No matter how creative or smart you are, achieving a high-ranking position requires a strategic approach to optimize your content.
Your content must be crafted around targeted keywords, including relevant semantic keywords while addressing search intent and conducting a thorough Content Gap Analysis. These elements are the foundation of a truly SEO-optimized article.
However, tailoring your content to meet these requirements can be tough. From addressing topic gaps to ensuring the inclusion of all relevant keywords, avoiding keyword stuffing (repeating the same keywords excessively), and aligning the content structure with your target audience’s needs, the process can feel overwhelming. Doing all of this manually is nearly impossible.
This is where tools like Frase come in. Frase empowers content creators to build SEO-optimized articles quickly and efficiently. Let’s explore the features that make this process simpler and more effective.
SERP: Analyze Competitors for Top Content
The SERP (Search Engine Results Page) feature in Frase is where you start.
It allows you to analyze the top search results for a given query, providing deep insights into competitor content. This analysis reveals not only the topics covered by high-ranking pages but also how their structure, themes, and key elements are organized. Armed with this information, you can optimize your content to compete effectively by incorporating essential keywords, subtopics, and sections that resonate with both your target audience and search engines.
Understanding what’s already written is just the beginning. You likely already know how to create content that approaches your audience from unique angles, standing out from existing material. However, writing is only the first step. But once you’ve written it, the job isn’t done. You still need to optimize it. And to make sure you’ve got everything right, there are a few key elements to double-check in your optimization process.
Essential Elements to Optimize Your Content
Frase takes content optimization to the next level with a dedicated set of tools designed to boost your article’s performance. To make the most of Frase’s optimization features, head to the third option in the main tab, labeled “Optimize.” Clicking on it opens a detailed panel that highlights the key aspects of your content.
Now, let’s break down the content optimization elements that Frase offers and explain how each contributes to better search engine rankings.
Topic Score: Optimize with Keyword Focus
The Topic Score is a key metric in Frase that measures how comprehensively your content covers relevant topics compared to competitor content. It evaluates your use of important keywords related to the main subject of your article but doesn’t account for the depth or context of your writing. This score focuses entirely on keyword inclusion as a marker of how well your content aligns with top-performing articles on the same subject.
How it Works:
- Keyword Scanning: Frase analyzes your article for the presence of essential keywords found in high-ranking competitor content.
- Score Calculation: Based on how many of these relevant keywords appear in your content, Frase calculates a Topic Score. The more keyword matches, the higher your score.
- Purely Keyword-Based: This metric does not assess how well you’ve explored the topic, the quality of your arguments, or the context of your writing. It is purely a quantitative measure based on keyword frequency and coverage.
- Competitor Benchmarking: The Topic Score allows you to compare your content’s keyword coverage with other top-ranking articles in your niche, giving you a benchmark to aim for.
For example, let’s say you’re writing an article about “Digital Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses.” To boost your Topic Score, Frase will analyze top-performing articles on this subject and suggest keywords like “target audience,” “content marketing,” “SEO optimization,” “social media engagement,” “email campaigns,” and “PPC advertising.”
Including these keywords in your content will increase your Topic Score because Frase recognizes that your article aligns with the language and focus of successful competitors. For instance, sentences like, “Effective SEO optimization helps small businesses attract their target audience through organic search,” or “Social media engagement and email campaigns work together to build customer relationships,” will help improve your Topic Score by hitting the right keywords.
Pro Tip
Frase gives you a comprehensive overview of key data from all the top-ranking articles. For example, you can see the word count for each article, including the average, minimum, and maximum.
(Quick tip: It’s not just about how many words you write—it’s about the impact and relevance!)
You’ll also get the topic score for each article, but here’s a reminder: having the highest score doesn’t automatically mean you’ll rank at the top. It’s all about how to stand out from the competition while understanding and addressing what users are searching for.
Frase also provides insights into the number of headings, images, and backlinks for each article, along with the domain rating of each site. This data gives you a solid foundation to estimate your ranking potential for the targeted keyword—especially when you strategically hit the right keywords.
What if you come across a great article with solid ideas, but it’s not ranking well? Here’s another pro tip:
If you find an article like this—perhaps during your topic discovery phase—you can manually add it to Frase. Once added, Frase will scrape its content and display it for you. It will also compare your originality score against both the top-ranking articles and the ones you’ve added manually.
Before you move on to optimizing your content, take a quick look at your competitors and what they’re doing through the Explore Topics feature.
Explore Topics: Find Winning Keywords
Explore Topics is a powerful feature that provides a detailed analysis of the keywords used by your competitors. This tool enables you to identify the most relevant and frequently used terms across the top Google search results for your specific query, giving you insights into how to optimize your content effectively.
How It Works:
- Keyword Frequency Analysis: Explore Topics displays the frequency of each important keyword used in the top search results for your chosen query. This feature allows you to see which terms are essential for your content based on how often they appear in competitor articles.
- Visual Representation: The data is presented visually, showing how each keyword is distributed among multiple articles. This makes it easy to grasp which keywords are prevalent and should be prioritized in your writing.
For example, for a search query like “digital marketing strategies for e-commerce,” the Explore Topics feature will reveal how often terms such as “SEO,” “content marketing,” “conversion rates,” and “customer acquisition” are utilized within the top articles on Google. By analyzing this frequency, you can determine which keywords to include in your content to improve its relevance and competitiveness.
Once you’ve finished writing your article, you can dive into the optimization process by exploring various topic types to enhance your content.
Topic Types: Perfect Your SEO Strategy
In SEO optimization, Frase distinguishes between different types of topics to help you cover all relevant areas in your content. These include Long Tail Keywords, All Topics, and Clusters, each serving a unique role in ensuring your content is comprehensive and targeted.
Long Tail Keywords:
Long-tail keywords are highly specific, detailed phrases that often have lower search volumes but higher user intent. Typically composed of two or more words, these keywords are used by individuals seeking precise information or solutions, indicating they are further along in their decision-making process.
Frase simplifies the process of identifying long-tail keywords within top-ranking content related to your topic. By integrating these targeted phrases into your article, you can enhance relevance and increase the likelihood of converting readers into customers. This task is challenging to manage manually, as tracking the repetition of critical and secondary keywords throughout your content is time-consuming and error-prone.
For example, if you’re writing about email marketing strategies, a broad keyword like “email marketing” may not yield the best results. Instead, a long-tail keyword such as “best practices for personalized email campaigns” targets users searching for specific guidance, increasing engagement potential. By including phrases like “tips for creating personalized email campaigns for higher open rates”, you address a precise query, boosting your ranking for these searches and effectively meeting your audience’s needs.
All Topics (a.k.a: Short-tail keywords)
All Topics refer to the terms that consist of only one word commonly found in top-ranking content for your subject. These are the essential, broader words that ensure your article covers the major concepts related to the topic. Frase identifies these core terms to help you build a strong foundation for your content, ensuring you don’t overlook any important aspects.
Frase compares your content to top-ranking pages and suggests important keywords or phrases that are frequently used. Covering these topics ensures your article includes the key concepts search engines expect to see for a given query.
For example, if you’re writing about “content marketing tools,” the main topics might include single-word terms like “analytics,” “automation,” “keywords,” and “distribution.” Including these broader terms ensures your article thoroughly addresses all the critical aspects of content marketing, meeting both search engine expectations and audience needs.
Clusters: (connected keywords)
Clusters are groups of related topics that revolve around a broader term. Frase identifies these clusters to help you expand on subtopics, making your content more comprehensive. Covering these clusters improves the overall depth and structure of your content, helping it rank better for a variety of related searches.
Frase scans top-ranking content and suggests topic clusters based on common groupings of related keywords. By integrating these clusters, you can ensure your content doesn’t just focus on the broad terms but also dives into related subtopics that add value for the reader.
Example: Let’s say your main topic is “customer engagement.” Related clusters could include “customer satisfaction,” “tools for customer service,” and “personalized customer experience.” These clusters allow you to cover the topic from multiple angles, making your content more thorough and useful for readers who are searching for related information.
By strategically using Long Tail Keywords, All Topics, and Clusters, you ensure your content is not only broad enough to cover the main subject but also specific enough to rank well for targeted, high-intent searches. This approach increases your chances of capturing a wider audience while also appealing to those looking for specific solutions or information.
To create content that ranks well and resonates with your audience, it’s crucial to track your progress and optimize your use of keywords effectively. That’s where Frase’s Status Indicators come in.
Status Indicators: Ideal Keyword Balance
Frase’s Status Indicators give you real-time feedback on how well your content covers relevant topics and keywords. These indicators ensure your content is both comprehensive and optimized, helping you avoid keyword overuse or missed opportunities. Each topic or keyword in Frase is assigned one of four statuses: Topic Gap, Completed, In Progress, or Overused.
By default, Frase automatically highlights long-tail keywords (e.g., “Content Audit”). However, if you switch to “All Topics”, it will also highlight single-word keywords (e.g., “Content”) where they appear alone.
Here are two tips to make the most of Status Indicators:
- Frase shows the average frequency of each keyword in your competitors’ articles and how many competitors are using it. This helps you understand how your content compares.
- You can click on any keyword to see exactly where competitors have used it. This provides insight into its context, allowing you to either adopt a similar approach or offer a unique perspective, like challenging the idea or presenting a fresh viewpoint.
Topic Gap
The Topic Gap is one of the most important factors in content optimization, highlighting the keywords or topics missing from your content compared to high-ranking competitors. Frase helps identify these gaps and suggests relevant keywords to include, enabling you to create more competitive and well-rounded content.
Addressing the topic gaps ensures your content doesn’t overlook important information that competitors are covering. Filling these gaps not only makes your content more comprehensive but also aligns it with search engine expectations, improving your chances of ranking higher. On the other hand, ignoring these gaps can weaken your content’s competitiveness, causing you to miss opportunities to meet user intent, which directly impacts your SEO performance.
Once you’ve addressed the Topic Gaps, it’s important to keep an eye on keyword usage to avoid over-optimization, which leads us to the “Overused” status.
Overused
The “Overused” status is triggered when a keyword appears too frequently in your content, to the point of keyword stuffing. Highlighted in red, this status serves as a warning to reduce the keyword’s usage to avoid penalties from search engines for over-optimization.
Pro Tip: You can search for any word—whether long-tail or a single term—and check how many times it appears throughout your article. This ensures that you haven’t missed any important keywords or overused any of them. After filling in all relevant topic gaps for your angle, be mindful not to repeat keywords excessively to maintain a natural flow and optimize your content effectively.
For example, if you’re writing about “SEO optimization” and find yourself using the term repeatedly, it can start to show as overused in the phrase status indicator. To reduce this, try mixing it up by saying “optimizing for the users and search engine sites” or simply “optimizing your article” when the context is clear. You can also replace it with related terms like “site ranking” or “visibility improvement” to keep your writing fresh and avoid redundancy while maintaining the same message.
After you’ve optimized keyword usage and avoided overstuffing, it’s essential to ensure all necessary keywords are adequately covered, which brings us to the “In Progress” status.
In Progress
This status indicates that a keyword has been partially covered but requires further usage to meet the ideal frequency. Highlighted in yellow, this status serves as a reminder to include the topic more frequently to improve the comprehensiveness of your content.
As you work on achieving the ideal keyword frequency, keep in mind that once you’ve addressed this, you’ll want to verify that you’re not just meeting the minimum requirements, but also hitting the right targets, which brings us to the “Completed” status.
Completed:
This status means you’ve covered a specific keyword or topic well enough in your content. It shows you’ve mentioned it as often as top-ranking competitors do. Frase highlights these topics in green, letting you know you’re on the right track.
Now your content is better optimized, and you’re well on your way to a more competitive piece of content.
The Final Touch: Finalizing Your Content
While “info gain” is often considered during the content brief preparation, as a writer, you can also apply it after finishing the article. You might address a question mentioned in the Questions tab from competitors or rephrase your content to answer a question posed on platforms like Quora or Reddit, even if it’s not directly covered in your article.
Additionally, you can enhance your content by including important statistics that add credibility, linking to relevant news that supports your claims, or providing definitions for unfamiliar terms from sources like Wikipedia. These additions help strengthen the trustworthiness of your article and provide further value to your readers.
