you push that solves problems. So it’s not a tool to achieve default values, or a rule about how long an article has to be, or how many times a keyword has to appear and where. Google stopped thinking in terms of keywords at least a decade ago (see: introduction of the Knowledge Graph, things that are not strings) and yet, for many, SEO is still what it is.

I started working in SEO in 2010, and then as now, there is no one SEO recipe. And since we no longer have control over our resources in the Google ecosystem, it’s even harder to say: this is how it’s done. That’s why I want to share with you a method based on a vision that has been with me since the beginning of my work, starting with the concept of quality.

What Is Quality For Google

Although common sense can help us evaluate a resource, the concept of quality we have as humans still falls into the realm of opinions and subjective evaluations. What we are interested in with an SEO strategy is trying to determine how the concept of quality for humans matches up with Google’s criteria.

This is where Google’s official resources and, in particular, the Search Quality Raters guidelines help us.

We know that quality raters are human individuals who receive a set of Google results for evaluation. These ratings do not directly affect the ranking of websites or the SERPs, but they are used by Google to refine its algorithms.

The guidelines are a very detailed manual explaining the criteria used to rank pages and content. I find them very useful and interesting precisely because they offer a human-centric rather than a search engine-centric point of view.

The concepts we focus on when looking for quality are expressed by the acronym E-E-A-T.

Google E-E-A-T: What It Means For Quality

First of all, we would like to emphasize once again that E-E-A-T is neither a ranking factor nor an algorithmically measurable value.

For all SEOs who try to create always valid operating rules by reverse engineering: Sorry, but in this case it’s really not possible. (I have found some scripts in Python that promise with the GPT API to rank a content by E-E-A-T parameters, but as thought-provoking as they may be, I consider them real nonsense and we’ll see why in a moment).

E-E-A-T is a set of criteria where numerous factors come into play, the nuances of which require human judgment: There is no single type of quality content, but this changes depending on the purpose of the page and what it is intended to do.

According to Google, the quintessence of quality content is defined not by its type, but by its purpose: it must have a useful purpose, i.e. it must be useful for users.

This is even more important when it comes to content that falls into the YMYL (“your money your life”) category, i.e. content that has a direct impact on people’s lives, well-being, health and finances.

The work of a quality assessor consists in identifying the elements of the website, the home page and page types, its purpose and creator, and then determining whether the main content of a page under consideration meets the various quality criteria.

Let us look at them in detail.

E – Experience

Introduced with the October 2022 guideline’s update, it specifies the extent to which those who created the content have direct first-hand experience with what they are talking about.

Many types of sites serve their purpose well when created by people with rich personal experience. After all, who would trust a restaurant review if the person writing it had never tried the dishes or a product without testing it?

E- Expertise

Indicates expertise in the subject, which means not only an academic degree or official recognition, but also informal expertise given, for example, by years of experience in the field. Think of a person who has been working in SEO for 15 years. She may not have a degree in SEO, but she can be just as competent if she has gained experience with numerous projects over time.

Expertise and experience can have overlap and nuance that can add value to the quality of the project, depending on the scope of the site. See the guidelines for examples, especially for YMYL content.

A- Authoritativeness

This factor concerns the extent to which the website or author is recognized as a reliable reference source on the subject. It goes without saying that while such recognition can be built through the development of expertise and experience, it also requires external recognition.

T- Trust

These three factors contribute to the construction of the most important value, trust: a website must be trustworthy and secure not only in the aggregate, but also beyond. To quote the example of Google: A financial scam is not trustworthy even if the creator of the content is an experienced and accomplished fraudster who is considered the best fraud expert!

When it comes to determining the quality of the site, the E-E-A-T rating refers to many elements and aspects:

  • It takes into account what the site or the authors/authors say about themselves, in their profiles and on the “About” or “About Us” pages.
  • It considers what others say about the site and the authors/authors through references, citations, independent news and reviews, articles, and other reliable evidence of the project’s experience, authority, and reliability.
  • Assess what is visible on the site, from the main content to smaller areas such as the comments.

How E-E-A-T Is Applied To AI-Generated Content

With the advent of generative AI, many have begun to wonder how AI-generated content is evaluated by Google: is it indexed? Are they penalized? Can they rank well and thus be considered quality?

In February 2023, Google updated its guidelines with guidance on AI-generated content and tells us two important things:

it does not matter how the content is created, what matters is that it is useful to people

the automatic generation of content does not violate the guidelines if it is not used to manipulate the search engine and thus is not used for spamming. 

Before chatGPT, there was already text spinning, i.e. the production of industrially produced and automated text, now this can simply become a more accessible and therefore mass practice. From this point of view, the discourse on quality and usefulness has not changed that much, even if the technological scenario around the available tools has already changed.

At this point, let’s see some practical tips and insights on what it means to create quality content that can meet the E-E-A-T criteria and what the roadmap of SEO activities could look like today, in 2023 and in the future.

Content SEO Best Practices

1. Read the Quality Raters guidelines

This document is definitely underrated, yet it is a valuable reservoir of guidance and advice that helps to look at things from the search engine’s perspective. Google does not always manage to deliver useful, high-quality results, but that does not mean it’s wrong to follow the guidelines provided.

In the given examples you will find many useful insights that you can apply to your own projects. The vision is always to work on the details, but also on the project as a whole.

In 2018, Danny Sullivan wrote a piece of advice on Twitter that I agree with:

2. Build authority through a solid content strategy

To become a reference source for your topic or area of interest, you need to be able to satisfy as many needs around your chosen topic as possible: a content strategy that covers as many topics as possible strengthens consideration for the source, because that’s where every question is answered. You are, so to speak, the “Wikipedia” of your industry.

Content strategies can be developed in many different ways and with different tools, depending on how we have built our workflow. This can be an interesting variable to consider as new technologies come on the scene, as we see with LLM and generative AI-based tools.

In the examples on the slides, we have an advanced tool, namely SEOzoom, which offers various tools for exploring topics, concepts, and keywords, such as keyword infinity, which allows us to cover a wide range of questions around a topic.

Then there are some AI-based tools such as Bing search in chat mode or ChatGPT itself for use with specialized prompts.

This strategy can really be applied in all contexts, from the most creative ones to those that are really difficult from a content point of view because they seem to be boring or of little interest, as it may be the case of a B2B company that deals with screws. But do not forget that people’s needs are diverse and can also have to do with… Screws to do!

3. Create relevance for search engines

After developing the content and resources by putting people at the center of the strategy, it is important that the search engine also understands what you are talking about. The information structure we have built and the project entities must remain relevant to the topics covered.

A good information architecture is definitely the first step to facilitate the exploration of content. This is true for humans as well as for Google crawlers searching websites.

Add to that the implementation of structured data markup, which gives the search engine a certain level of precision that it needs but may not recognize because it does not have the understanding that humans have. This task can be done by hand, but there are already advanced AI SEO tools that support and facilitate this task, such as the WordLift platform.

4. Building authority with human and experienced authors/writers

We can work on our value as content creators, but it is not always possible to cover all areas of knowledge. Therefore, it is important to enhance the project with content created by people who can demonstrate experience and expertise.

In this example, the healthline.com website displays a history of its editing and revision for each article, with names linked to author and author pages describing qualifications and experience. This structure is not only a sign of reliability and authority, but can also be supported by the specific structured data markup to increase relevance also from the search engines’ point of view.

5. Build authority with human relationships

I have long been of the opinion that link building activities can do more harm than good. You have to be very careful when choosing where to advertise, and often industrializing the process can have a negative impact on the outcome. Of course, this “depends” on a case by case basis. However, for Google, links and citations are of great value when it comes to determining the authority of a resource, just as the guidelines suggest we do: To determine whether a site or content is trustworthy, one must also consider what others are saying and how they are using the content.

Quality content, truly useful resources that solve problems in a practical and comprehensive way, is a rare value, which is why it can naturally become sources to cite and reference. It’s a reasonable process that may certainly seem tedious, but it can pay off in the long run.

Do not buy links, build human relationships and valuable resources to fulfill them.

6. Build confidence in the use of AI

We have seen that introducing generative AI into content creation processes can have benefits and effectiveness if the goal remains to create quality for users.

In the example, the bankrate.com website has chosen to create articles using automated techniques, to which it adds a process of review and editing by humans. Each step is transparently communicated to users, making a work-optimizing practice an added value: AI is used to make certain activities more efficient and allow a greater investment in quality, and communication becomes a trust factor for readers.

In a world where people are often deceived, this can become a differentiator and a signal of trustworthiness.

7. Ethics and responsibility in the use of AI

As consultants, we should always ask ourselves whether we are leading our clients to an easy but potentially dangerous solution for themselves and others, or to choices that preserve ethics and responsibility. There will always be those who operate with unfair or irresponsible practices, but we have the opportunity to choose and guide the decisions of others toward the values we believe are right for ourselves and others.

Google has a section dedicated to the principles of AI use, and I think the ethical debate needs to go hand in hand with the technical debate.

Aleksandr Tiulkanov, an expert on AI, data, and digital policy, shared on Linkedin a diagram of an algorithm for deciding if and when to use ChatGPT, and I find it really effective in its simplicity

8. Development of an algorithm-safe method

When we do SEO today, it has a lot in common with what was done before, when we worked from the perspective of quality.

So it is important to do the “same as before” and, if we have not already, to develop a solid method that can be applied in any scenario: In the era of AI, it is even more important to put people at the center, so as not to lose the communication principle on which the SEO activity is based.

So if we want to indicate an SEO roadmap, here is mine:

  1. Analysis of search personas and needs
  2. Analysis of topics/keywords and search intent
  3. Design of a robust and comprehensive information architecture
  4. Designing useful resources and content that match the search intent
  5. Writing content in a natural style (forget about SEO when writing)
  6. Creating micro-content: Metatag title, description, etc.
  7. Implementation of entities through structured data markup
  8. Technical improvements to all aspects of the site in terms of usability and user experience

Finally, investigating and developing new ways of working, such as integrating AI into repetitive and low-value processes that allow us to spend more time on quality.

This is my presentation:

20 Best Content Optimization Tools

20 Best Content Optimization Tools

Content marketing is a business that grows year after year. Writing good content quickly and accurately is critical to beating the competition. We have identified the 20 best, most popular, and most proven content optimization tools. Before we look at the best, let us look at the reasons why they are helpful for our editorial plan and inbound marketing strategies.

Why Use Content Optimization Tools In SEO?

Content springs from an idea, but should take shape and evolve from a semantic structure based on people’s search queries and intent. To write SEO-optimized texts, we need to know these search queries and their search scope (the semantic search).

Google is increasingly relying on quality text to serve its search engine users, and there are many! And Google wants to share content that is recognizable, easy to read, shareable, accessible, complete, and relevant to online searches. That’s why optimizing content for search intent is so important.

We can also start with an idea for the content (brainstorming phase). The primitive idea must be expanded and enriched, answering various questions, including latent ones, in correct grammatical and orthographic form.

Therefore, the optimization process begins with the positioning of a topic and the selection of a targeted keyword list through keyword research. At this stage, the best content optimization tools come into play. They show metrics like volume and keyword competition score to pinpoint which keywords are worth considering.

However, besides keywords, it is also important to take care of the quality of your texts. That’s why platforms that help us find spelling and grammar mistakes can make a big difference.

Thanks to these tools, we can:

  • scale the production of content;
  • analyze the semantic aspects of texts;
  • connect crucial data such as the search volume of a keyword.

And now, let’s see the 20 best content optimization tools.

  1. GrowthBar
  2. Hemingway
  3. ChatGPT
  4. SEMRush
  5. Google Docs
  6. Grammarly
  7. ProWritingAid
  8. Ludwig
  9. TextMetrics
  10. WordLift
  11. Headline Analyzer
  12. Yoast
  13. Clearscope
  14. Wordcount.com
  15. Google Search Console (GSC)
  16. Answer the Public
  17. Frase
  18. MarketMuse
  19. SurferSEO
  20. Databasic Wordcounter

1. GrowthBar

GrowthBar is a powerful tool for those who do blogging. The tool uses OpenAI GPT-3 to generate content in the form closest to human language and to optimize them with keywords that the software returns after its detailed analysis. 

Its power lies in analyzing the hundreds of results in Google’s SERP to identify the most pertinent and advantageous keywords for climbing positions. The tool also integrates functions to detect other fundamental data of the pages it analyzes: number of words, headings, images, links, introductory paragraphs, titles, readability score, etc., and suggests internal links during the writing phase. 

For text management, it’s possible to use the GrowthBar content editor and import any article on the web to optimize it with the tool. 

GrowthBar also integrates tools for researching keywords and competitors. But this can also be done with its Chrome extension (rated with five stars), which lets you discover information about keywords and competitors while browsing Google or while writing with AI features in WordPress.

GrowthBar offers a free 5-day trial and then costs $29/month.

Its main features:

  • It uses the OpenAI GPT-3 to generate content similar to human language.
  • It analyzes Google’s SERP by returning data on keywords and other SEO factors.
  • It exists in the version extension for Chrome which returns data on keywords and competitors while browsing Google.

2. Hemingway

A well-written text is a text that people read with pleasure and fluidity. Hemingway App is the perfect tool for quality text checking: a self-editing tool that is very simple but beneficial when writing content. 

Thanks to its Artificial Intelligence, the software sifts through the text signaling everything that makes it heavy and unreadable: redundancies, repeated sentences, passive sentences, and words that are too long and difficult. 

You can use it online by pasting a text into Hemingway’s web page or downloading the desktop version.

Its main features:

  • It uses Artificial Intelligence to simplify and make the text more readable.
  • It exists in both online and desktop versions.
  • The application is free.

3. ChatGPT

Among the best content optimization tools, ChatGPT by OpenAI is a platform that uses artificial intelligence, Natural Language Processing, and deep learning to automatically generate original content suitable for different platforms, from blogs to social media to emails.

The tool works as a Q/A chatbot providing engaging and informative content, depending on the purpose of the text and in a tone of voice suited to the content genre. 

You can use ChatGPT to identify marketing trends and solutions to suggest topics and editorial ideas. 

Its main features:

  • It runs GPT-4
  • User-friendly interface
  • Unlimited creation of different content templates in multiple languages
  • ​​Chrome extension

You can use the tool with a free version. ChatGPT pro plan costs $20 per month.

4. SEMRush

One of the complete SEO tools is now famous for the myriad of functions (over 50 tools) collected in a single dashboard, which is challenging to interact with, if not after a bit of practice or training.

SEMrush is a digital marketing suite that goes into the merits of a series of SEO aspects, from keyword research to on-page SEO analysis and technical SEO to the study of competitors, of which it practically x-rays (keywords, backlinks, data on paid advertising campaigns, including displays, presence on social media, etc.). 

After entering the URL to be analyzed. But not only. SEMRush also investigates the sector of interest by returning analyzes of trending topics and related pages, which returns detailed information.

Content side and SEO optimization main features:

  • allows you to find organic and paid keywords in the dedicated platform by returning results on related keywords, synonyms, and queries typed by users
  • check the contents in real-time to optimize titles, track keywords, make suggestions on tone, and analyze their readability
  • monitors the organic positioning of keywords  
  • analyzes backlinks reporting malicious ones
  • performs complete audits of the website, verifying its performance from mobile.

The tool provides a Google Chrome extension. Once registered on the platform, it offers some tools (such as keyword research) in free mode and free trials of variable duration to test all other paid tools. 

You can subscribe to 3 different plans: PRO at $99.95 a month to manage up to 5 projects; Guru at $199.95 a month for 50 projects and some additional features; Business at $399.95/month for 200 projects. 

5. Google Docs

Who doesn’t know Google Docs, the web-based document management application that allows us to create and edit documents in real-time? Very convenient if you work remotely or externally and want to share a project

The platform offers several features for monitoring ongoing activities managed by multiple users, posting comments, sharing files, and exporting and archiving. In addition, you can take advantage of customized templates for writing resumes and project reports, but also format text and paragraphs, correct spelling errors, embed photos, add links, and change fonts. 

But Google Docs is one of the best content optimization tools considering all the add-ons available for Google Sheets.

Popular SEO Add-ons:

  • Semrush SEO Writing Assistant Add-on (after registering for SEMRush
  • SEO Assistant GDoc (Google Docs Add-on) gives SEO score of keywords and suggests related keywords among the most relevant
  • SEO Content Writing Assistant SEO content writing) tool to get a snapshot of the word, paragraph, sentence count, SEO score, images, URLs, and a report to improve content.
  • SEO Add-on by WordLift to perform semantic keyword research and analyze entities comparing queries and URLs.

Google Docs is available both for free and with monthly subscriptions.

6. Grammarly

An online tool, always accessible and from any browser, helps to improve in real-time while writing the contents with the grammar check and proofreading functions.

Its main features:

  • It checks spelling and grammar, anti-plagiarism.
  • It improves the readability of the text, punctuation, tone, choice of words.
  • The correct Proofreader applies more than 250 different grammar rules.

Grammarly is a free version that lets you use essential functions such as grammar checking and punctuation errors. The Premium version costs $12/month and includes all free features plus word picking, fluency control, pitch modulation, etc.

7. ProWritingAid

Writing correct content is a best practice for SEO optimization. Sometimes, a text contravenes the SEO basics precisely due to the presence of spelling and grammatical errors and oversights. This tool was created to help write correct texts and automatically convert documents into multiple languages.

ProWritingAid is a grammar checker and style writing editor, an AI-based writing assistant that optimizes word choice and allows you to change punctuation, adopt different structures and styles – academic, colloquial and business – but above all to notice grammatical and spelling errors, which are certainly not good for SEO or the authoritativeness of the source. 

Plus, with ProWritingAid, you learn as you write why the software explains the changes it suggests with different resources.

Its main features:

  • Real-time grammar, spelling, and style checker.
  • Thesaurus based on semantic context.
  • Twenty-five real-time writing reports on repeated words, errors, etc.
  • Integrations in Word, Google Docs, Scrivener, and as a browser extension.

ProWritingAid is available in both free and premium versions. The free account limits you to 500 words at a time but lets you access as many reports as you can generate. With the Premium version, there are no limits.

8. Ludwig

It is more than a simple automatic translator, Ludwig. It is instead the first phrase search engine that helps you write English with a more authentic literal and semantic sense and relevant to the context, referring to examples extrapolated from reliable and, precisely, contextualized sources. 

For instance, when translating from Italian to English, it is crucial from an SEO point of view to interpret the sentence’s meaning and not a translation word by word because each language corresponds to its own culture and a way of thinking and formulating thoughts, sentences, and questions peculiar to its linguistic and communicative system. 

Ludwig is the tool created to assist those who write in the language to express concepts correctly, showing examples of quality writing taken from reliable sources. The software uses an algorithm that draws from a rich database of texts written by journalists, writers, and researchers.

Its main features:

  • English language writing assistant. 
  • Available as a desktop app and mobile app.
  • Draws on databases with authoritative sources. 

Ludwig exists in a free and paid version, which costs €14.99 per month, or annually, which costs €59.88.

9. TextMetrics

Textmetrics is a cloud-based tool that leverages algorithms based on artificial intelligence to optimize new and existing content, analyze its quality, and streamline workflows. It gives real-time suggestions based on the target audience. 

Textmetrics provides style guides, updates on selected keywords, and the content positioning index, which updates the website’s visibility in Google results.

Its main features:

  • Keyword analysis and readability.
  • Page Ranking tracking.
  • Real-time SEO suggestions.
  • Integrates with various third-party content management systems, such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Sitecore, Microsoft Word, Umbraco, and Episerver.

Textmetrics pricing is available upon request.

10. WordLift

WordLift is the AI, and ML software applied to SEO to implement structured data within web pages, essential for letting Google understand the contents and obtain better indexing.

Once the plugin is installed, the artificial intelligence analyzes the text of the website and suggests the relevant concepts, identifies the topics to which it is possible to add the semantic markup associated with the Knowledge Graph entities (concepts, people, or places) that can be assimilated to the articles to enrich the content and allows people to find information relevant to their search intent. 

WordLift’s job is to create relationships between entities, transforming information into related data to build a Knowledge Graph.

Its main features:

  • Semi-automatically adds Schema.org markup.
  • Uses linked data, i.e., transforms text into language understandable to search engines optimizing text based on search intent and semantic SEO.
  • It can be used with WordPress and others CMS, providing APIs and webhooks to integrate proprietary CMSs. 
  • Integrations with Google Looker Studio, Google Analytics, Google Sheets, WooCommerce are available.

11. Headline Analyzer

A headline analyzer is a useful tool that analyzes some effectiveness factors: readability, SEO, and sentiment. It identifies the words that generate the most impact and attracts attention. At the same time, it offers suggestions to optimize the SEO title by entering the keywords, evaluating the number of words, readability, etc.

CoSchedule Headline Analyzer is one of the most popular headline analysis tools. Simply type the title in the text field and click “Analyze Now”. The system generates analysis with the overall score, length analysis, Google search preview, and other elements.

Its main features:

  • Optimize your titles with relevant keywords, but also make them attractive to readers.
  • Offers hundreds of tested and proven emotion words. 
  • Integrates with WordPress to optimize your titles directly in the platform.

12. Yoast

Yoast is best known for its inflexible traffic light that guides how to optimize content with keywords, internal links, and metadata, i.e., the title and meta description, with the right keyword density and length and clarity of content, plus a whole set of other tips. 

Functions in Yoast also go beyond writing content. The plugin offers tools to set up breadcrumbs, edit URLs and redirects from one page to another, check for duplicate content, and manage technical aspects such as Schema Markup, robots.txt file, .htaccess, and the sitemap. 

All this is in its basic (and free) version. The premium version ($99/year) offers additional features such as correcting grammar errors, inserting more keywords (sub, related, synonyms), and managing internal and external links.

Its main features: 

  • plugin for WordPress
  • on-page SEO analysis and indications 
  • integrates some fundamental tools for technical SEO.

Yoast does not perform off-page SEO analysis or research keywords and competitors.

13. Clearscope

Clearscope is a tool similar to GrowthBar and is very simple to use. The tool takes care of on-page SEO and analyzes online content starting from the keyword you want to position yourself and suggesting other essential keywords for the article.

After indicating the keyword, the tool analyzes the results in the Google SERP. It returns a list of key terms and topics, the competitors currently ranking for that term, the ideal length of the post, and an optimization scheme to better structure the text with the topics to be treated. 

Its main features:

  • Uses IBM Watson (software for data analysis and natural language, image, and sound understanding) to analyze content and make suggestions based on the most current SEO practices and data.
  • Guides writing and structure of the content and analyzes the competitor’s content to suggest improving the texts’ tone, keywords, length, and readability. 
  • It is simple to use and integrates with Google Docs and WordPress.

The cost of the software for the essential functions is $170/month; the Professional version costs $350/month, while the corporate version can be customized. 

14. Wordcount.com

Wordcount.com is a quick and free online tool for checking the number of words and characters in a text, proofreading texts and web pages, and evaluating the effectiveness of the writing, the reading time, and the content’s keywords. 

Regarding the latter, the tool helps SEO by indicating the number of times each word is repeated in the text—a proper function to avoid falling into the error of keyword stuffing and over-optimization.

The tool indicates the ideal number of words for Social Network platforms, Blogs, professional texts, literary texts, and essays. But it is still particularly useful on the SEO side when we need to optimize the metadata of a web page which must not exceed a certain limit of characters: the title field must not exceed 60/65 characters, and the description field must not exceed 155 characters.

15. Google Search Console (GSC)

Google Search Console is one of the essential content optimization tools. 

Anyone who manages their own or someone else’s site can only do with this free analysis tool in all its forms and extensions. Google makes it available to monitor, analyze and improve a website’s and its pages’ performance. 

In Google Search Console, it is possible to obtain data on the pages visited, those that are performing better, the queries generating impressions and clicks, and all the associated data, such as CTR and ranking position. The key element of the console is that we can find out how Google (the crawlers) see our site, view Google’s crawl data, find out if there is a lack of indexing, and request it in real-time.

Its main features:

  • Free service offered by Google.
  • It can be connected to Google Analytics, with which it works in synergy for data analysis.
  • It offers analysis and interactive tools for performance improvement and SEO optimization through clear and complete. 

16. Answer the Public

Answer The Public is an online SEO tool for keyword research with many free but limited features. The tool uses an intuitive visual system to show the queries extrapolated from Google divided by questions (what, who, how, when, why); prepositions (shows keywords used with prepositions with, for, from, etc.); by alphabetic letter (shows results starting with letters of the alphabet); for comparison/comparison with similar or related keywords.

With the tool, we can find keywords and related words and the intent and questions asked by users on a given topic to find ideas and ideas for articles.

Through Answer The Public searches, we can discover users’ questions on a particular topic and the information they want about a product or service. Based on these queries, we can develop texts and micro-texts for the blog, site, e-commerce, etc.

Its main features:

  • Search for keywords and queries divided into categories. 
  • Possibility of downloading CSV and course images via email free of charge.

With the free version, it is limited to about three searches per day. The Pro Plan is $99 monthly or $79 annually for unlimited searches; get results based on the language and locality of interest; compare data; ability to save reports; unlimited team members; customer support; integration with other SEO tools like SEMrush.

17. Frase

Frase is a text processing tool that allows you to write directly on the platform, but not only. The tool also works on optimizing the contents, identifying the most relevant topics, and providing a structure to organize them to make them more exhaustive and complete.

The software generates article introductions, FAQs, titles, sentences, and paragraphs, giving guidance as you write on how to improve the text by including some of the topics mentioned in the ranked articles. And to include everyone, really all the project participants, the software generates a very useful brief with the topics to be treated and to be included.

Another handy feature of Frase is to manage content workflows, allowing you to invite authors, assign due dates, label documents by stage, and export them to WordPress.

Its main features:

  • Automatic generation of briefs, sentences, and paragraphs of content, introductions for posts, FAQs, titles, and more.
  • Integration with Google Search Console data and insights.
  • SEO guidelines with content scoring.
  • Optimization of content workflows.

Frase offers a free 7-day trial, after which you can subscribe to three different pricing plans (and an SEO add-on for $35/month): the basic version costs $44.99/month; the Team, $114.99 a month, the formula for companies can be customized.

18. MarketMuse

MarketMuse is a software that helps plan and optimize the content through an artificial intelligence-driven search that scans pages with the same topic already positioned online. The goal is to analyze the practical positioning possibilities for new content based on the difficulty score obtained from the SERP analysis.

But not only. The tool’s features allow you to discover the most important related topics to include, the amount of content needed to cover them all, titles and subtitles, and internal and external links.

Its main features:

  • Content competitor analysis and reports with customized difficulty scores based on site and the content outlined.
  • Content briefing on established topics based on SEO goals. 
  • Content optimization with internal link-building tips and ideas for external links.  

There is a free basic version of MarketMuse, but then you switch to the Standard version with a cost of $149/month or the Team with a cost of $399/month. It is available also a Premium Plan customized for large teams.

19. SurferSEO

Another of the best content optimization tools is SurferSEO, an on-site SEO tool available as a web app, which integrates SERP analysis features, a content editor, keyword research, SEO audit, and a content editor extension for Chrome.

It is also possible to write directly in the platform’s editor and receive real-time tips to optimize the content based on previously positioned keywords. Then, the software returns insights to guide us in creating better texts through the targeted choice of terms, titles, words, and images.

As stated, SurferSEO also offers a Chrome extension for keyword research and a content editor, which works in both WordPress and Google Docs. 

Its main features:

  • It searches and analyzes keywords to be implemented in the text based on content already positioned in the SERP.
  • It provides scores and guidelines for optimizing old and new content.
  • It integrates with Google Docs, WordPress, and Google Search Console.

SurferSEO has a Basic cost of $49/month; the Pro version costs $99/month, while the Business, $199/month.

20. Databasic Wordcounter

WordCounter by Databasics.io analyzes text and indicates the most common words and phrases. This tool helps count words, bigrams, and trigrams useful to individuate the most frequent search intents. For instance, you can use a large dataset of queries from Google Search Console and extreme all the bigrams to see the frequency of each blog’s intent.

These were just some of the many tools available to optimize content from a marketing, syntactic-grammatical, and SEO point of view. Although many of these tools are simple grammar or form checkers, or others seem to detract from creating copy using AI to generate content, they remain mere tools in our hands. Knowing how to use and exploit them to improve the text creation and revision process remains a personal and peculiar skill of a good writer.

11 Best SEO Tools for Content Writing

11 Best SEO Tools for Content Writing

Some principles never change – even in the ever-changing digital marketing world – like the evergreen “content is king.” In 2023, one of the most effective marketing strategies is still the creation of digital content for our audience, even though our ability and the technology to do so have significantly evolved. In this context, content automation is now king.

Companies and individual marketers alike are using more and more digital platforms and SEO tools for content writing. AI is now able to support us in better ways to produce content (also publishing and distributing it), and the market is offering more and better ways to satisfy our needs. Most likely, you have already been using these very tools.

We believe that SEO automation will be huge. Content creation will increasingly be a task performed by humans and AI working in tandem.

This is happening due to technological advances, of course, but also to a highly competitive market. The Internet is now a boundless ocean of competing content. To get the attention of our target, we must compete in quality, uniqueness and authority with a fierce crowd of competitors.

This article will define content automation, discuss how AI can help in generating content in a timely fashion, argue the reasons why we should use it, and provide a list of SEO tools and platforms for content writing.

This blog post is also available as Web Story  👉 Best SEO Tools for Content Writing Web Story

  1. What is content automation?
  2. The ways in which AI generates effective content in a time-efficient manner
  3. Thy we should automate SEO content writing
  4. SEO tools for content writing

What is content automation?

Content Automation is the use of technologies, systems, and strategies that eliminate or significantly reduce human intervention at every step of the content creation process.

Its main goal is to be of assistance to professionals and companies by delegating the most repetitive and tedious work to AI. It revolves around the same principles and needs of industrial automation, although applied to digital marketing and, more specifically, to the sub-sector of content marketing.

The ways in which AI generates effective content in a time-efficient manner.

AI helps us at every step of the way in content creation, especially in the most time consuming and repetitive tasks.

Thanks to machine learning, a few platforms are able to analyze the structure of articles better suited to our needs through specific keyword usage and then generate detailed reports on them in a few seconds.

Moreover, advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) allow algorithms to better understand our inputs and then select content with pertinent information and with language closest to natural human expression.

With these improvements, we can summarize even very long excerpts. Just think how convenient this could be in creating meta-descriptions of our articles or texts accompanying social media dissemination.

Some of the methods used in NLP to process content. This image was suggested by WordLift AI.

We can ask AI to look for the most suitаble images to accompany our text.

We can even ask AI to create a whole text following our input, like in this famous example from The Guardian or to answer specific questions, like the ones Andrea Volpini, our CEO, asked to the davinci model on GPT-3 in an article on SEO trends in 2021.

Just imagine how much faster these tools can generate your content.

Why we should automate SEO content writing

The first reason is extremely simple: it’s time-saving and, consequently, cost-effective.

Just imagine you’re writing an important piece for your target. How long would it take to identify the best topic, find your keywords, research your sources, and analyze your competitors? How long would it take to manually apply the markup of structured data on your article in order for Google to fully understand your content and disseminate it as widely as possible?

Have you completed your estimate? Excellent. Can I give you some good news?

There are already a number of solutions in place that can do all this in a few clicks.

You can even estimate the time you’ll save by automating one or more of these tasks and multiply it by the number of contents you generate in a year. You will then have a realistic estimate of how much AI can contribute in cutting marketing costs.

Another reason to automate content is cutting down on human error. Just think of the time spent in looking for typos. An algorithm is never tired at 5pm on a Friday – but we are. When properly programmed, your tool will always find typos. As trained as our eyes can be, we will always make mistakes because of exhaustion, distraction, or simply … being human 🙂. AI will always be more efficient than we could ever be in tasks like these and it would be wise to delegate them to AI.

Lastly, because it can process an enormous amount of data, AI can improve the quality of your content.

And just to calm those nagging fears, let me say one last thing about this: AI will never “steal” your job (maybe just a few monotonous tasks). Rather, it will allow you to do better work and to devote yourself to the tasks where you can really make a difference.

We’ve been suspicious of AI for more than two centuries, but machines do not take away our jobs. Jobs change and evolve because of technological advances. Whether we like it or not, this is also the future of content marketing.

AI Text Generation for SEO: learn how to train your model on a generic data-to-text generation task 

SEO tools for content writing

Now that we know what content automation is, and how it can help us in digital marketing, let’s have a look at a few of the solutions available. This is a list of tools that can help you in automating the writing of your SEO content.

MarketMuse

MarketMuse is a content marketing platform that, thanks to AI, transforms the way we research, plan and create our content.

Thanks to machine learning, MarketMuse’s algorithms can analyze a vast amount of data from published content on a specific topic, and it can create detailed briefings containing information on important related subjects. Plus, this platform can generate a detailed first draft based on KPI found in the briefing.

MarketMuse can also perform a comparative analysis of our competitors’ content using the same keywords, showing us how well we covered the subject compared to others.

This Boston-based firm offers various pricing plans to marketers and SEO professionals.

Plans start at $79/mo., paid annually. There is also a free trial option.

Topic

Topic is a platform that helps agencies and editors create briefings based on their content in half the time usually needed.

By inputting a keyword, Topic will analyze the first 30 results, highlighting not only the headings and keywords to include in your content, but also the questions to answer. You can also use this platform to create a rich outline.

Topic is therefore a tool to create content more swiftly, employing the model of GPT-3 language and machine learning.

This is a platform aimed primarily at agencies and editors.

Its plans start at $50/mo. There is no free trial option, but a demo is available upon request.

WordLift

WordLift logo

WordLift is the AI-powered SEO tool that does the heavy lifting for you. In order to optimize your website’s content for search engines, it’s crucial to pay attention to the data that allow algorithms to better understand who you are, what you do, and what your pages are about. WordLift can automate this process and improve your position on SERPs, thereby increasing the volume and quality of your organic traffic.

WordLift uses natural language processing and linked data to automate semantic markup. It analyzes your content and identifies the corresponding entities organizing them into four categories: who, what, when and where. You can select the suggested entities and create your own in order to give your users useful context information.

Thanks to this glossary, all the search engines will be able to index your pages correctly, leading more traffic your way. It will also be easier to have SERP Knowledge Graphs associated to your business and your product.

WordLift offers various widgets and tools to guide you in content creation by suggesting free stock images to display, and by summarizing content you will be able to use for your meta-descriptions or social media posts.

WordLift is a useful tool for all marketers, editors and companies that want to automate a fundamental part of their SEO. It’s perfectly integrated with WordPress, can be used on other CMS, and is now available with a brand new add-on for WooCommerce. Plus, many more AI-based solutions are being developed exclusively for VIP clients.

The base plan starts at €47/mo., paid annually. WordLift has a 14-day free trial period.

Do you want to start now with your free trial?

Paraphrasingtool.ai

Paraphrasingtool.ai emerges as a comprehensive writing assistant, providing a unique array of tools for content writers. The highlight of this platform is its exceptional paraphrasing tool, touted as one of the most sophisticated and advanced in the industry. It presents you with eight distinct paraphrasing modes, each specifically designed to ensure content integrity through high-quality paraphrases.

One of the unique offerings from Paraphrasingtool.ai is the ability to choose from five alternate sentences for any spun sentence. This feature, coupled with the ability to switch the tone of the text – from formal, professional, or casual to witty – allows users to customise content to align with their target audience.

Paraphrasingtool.ai also brings innovative features like audio, image, and speech-to-text paraphrasing to the table. These are unique capabilities that no other online paraphrasing tool currently offers. The tool’s in-built plagiarism checker ensures the integrity of the rephrased content, while its AI text editor fine-tunes your paraphrased content to near perfection.

With the synonym-changer feature, users can modify paraphrased words to better suit their text, even providing definitions for complex words. The web browsing feature, on the other hand, allows users to search and insert text directly into the editor for paraphrasing.

Paraphrasingtool.ai’s premium package offers an attractive price point – just $7 per month, or $5 per month with an annual subscription.

HIX.AI

HIX.AI is an all-in-one AI writing copilot. Using the leading GPT language models, it easily creates SEO content customized for your target keywords and other requirements. It provides multiple innovative products to help with content writing in different ways. 

HIX.AI comes with 120+ useful AI tools to write or rewrite any high quality, unique content in just a few seconds. They also include features like grammar checking, paraphrasing, translation, email generation, and more.

And complementing short-form writing, HIX.AI offers Long-Form Article Writer enabling you to generate plagiarism-free, SEO-friendly and fact-based long blog posts or articles according to your needs. 

Besides these writing tools, they’ve also developed HIX Editor, a more powerful Notion AI alternative. This editor allows you to create and optimize content simultaneously using AI, saving valuable time switching back and forth between AI writing tools and text editors.

They even have a smarter ChatGPT alternative called HIX Chat that can answer any queries and access up-to-date online information. It is a great tool to assist with your writing research and further improve the efficiency of your content creation. 

Furthermore, HIX.AI offers an all-in-one Chrome extension to ensure that you have easy access to their useful writing tools and chatbot everywhere online with your Chrome browser.

QuillBot

QuillBot allows for content creation in half the time thanks to its algorithms. This tool supports British, American and Australian English.

QuillBot has two major features. “Paraphrasers” allows you to paraphrase texts following certain parameters, like length of output text. You can customize it to obtain output texts with different characteristics: you can have a “standard” text, one with as many possible variations from your input text as possible, or one as close as possible to natural language and correct grammar.

Its second feature is the “Summarizer,” summarizing a text in a few clicks. You can choose between key sentences and paragraph. The former will highlight the most important sentences of your input text, the latter will create a paragraph based on key information in your input text. The final result will combine both the paraphrase and the summarizing features. And remember that you can always choose the length of your output text.

QuillBot helps in writing emails, posts, articles, and much more, all in English.

Most of its features are free, but if you want to get the most out of it, you can choose the premium package, with more features, no character limit, and more processing speed.

The premium package starts at $6,67/mo., paid annually.

Frase

Frase believes that the future of SEO is in answers, not in links. In conversations, not just keywords. Its mission is to help you develop an SEO that “will still work in 2030.”

Frase offers two primary solutions on subscription: Content and Answer. Frase Content significantly reduces content production time, automating many steps of the process and offering an editor tool where team members can collaborate.

Once you insert a keyword, this platform will display a list of topics, FAQs, statistics, news and related facts. You can also check how your final text does compared to competing software, thanks to Frase Topic Score.

Frase Answer trains and implements chatbots in a few steps by analyzing the content on your website. You don’t need any starting knowledge to train its AI, just some content, such as, a product page or blog post. It just needs to have a url. At this point, you will be able to train multiple bot personas that can specialize in different tasks (support, commercial, etc.), or, if you prefer, you can create one single super-intelligent bot.

Frase is best for teams working on content marketing or on SEO, and for agencies. This tool supports Italian as well, although only for Frase Content.

Starting price for subscriptions is $45/mo.

Semantika

Semantika is an Italian tool developed to put NLG at the service of content marketing.

This tool uses your data to generate content through AI in a few steps and following your parameters. During this process, you have the assistance of a project manager.

For example, an e-Commerce project could upload its catalog and leave the automatic creation of product details to the platform. Alternatively, you could create financial reports for your firm, or publish the team scores on a sport news website in real time.

Semantika’s target is firms, e-Commerce and editors.

On their website you can find all the relevant information on pricing, although you can also contact them for a demo.

Clearscope

Clearscope is a tool created to optimize content through AI.

Its algorithms analyze the 30 best content results based on a chosen keyword and display related keywords, search volumes and other data crucial to create an optimized text. This tool also offers an evaluation of your content, providing suggestions on parameters such as readability or relevant terms density. Its interface is easy to use and this platform integrates with Google Docs and WordPress.

The Essentials Plan starts at $170/mo. without a trial period.

NeuralText

NeuralText is a platform using NLP to help marketers write rich content optimized for SEO.

Like the other tools in our list, Neural Text also analyzes SERP following your parameters and keywords. This tool generates reports with useful information, like questions and related topics, volumes, but also most cited entities and sources within the articles.

NeuralText offers an additional tool to evaluate your own content, a keyword tool plus a tool to analyze search intents behind every query.

We should give special mention to their Smart Writer, the text editor on their platform that, thanks to AI, gives suggestions on how to speed up content creation.

Their subscriptions start at $50/mo. and there is a 7-day trial period.

Writer

Writer’s free grammar check tool is a simple, AI-powered resource that helps ensure your content is clear, error-free, and easy to read. Improper punctuation, grammatical errors, misspelled words, irregular verb conjugations, and other common writing issues are detected by this tool.

Most AI assistants are notorious for their rigidity. Writer, on the other hand, is the most customizable writing assistant available today. Professionals may define date formats, punctuation, and capitalization choices, and share them with the team. 

As a result, Writer outperforms all other tools when it comes to professional use. Writer recognizes that you don’t talk to your boss like you do your best buddy. You may use Writer to check your tone, writing style, and terminology.

Trusted by big companies, Writer uses AI techniques like deep learning to discover patterns. In addition to checking grammar and spelling, Writer analyzes your content for clarity, readability, conciseness, writing style, tone, brand voice, uniqueness, and bias.

Writer’s grammar checker is a free tool for basic suggestions, which makes it ideal for anyone looking to enhance their writing skills. Paid plans include the Pro and Team upgrades.

Writer provides a browser extension, a Word plug-in, and a Google Document add-on in addition to their clutter-free web editor.

Interested in knowing more about how AI can help you automate your SEO and content?

How To Optimize Existing Content With Entities, Semantic SEO, & All Things Nice!

How To Optimize Existing Content With Entities, Semantic SEO, & All Things Nice!

In content marketing, we would leave no stone unturned to ensure that our content reaches the right person – one who is looking for a solution. Some of us can remember the days when we wrote article after article, just like SEOwl shows here.

SEOwl GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY

Content calendar, pillar pages, keyword clustering, content distribution, competitor analysis, social media… Wait a minute! What about your current content that is waiting for a makeover? If these activities have been lost in your To-Do Lists or Trello boards, now is the time to pick them up again!

For some of our clients, depending on their specific goals and OKRs, we have planned some revitalization activities. Let us see how to optimize existing content and how we worked out in two cases.

Case I: Almost Dead Page

We had fluctuating impressions that rarely translated into results. After the changes, we can see how impressions have increased by more than five times and clicks by six times. That’s a start, of course! Not to mention how well the page climbed up the SERP ladder⚡

Case II: Stagnated Page

The webpage had reached a plateau before we started semantic SEO enrichment. As the numbers show, clicks have doubled over time and we are seeing an increase in trends.

Let’s go through how to optimize your existing content, identify the relevant opportunities and then give them a spin, the semantic SEO way!

Optimize Your Existing Content, The Semantic SEO Way!

Whenever we have a new client on board, their goal is to increase business value through SEO. This can be done by improving content, improving their E-A-T ( Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness ) on the web, and making the most of structured data, to name a few examples. Whether it is one or all of these, Semantic SEO is at the heart of all our efforts.

As for content, optimizing existing content on the site goes hand in hand with brainstorming fresh content ideas.

Sherlock-Holming The SERP

  1. As always, we start by identifying the content opportunities in Search Console. In most cases, these are search queries with few clicks and many impressions just waiting to be tapped.
  2. Once we have identified the relevant search queries and the URLs that need to be revised, it’s time to analyze the content gap – one page at a time. The SERP is one of the best places to understand this.

As you may have already done, analyzing your competitors is a good place to start to find out if your content is missing something crucial. Or if there’s room for improvement.

The results shown will help you get closer to user intent and make sense of the content clusters you have. No wonder, the better you address intent, the better your content is likely to perform.

Tools like Semrush are also good-to-rely sources to explore new content additions to the existing page. For example, some of the queries “what is the difference between cheetah and leopard and jaguar”, “what is the bite force of a jaguar”, and “what is the speed of a jaguar” are high-intent, long-tail, and comparatively easier to rank for.

What’s more?

Hola, Entities!

Does the content revival stop with SERP analysis, more keyword research and competitor analysis? Not quite! There’s so much more you can do with entities.

For those who are new to entities, in the Semantic Web, an entity is a “thing” that:

  • can be described easily,
  • could be unique,
  • is distinguishable & well-defined.

It could be our favorite music star, the next vacation destination we are planning, or our favorite dish. An entity helps computers understand everything you know about a person, organization, or place.

For example, if you are a car dealer, your website must help Google understand that Jaguar is the car for you, not the threatening jungle cat.

With entity-based SEO, this is a cakewalk!

Entities can also lead you to highly relevant topics that can benefit your business. This in turn increases your thematic authority with strong content clusters

Now, of course, the question is: How do I find entities?

Using SEO Add-on for Google Sheets™by WordLift

SEO Add-on for Google Sheets™by WordLift is an extension that lets you perform semantic keyword research and create a JSON-LD that helps Google understand what your content is about.

The SEO Add-on comes in super handy even if you are creating a new content piece or reviving an existing one. Let me walk you through how we use it to enrich a page with entities and implement SEO content optimization.

1. In your Google Sheets, get the WordLift Add-on under Extensions>>Add-ons>>Get Add-ons. Search for WordLift, and you are good!

2. To use the Add-on, you need a WordLift key. If you are already a customer, you can use your key as such. If not, drop us a message, and we’ll help you out.

3. You can either run the SEO Add-on with a set of queries or connect your Google Search Console account to get the data automatically. 

4. Here, I have a set of keywords for the best travel suitcases

5. You can go a step further and create clusters to better identify content opportunities. The fab tool Keyword Clustering App by Charly Wargnier is what we use. 

6. From the clusters, choose the keywords and queries that are relevant to your content plan. Open the extension, and choose ‘Analyze SERP.’

7. Voila! The SEO Add-on analyzes the queries you have selected, goes through the SERP, and brings you a list of entities and their DBpedia URL. Oh, and a confidence score denoting relevancy. A higher confidence score indicates that the entity is relevant to your content. Although, this is completely your choice.

8. From the list, we can see some of the entities that are super relevant to the article we are writing – travel & suitcase, for instance. You can also note entities such as Polycarbonate that you can cover when it comes to the material of the suitcase. The same goes for the brand Samsonite.
– In short, when search engines crawl this article, it becomes apparent with these entities that you are talking about travel suitcases, the types, different brands, and more! Make it easy for bots to understand your content.
9. As a final step, you can proceed to Login into your WordPress account, and import these entities to build your Knowledge Graph, wrapping up the process. Alternatively, you can use the data and create the entities on your own, in WordPress, via WordLift’s plugin.

Simplifying Interlinking

Internal linking is quite underrated; the rush to build backlinks and the countless deployments every day outweigh this. For smaller websites, internal linking may be a no-brainer. But what about an e-commerce site with more than 50,000 visitors? Err.

Definitely not impossible, just time consuming.
Is there a way we can do this faster? And with fewer resources? But of course, yes!

When we add entities in WordLift, an internal link is automatically created. And not only that, you can turn this feature off whenever you want.

  • If you have a product page, we want to add the product label first, which gives relevant details like availability, price, shipping details and more
  • If you mention the product on your follow-up pages, the WordLift plugin will capture those mentions and allow you to mark them as entities and add an internal link.

If you have a website with thousands of pages and products, imagine how things can be simplified, how you can save time and how your team can speed things up without compromising the bottom line!

Propelling FAQs

Earlier this year, there were several decisions that said Google has started displaying more Rich Results in the SERP and that the importance of Q&A and FAQ schema markup is magnificently increasing.
While earlier you had a chance to get a position in the “People Also Ask” section, Google’s core update in May this year helped many website owners to get more space in the SERP with their FAQs.

What are some of the best sources for FAQs?

  • Questions posed by your customers to your sales or CS teams
  • Google’s People Also Ask
  • Google’s dropdown for search and related queries
  • Tools like AlsoAsked.com helps you map what users are searching for, relating to a particular query/topic.
  • Tools like Semrush offer questions asked by users when it comes to keyword research, making it easy for us to identify some high-intent, low-competition keywords to potentially target.

Of course, it’s not a good idea to force FAQs on all pages in the hope that they will rank well. Depending on the goal of the article and its intention, it’s worth checking if you can accommodate questions and answers on the page.

That’s about it!

Want the growing charts and numbers for your website or more (even better!)? Let us talk about it!

Until next time with another blog, Hey Ho, Let’s SEO🤟