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Have you been looking for a new way to optimize your content and research for your website or blog? You may want to consider Frase as a content creation tool. There are several tasks it can help with you such as:

    • Choosing and analyzing keywords for SEO
    • Creating content briefs and outlines
    • Analyzing competition content
    • Identifying your own content gaps

These processes need to happen before you even start writing and it can take anywhere from an hour to a few days. For some people, it’s not the most exciting part of writing your content, either. Luckily, there are tools that can do a lot of these processes for you and make your tasks easier. And one of these tools is Frase! 

What is Frase?

Frase (also referred to as Frase IO) is a cloud-based content creation platform that helps businesses create and manage digital content more efficiently. Started in 2016, Frase has its headquarters in Boston, is available online to anyone, and has a lot of great features that can help you with content creation and content planning.

Frase uses artificial intelligence to analyze a business’s content needs and then creates templates that can be used to produce new content more quickly and efficiently. Frase Answers will scan your entire website and create an intelligent knowledge base. It can basically work to answer questions your visitors may have 24/7, which improves the user experience and gives you more time to work on other important things within your business.

It also offers a content management system that helps businesses keep track of their content, publish it to multiple platforms, and measure its performance. As a result, Frase can help businesses save time and money while still producing high-quality content. 

How Does Frase Work?

As a multi-purpose tool, the way it works depends on which functionality you are using with it. In general, you will log into your Frase dashboard from the browser at https://app.frase.io/

From here, you will see a menu on the left side. This menu has:

  • Documents
  • AI Tools
  • SEO Tools
  • Account
  • Help
  • Updates

Under Documents, you will find all the documents you are working on inside of Frase. You can create folders here for different projects, which is one of my favorite features because I work with a lot of content and organization is important.

I organize my folders by website/domain name. You can organize however you want, but the goal is just to make sure you can find the documents you need when you want them. There’s also a search function and you can use this for all the documents as a whole, or you can search specific document folders.

You can also filter your documents by status:

  • All
  • Researching
  • Writing
  • Optimizing
  • Completed
  • Published

This is such a simple but incredibly useful feature that I use all the time. It allows me to log into Frase and at any given time see what I’m working on, what is still in process, what has published, and even what keywords and topics I’ve already covered on a particular site.

For organizational purposes, this is invaluable. It saves me so much time and helps me keep track of all the content for all of my different sites. 

Using Documents Inside Frase

Once you click on a project title, you will get two different tabs at the top. One will say “content brief” and the other says “My Content”. I will explain more below about how the different features work, but these two tabs are how you access them.

Within that space, you can copy and paste, import from a URL, or type directly into the space provided. Once the content is in this space, that is what will be used for some of the additional features below. You will see tabs on the right side of your screen for:

  • Research
  • Outline
  • AI Write
  • Optimize
  • Links
  • Help

Before I tell you more about how each of these is used, let’s cover the basics of the features within Frase. You may not use all of them. For example, I don’t use the AI writer at all, but I use all of the other features and I find it more than worth it for them. Let’s explore this. 

Features

Let’s take a deeper look into each of the features so that you can understand better how Frase works and how this tool can help you with your content creation. 

Keyword Research

First up is keyword research, which is a very important part of the process of any content creation.

Questions and Topic Research

This is one of my favorite parts because it shows you directly what people are searching for on the topic you choose, which helps you create content that directly answers the questions they want to know. Any content creator or content strategist can tell you the importance of topic research.

It’s one thing to know your keywords, but you also need to have topical relevance and know how to use those keywords effectively. This is something that I believe the Questions and Topic Research feature can help you with.

This tool helps you see the questions your audience is asking so that you can answer those questions for them in your content. You can use the tool to automate the entire process for researching these questions. It will pull from sites like:

  • Quora
  • Reddit

And from People Also Ask and Search Autocomplete Results. This is perfect if you are added an FAQ schema to your post.

When using this tool, Frase gives you a list of questions. Then, it will also tell you the source of the questions and the monthly search volume of the keyword. For me, this is a great tool to determine the keywords that are most in demand.

I use this tool to help me create my content because it shows me what information people are looking for. You can then use that for your headings and subheadings of your posts. You can use this to create a piece of pillar content and then use additional questions to build out an entire cluster of articles on that content. 

Content Briefs

You can also use Frase to create your own content briefs. Once you do your keyword research, you can then use that research to help you create an outline and brief of the content you want to create. I will often use the keyword research and the questions and topic research to build out my brief.

You can use the AI tool to create a content brief before you begin drafting your articles. This can be for your own personal use, or it can be to assign a writer or content creator who is working on your project with you.

Some of the factors it will automatically put into your content briefs for you are:

  • Overview
  • People Also Ask section
  • SERO
  • Top 20 Topics
  • Questions
  • Headers
  • Statistics
  • External Links

You can choose to automate the brief and it will plug all these things in for you, or you can simply choose the sections you want and skip the others. Even if you let it automate fully for you, that doesn’t mean you have to use all the content that gets put into the brief.

Frase allows you to create unlimited content briefs so you can use it as much or as little as you want. To use it, click on the “Workflows” tab and then click “Automate Content Brief”. You can then choose the sections. To insert them, click “Insert Brief into Editor”.

That’s it!

The AI will do the rest for you, and you’ll end up with a very effective, up-to-date content brief that you can use to flesh out your article, or to give to your content creator or freelance writer to create for you. 

Content Optimization

Another great feature of Frase is the content optimization. As mentioned above, you can use it for your keyword research, but then what do you do with the information? Once you’ve started writing your draft, you can also use the content optimization tool to make sure your article is properly optimized.

It’s also a great way to ensure you don’t overoptimize. Another way to use this great tool is for content you’ve already created. Even if it’s already published on your site, you can use this tool to see if it’s optimized well. If not, you can edit it and bring it up to speed.

This is a great example of how Frase is valuable outside of just new content creation. Using it to help ensure all the content currently on your site is properly optimized makes it even more valuable.

When you pull the URL of your content into this tool, it will pull the content in the same way as if you were writing a new article here.

Then, it will compare your article with the top 20 search engine results for that same phrase and will give you edits to help you improve. The tool basically tells you what you need to do to compete with the top position. It gives you data like:

    • How many times to use the keyword (or if you’ve used it too much)
    • The average word count (and if your article falls short)
    • Other topics you didn’t cover that the competition did

Using this, you can help fill content gaps and also just create better content overall. Once you use this a bunch of times, you will also begin to intuitively know better how to create content that is optimized well. 

Answer Engine

Simply type in a question, and Frase will search its database of over 1 million questions and answer it for you. You can also ask Frase follow-up questions to get more information on a topic. Frase also allows you to save questions so that you can come back to them later.

It’s easy to set up the Frase Answer Engine on your sites and then run a crawl. Once you have it all set up, users can ask your bot questions and it will show them answers found from your blog posts or articles. Basically, it’s like a mini search engine for your site. 

Pricing Plans

If that all sounds good to you, then your next question might be how much it’s going to cost you. There are several pricing plans available.

Solo

The cheapest plan is $14.99/month ($12.99 if you pay for a year at a time).

For new projects that require up to 1 article per week.

  • 1 User Seat
  • Write + Optimize 4 Articles / month
  • Generate 20,000 AI Characters / month

 

Basic

The next tier up is $44.99/month ($37 if you pay for a year at a time)

For organizations with a content plan and SEO goals.

  • 1 User Seat
  • Write + Optimize 30 Articles / month
  • Generate 20,000 AI Characters / month

 

Team

The largest plan is for $114.99/month ($97 if you pay for a year at a time)

For teams that need more flexibility and collaboration.

  • 3 User Seats ($25/mo per extra)
  • Write + Optimize Unlimited Articles
  • Generate 20,000 AI Characters / month

The Pro Add-On for $35/mo

Get unlimited AI-Generated Characters, as well as other premium features for an additional $35/mo

$1 Trial

If you’re not sure whether or not Frase is for you, they do offer a 5-day $1 trial so you can see for yourself. The trial includes:

  • Unlimited Question Research
  • Five documents (Note: Creating one article or optimizing an existing article counts as one document.)
  • One crawl through Google Search Console
  • One Answer Engine 30-day test

As with any free trial, it’s very important you remember to cancel if you don’t want to keep it, or you will be billed the full price for Frase.

 

Every Plan Comes With

Every plan will give you:

  • Automated content briefs
  • Content scoring
  • Content editor
  • Share documents
  • Project status settings
  • Team project folders
  • Google Search Console
  • Custom templates
  • Outline builder

 

Frase Pros and Cons

Before using any app or tool, it pays to look at the pros and cons for it to see how it compares to your needs.

Pros

Let’s take a look at some of the benefits to the tool:

  • It helps you research keywords
  • Compares your content to similar content ranking well on the internet
  • You can use for unlimited documents
  • Low learning curve/ easy to use

Cons

And everything has cons, so let’s take a look at potential downsides:

  • The cost can be high for some people, especially if you are new and not earning a lot with your site(s) yet
  • It doesn’t have a mobile app

AI Writer

I do not recommend or endorse AI writing tools, as I feel nothing can replace a real, human writer. Just look at this blog 😉

That said, as far as AI writer tools go, Frase is not rated very highly. It claims to automatically generate optimized content for you but there is no built-in plagiarism detector and it gets low ratings when compared to other AI writer tools.

Customer Support

Another question you might have regarding this tool is how the Customer Support measures up. I’ve not ever really needed but they do have both email and live support for their users. Email support typically replies within 24 hours. Live chat support is available Monday through Friday from 9 A.M. to 6 P.M. (EST).

They also have a thorough Help Center full of articles covering all the things their tool can do and popular questions people have about using Frase. There are also some video tutorials to help walk you through it if you are new or stuck on using a particular feature.

Conclusions

All in all, I think it’s an extremely solid tool for content research and creation. When you want to take your content marketing to the next level, this is a tool that you will use again and again. However, it can be costly so if you’re not producing a large amount of content monthly, it might not be the best investment for you at this time.