Frase.io
Starts from $45 per month
Pros
- An all round content research and optimization tool
- Built-in AI copywriting feature
- Proprietary AI technology for content writer and doesnt depend on any other third party API's
- Custom templates and frameworks
Cons
- No live chat support
- No free plan
- Slightly confusing pricing model
- Lack of native integrations and Zapier integration
One of the hardest parts of running an online business is identifying and executing a consistent source of high-quality traffic. It could make or break your business model.
Although so many new channels have come up in the recent past for website traffic but for the sheer quality of the traffic and conversion rates, nothing comes close to SEO.
However, as good as organic traffic is when it comes to quality, it does come with quite a few challenges.
Unlike paid advertising where you can spend a defined amount of money and get instant conversions, organic traffic takes time to see results.
Frase as an SEO tool can be used for multiple cases including,
- Building content outline and briefs,
- Writing content easily with the AI assistant,
- Optimizing existing content to improve the ranking,
- Content Research to come up with new ideas for articles, etc.
How good is it in executing each of the above use cases? Well, let us find it out in this review.
Dashboard, Features, and User Interface
Once you are done with the initial sign-up, you are welcomed to the main dashboard that is super clean with bare minimal navigation elements.
With SaaS apps getting overly complicated and the user interfaces getting so cluttered, it is refreshing to see a very minimalistic user interface that is easy to navigate.
Everything in Frase starts as a document, so the first thing to do is to make a new document. You are given two choices, either to start one completely from scratch or to optimize an existing document which could be a live URL.
You have to then enter the target search query that you want to rank for. It is important that it is not too short to get enough context or too long making it quite complex for the tool to fetch the necessary data.
You can save a set of documents under a specific folder for better organization. It could come in handy for agencies that use the tool for multiple clients under the same account.
It is also possible to define the country you want to target in terms of ranking and the type of search results you want Frase to pull in while building up the content outline.
By default, Frase will pull the top 20 Google search results for your target keyword but if you know of a specific competitor that ranks highly for the search term, you can enter that domain.
Also, when it comes to the languages, apart from English, Frase supports Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. Although it is a good range, the absence of Asian languages is definitely a negative.
Content Outline Builder
Once you enter your target search term with all the preferred settings, you will get inside the main content outline builder.
The right side of the menu shows you all the elements of the content editor including SERP, Brief, Optimize, Questions, AI writer, and Templates.
Unser the SERP section, Frase will analyze all the top-ranking pages for your search term and provide a short summary on the average word count, number of headers, number of links & images, average domain authority, and the number of backlinks.
This will give you a fair idea of what is exactly needed if you want to outrank your competitors for your target search term.
Also, for each of the top-ranking pages, you will get a detailed breakdown of the headings used with the header tag that you can copy and start building your content outline.
This lets you mix and match the headers from different pages and easily build out the entire outline for your content in a few minutes.
However, if you really want to stand out from the crowd and add value with content for your audience, it is crucial that you can just take inspiration from these headings and be completely unique in your approach to them.
The real advantage of this is that it drastically reduces the research time you need to come up with an overall topic cluster for your article as you get an idea of what your main competitors are covering on the subject.
The Brief section as it suggests gives you more details under each heading that lets you have a glance at the overall article.
Under the Optimize section, you can see a list of many potential keywords that can be used in order to improve the chance of higher ranking.
However, it is important that the article is not purposefully stuffed with keywords which really diminishes the quality of it from the reader's perspective.
The Questions section is a really interesting one where you can find a list of all the related questions asked and answered on the SERP with regards to your target keyword.
This can be very useful for getting ranked on Featured snippets as you are answering very specific questions that are mostly searched for. You can easily add detailed FAQ sections in your articles by just including these questions and answering them precisely.
In addition to the general questions asked on the SERPs, you can also see questions listed on Google's People Also Ask, Quora, and Reddit to help you completely dominate the search ranking across various channels.
AI Content Writer
One of the best aspects of Frase is that it has a complete AI writer built-in so that you can have your whole content research, writing, and optimization process all within the same tool. If you are an agency, this saves a ton of time making everything easier to manage and coordinate with team members.
It has to be purchased as an add-on for $35 per month which gives access to unlimited content generation making it excellent value for money.
Once you have built out the content outline in Frase, you can then head to the My Content tab to start with writing the content.
It is possible to set the length of the sentences generated with a range of 50 to 250 words. Frase also lets you control how creative the content generated must be.
You can also enter a brief description of the content you want to write as it can help the AI to get the context of it and come up with better quality content.
Once you have completed these settings, you can pull the content outline you have already built by just clicking on the Brief tab on the right sidebar.
You get a nice distraction-free interface to start building out the crux of your content for the article. You can point the cursor at the point of interest and simply click on "Write for Me" which will trigger the AI writer into action.
At any point, you can see the number of words in the whole article to keep tabs on the post length. It is possible to get up to 3 variations of the content generated so that you have a choice of selecting the best quality output.
Below are some of the templates that are available in the AI writer of Frase that you can utilize to build the content as per your needs.
- Attention Interest Desire Action (AIDA Framework),
- Problem Agitate Solution (PAS Framework),
- Before After Bridge (BAB Framework),
- Blog Introduction,
- Blog Title,
- Bullet point to Answers,
- Definition,
- Feature to Benefit,
- Featured Snippet,
- List of Questions,
- Listicle Ideas,
- Meta Description,
- Metaphor/Analogy,
- Next Paragraph,
- Next Sentence,
- Outline,
- Paragraph Compression,
- Paragraph Finisher,
- Paragraph Rewriter,
- Paragraph for Heading,
- Paragraph with Context,
- Pros & Cons,
- Related Topics,
- Sentence Rewriter,
- Summary Bullets,
- Taglines,
- Title Ideas.
It is a fairly decent array of templates that can cover the use case of a majority of business types. You can use the backslash command that instantly displays the list of all the templates to choose from.
For example, if you want to choose the blog introduction template, the editor will just ask for a short brief of your post title and you can run the template to start writing.
When you select any sentence or paragraph in the editor and right-click on it, you will be presented with a handy toolbar in the AI writer that lets you select one of the following options,
- Rewrite
- Write about this
- Write with transition
- Addition
- In Addition
- Plus
- Furthermore
- Moreover
- Additionally
- What's more
- Contrast
- However
- Nevertheless
- Nonetheless
- On the other hand
- But
- While
- In contrast
- Sequence
- Then
- After
- Afterward
- Next
- Firstly
- Finally
- Condition
- If
- As long as
- Provided that
- Unless
- Otherwise
- Result
- Hence
- Therefore
- Accordingly
- As a result
- So
- Summary
- All in all
- In summary
- In short
- In brief
- In conclusion
- Addition
- Smart list
- Topics
- Questions
- Outline
- Takeaways.
As you can see, with the AI writer, you get the flexibility to build sentences with the type of context you need and with the words that you want to be used.
When you select the rewrite option, you get a list of 4 sentences to choose from. You can also select the general rewrite or a more formal tone of voice which could be used for B2B communication.
The third option is called Next, which in addition to rewriting the existing content will also suggest options for the next sentence.
Content Optimization
As explained earlier, in Frase, you can either optimize existing content or any new content that is yet to be published.
We will see more about optimizing new content as that is what most people would be utilizing it for.
What Frase essentially does is compare your content with the top 20 ranked pages for the target search query and provide suggestions across various segments of the article.
Frase will analyze the topics in their content and suggest you add those topics if you have not already added them. To easily see how your article compares with the best, you can see a topic score that gets updated as you keep optimizing your article.
Higher the topic score, obviously better optimized your content is and you also can see a benchmark bar which is an average topic score of all the highest-ranking pages.
You also get a list of keywords and the number of times you have mentioned it in your article when compared to your competitors.
These keywords are color graded in green, yellow, red, and grey. Green means you are good to go and the keyword has been used enough times, while yellow suggests that these keywords have to be used a bit more in order to improve the overall topic score.
Finally, the red color suggests that you have used the keyword way too many times and your article might get flagged keyword stuffed by the search engines.
This is really helpful as it is very much possible that many times you could unintentionally mention a keyword multiple times and it is quite difficult to spot it manually.
If a keyword that is on the list is not mentioned in your article and you don't have much knowledge about it, all you need to do is to just click on the keyword, and Frase will run a search of the keyword on all your competitor's content and display it for you.
This drastically brings down the research time and lets you write about topics within a very short duration. It is also possible to do this keyword optimization on long-tail keywords and topic clusters as well.
Topic clusters show a bunch of related topics you can utilize on the article and thereby improving the opportunity to rank for multiple keywords and searches.
If the list of keywords is too cluttered to have a clear view, you can also visualize it with a topic heatmap where all the keywords are tabulated and shown exactly how many times they are used by your competitors.
This gives a bird's-eye view of the topic cluster and makes it visually easier to do the content optimization.
Frase lets you easily share the documents with your teammates using a link so that if you are an agency, the whole team can collaborate and work effectively for content research and optimization.
Pricing
Frase has 3 plans in total ranging from $45 to $115 per month. The major difference between the Basic and Team plan is the number of user seats and the number of document credits you get.
For a solo user, the basic plan is more than sufficient, but even if you are a small-scale agency, the team plan is the best value for money for the 2 additional seats and the access to unlimited document credits.
The team plan also gives access to Google Docs integration which could be very important to collaborate with your team members.
However, these pricing plans are only for content research and optimization features. If you need the AI writer of Frase, it has to be purchased as a separate SEO add-on for $35 per month.
Yes, it is an incredibly good deal as for $35 you get unlimited content generated, but it would have been better to have it included in one of the plans and not as a separate add-on as it really confuses the pricing structure slightly.
There is also an enterprise plan if you want to purchase it for your organization with multiple users. For a fairly large content marketing agency, Enterprise might be the plan to go for as there are no limits on the number of users and documents.
Support
There is no live chat support both on the main website and within the app dashboard which is not the best if you are in urgent need of any help.
However, the good thing is Frase makes up for it with really good support documentation and tutorial videos.
Text-based documentation is quite extensive covering all the important features and the Frase academy has a lot of useful videos to learn how to get the best out of the tool for your specific use case.
Best Frase Alternatives
As good as Frase is as a product in the SEO and content space, there are definitely a few good alternatives if you are looking for some choices. Let's have a look at a few of those here.
Surfer SEO is another fantastic content research and optimization tool that lets you build your content outline and optimize it easily.
Similar to Frase, you can optimize both existing content and new posts from scratch. It is also possible to run white-labeled SEO audit reports for your clients with Surfer SEO.
You get detailed insights on page speed, backlink profile, keyword density, number of headings, NLP sentiment, meta tags, etc. to completely optimize the content.
Surfer SEO has a handy chrome extension as well that lets you work easily with both Google Docs and WordPress making content optimization super quick and effortless.
The outline builder is one of the best features in Surfer SEO that can assist you to come up with the core structure of your article in minutes. You can also set it up in such a way as to match your tone of writing.
INK is another excellent all-in-one content generation and optimization tool that has a host of features to both write and optimize your content.
If your focus is on content generation on a large scale, WordHero is an excellent option as it offers an unlimited number of words generated at a very reasonable cost.
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As it is based on both GPT-3 and their own proprietary AI, the quality of content generated is really quite good.
If you are looking purely for an AI copywriting tool that massively helps you in curating and writing content for yourself and your clients, ClosersCopy is one of the best options. It is an excellent piece of software with powerful features.
It has its own proprietary AI technology and a powerful framework-building feature that makes it one of the best AI copywriting tools.
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There are more than 300 frameworks available that support more than 100 languages to support a very wide range of use cases.
Jasper is one of the most feature-packed copywriting tools. Its Boss Mode makes it an incredibly powerful option that you can use to instruct the AI to exactly match your needs when it comes to writing content.
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One more good thing about Jasper is that you also get native integration with Surfer SEO making it a fantastic combination to get all the functionality to get from Frase.
ArtSpace is a SaaS tool that helps you with the generation and editing of images that are required for your articles and blog posts.
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Conclusion
To wrap up, Frase is a really well-thought-out and put-together tool for content and SEO-related tasks.
The best part about is that it is truly an all-around content tool that lets you do everything from content research and AI-assisted writing to content optimization under one dashboard.
Individually there might be slightly better tools for each use case, for example, both Jarvis and ClosersCopy are better in AI copywriting, but as an all-in-one content software, Frase is truly one of a kind and definitely worthy to try out.