Frase Review: Stay A Cut Above Your Competition

I wrote this Frase review after using it for several months. I’ll be covering how I came across this SEO tool, what I didn’t like about it, and how the tool evolved and became my all-time favorite.

During my hunt for AI content generation tools, I came across this AI SEO software on Appsumo. Right off the bat, I could see the value in their offering. Like a little kid with his newfound toy, I started playing around with Frase.

But I felt one major lacking…

It analyzes all the top 20 results, and there was no way to choose the sources. It just didn’t make sense to me. There are many scenarios where I’d want to exclude a search result. For example, I’d get inaccurate recommendations if I included a coupon site that ranks because of black hat links.

Few other instances where I needed the filtering option:

• Intent mismatch (e-commerce sites ranking among blog posts)
• Outlier pages very different from other ranking pages
• Pages ranked solely based on their authority, like Wikipedia or Amazon
• Online directories, when I write informational blog posts

There was no way to exclude these from the analysis. I shared my thoughts in the Frase review on Appsumo, but I still went ahead and bought the tool because it had potential, and more importantly, the team behind it seemed passionate, responsive, and open to suggestions.

It turned out to be one of my best decisions. The tool evolved and became everything I’d hoped it would, and much more.

What is Frase IO?

Frase io is an Artificial Intelligence-powered content optimization tool that helps you create high-quality search engine optimized content. The software has an AI writer that uses natural language generation to make writing faster. It comes with an answer bot that crawls your website and provides snippets of answers to questions your users ask.

The pros and cons list is only updated occasionally, so it might not reflect the most recent changes.

Topic Idea generator 

Question Ideas

Frase places a lot of importance on creating resources for users, so it’s only natural they have a questions section. Plugin your keyword and hit enter; it collects question ideas from the below sources:

• People Also Ask
• Search Autocomplete
• Quora
• Reddit
• Related Searches

You can create a document from a query or save them to a list and add them to your blog post later. This feature is useful for adding an FAQ section to your blog post. Frase recently introduced keyword search volume; it helps to choose phrases with high monthly search volume. You can filter the questions by user intent as well, although you’d still need a keyword research tool to come up with content ideas. 

Frase Concept Map

The concept map gives you a visual representation of Wikipedia’s Knowledge Graph. The concept map feature is handy to create a pillar-cluster model. You can then click on a particular topic to pull up the Wikipedia brief. You can either read the wiki or create a new document from the keyword phrase.

Content Research, Creation, and optimization feature

Once you’ve identified the topic or target keyword from the list of ideas, you can move to the Frase content editor. You can either start writing new content or import existing content. Frase has a research assistant, which gives you a birds-eye of the Google SERP results. This feature has helped me cut several hours from my content creation process.

The overview section gives you a competitor analysis of results ranking in the search engines:

• Average word count
• Avg topic score, which is their propriety algorithm
• Select sources
• Avg sections
• Avg external links
• Avg images
• Search intent still in Beta
• Topics
• Questions
• Sections
• Statistics
• Domain authority and backlink report for the search engine ranking pages

You can compare your site against the top-ranking pages by checking a box. You can also switch to different tabs with the same user experience, but additional data:

Summaries tab showing topics and crossheads for individual results in the SERP

The topics tab shows the number of times a phrase should be used on your page and assigns you a content score based on your topic coverage. The topic card turns green at optimum keyword usage and red if you use it 1.8 times more than the average or less than 1 percent density. The score updates in real-time as you edit your text. You can filter by missing topics to fill in content gaps.

SERP (search engine results page) mentions and Co occurrence

Clicking into topic cards will show you how the phrase is used in paragraphs. It also shows you the topics used together in the same sentence and related topics (semantically related topics from Wikipedia knowledge graph).

Questions tab gives you all the queries in the SERP

Links tab gives you all the links mentioned in the top-ranking pages in the search engine results

The Stats tab scrapes all the data mentioned in the top results. It picks up some random information when a number or percent is mentioned on a page, but it does a decent job of filtering these out in most cases.

The news tab gives you all the latest news related to your topic. The results are arranged from newest to oldest, so you have the latest news at the top. I find this a brilliant feature. You can piggyback on the latest news to promote your business on social media.

There is an option to automate the content brief by running the AI-generated content brief option. It gives you a detailed content brief with topic ideas and an average topic score to target. It’s helpful when you want to outsource writing and give a clear outline to your writers.

Frase’s FAQ Schema feature

This gives you the ability to mark up your HTML with FAQ Schema automatically. FAQ rich results are where Google shows some of the frequently asked questions as accordions. Answering these will increase your visibility in the SERP. If you need more information on FAQ schema, you can read this resource by Google.

Search intent feature

Search intent shows you the type of articles that are currently ranking, so you know what Google or rather the user is looking expecting. The search intent is not the traditional commercial, informational, comparison, navigation, and branding model. They have a few more options:

• Long-form: in-depth articles
• Listicle: articles using an explicit list format
• How to: step by step guide
• Products: product pages
• News: recent/fresh articles
• Branded: company homepages
• Local: focused on a specific location
• Visual: short text with many images
• Video: short text with video
• Entity: content that discusses a knowledge graph type article
• Landing page: Company landing/pillar page and content hubs

Frase Answer Engine

Frase’s answer engine creates answers for your customer by using the information on your website. The best part is that you don’t have to write any crazy, complicated code or algorithms. It’s a set-and-forget setup, although it requires some training like any AI system. I don’t think it’s that complicated; it’ll take you 10-15 minutes (unless you start scrolling through your Spotify playlist hoping to find the perfect bot training song). Once you have set it up, it will be live on your website 24/7, fielding all your customers’ questions. The Frase answer bot allows users to switch to live chat, so users can connect with real people if the answer engine fails. Looking at the Frase answer reports can help you identify the knowledge gap.

Frase SEO add-on and AI writer

The team recently came out with an add-on, which gives you additional SEO data and AI writing features. You can create your own AI templates based on your data. While other writing tools in the market use GPT3, Frase uses its own proprietary AI model. The advantage of Frase’s AI model is that it doesn’t have topic filters like other AI content writing tools. The SEO add-on gives you unlimited text generation.

Frase Content analytics

The team recently beefed up the GSC integration to build out the Frase analytics dashboard. It helps you quickly identify information that falls in the below categories:

• Top results (pages or keywords in top ten and hasn’t experienced any ranking loss) 
• Quick win (pages that rose to position one to ten in 3 months from the publishing date)
• Ranked (Generating clicks, but no leading average position)
• Opportunity (Position between one to 50, but getting a lot of impressions)
• Decay (Lost more than two positions and clicks are decreasing)
• Unranked (No clicks and weak position)

These actionable insights will help content writers prioritize and create an optimization plan for every piece of content.

Frase Integrations

The most important integration is with your Google Search Console. This is required for the answer engine to perform correctly. Frase integrates seamlessly with several other marketing platforms such as Mailchimp, Hubspot, Google drive, to name a few. They have a WordPress integration, but that is temporarily parked to iron out some minor issues.

Support

Customer support is a big one for me when choosing my tools. Frase comes out on top here. They have built a loyal community and following by listening to their customers and by providing stellar support.

Here is another one.

All issues are addressed quickly in my experience. I’ve seen the team respond to issues in their Facebook group even on a Sunday.

Pricing 

They have a free trial, which is enough to test the waters. The free trial comes with unlimited Question Research, five documents, one search Google search console crawl, and one answer engine thirty-day test. Pricing might have changed from the time of writing this post, so please verify the current pricing on their website.

The basic package is $39.99 billed annually or $44.99 monthly, which gives you one user and 30 documents (briefs and optimization) per month.

They offer a growth plan for $99.99 billed annually and $114.99 monthly, which gives you three users and unlimited documents (briefs and optimization) per month.

The Answer Engine package comes at $199.99 per month billed annually and allows three users (with $15 per additional user), unlimited documents, and 500 answers/mo per Answer Engine ($50 per additional 100 answers).

Alternatives available in the market

There are several other tools in this segment. MarketMuse, a content intelligence platform, is the leader in this segment in terms of functionality and market share. MarketMuse is more of an enterprise tool being priced at $500 per month, but it offers personalized recommendations, access to content strategists, and done-for-you briefs. Clearscope is another enterprise-grade tool starting at $170 per month. It analyzes the top 30 results and suggests topics and subtopics you should cover.

Frase vs. Marketmuse

Frase is often compared to MarketMuse because both tools have overlapping functionalities.

Differences between Frase and MarketMuse

• Both Frase and MarketMuse use different data set for their topic modeling. Frase uses the top 20 ranking pages for their topic modeling, while MarketMuse analyzes thousands of pages to create their suggestions. Frase’s approach can help you rank in the top results because Google is already ranking similar pages. Market muse’s system goes a step further and enables you to create expert-level material that your competitors haven’t covered.
• Apart from the content optimization workflow, Frase has an answer bot that scrapes existing content on your website and delivers it to your website visitor. This can reduce your site’s bounce rate.
• Frase allows you to share editable links with your external writer to give them access to your content brief.
• MarketMuse has a research application that runs on an advanced algorithm. This application can help you identify closely related topics that you can use to create a topic cluster.
• The connect application available in MarketMuse will make internal linking recommendations by identifying the best pages on your site for each topic you cover.
• The compete application in MarketMuse gives you a head-to-head comparison with other pages ranking in the SERPs (search engine results page). This application can help you quickly identify the missing topics you can cover to stand out from the rest and become a thought leader.

I don’t think you should be thinking Frase vs. MarketMuse; it should be Frase and MarketMuse. Both tools can complement each other very well.

Conclusion

Frase will only get better over time, so consider adding it to your SEO toolkit if you’re a small business owner or a marketer. It can help to level up your content marketing game.