Powerful Content Optimization Tools for SEO

A huge Content Optimization Tool update. Inlinks has released a major upgrade to their Content Optimization Tools, built entirely from the ground up around topic analysis. Now content optimization for SEO marketing is faster and more accurate than ever before.

What is a Content Optimization Tool?

Writing intelligent marketing copy or knowledge leadership pieces is only half the battle. Understanding how machines interpret the content and making the machine understanding align with human understanding is essential for SEO. Content optimizations tools make this process much more scientific.

As modern Search engines like Google move towards understanding audiences, semantics and the intent of their questions, so traditional keyword-based copywriting has suffered. The new Inlinks SEO Content Optimization tools understand topics first and foremost, before creating a content structure that gives content writers the freedom to remain creative, whilst addressing user intent and solving the user’s challenge and aligning closely with the SERPs content returned by Google and other search engines. If you are looking for a better business process for optimizing content, you will love the new content editor. The content gets created much faster and with more accuracy than before.

New Features for 2021

• See your SEO Score update in real-time as you type and add topics
• Always on text editor updates wordcount and saves as you go
• Find the topics you are not yet using and easily add them
• Whole new editor and layout
• Better data interpretation and data visualization

Modern Day Copywriting for Search

Ranking in Search organically was traditionally dependant on a clever content strategy that involved content marketing around specific keywords. In recent years, however, search engines have first analyzed the content on a page and broken it up into topics that are predefined in Google’s Knowledge Graph, which a machine learning algorithm can better understand. The search engine then similarly analyzes the user query to understand the topics sought by the user and the user intent of the query. In many instances, this offers improvements in Information quality. The search engine then matches results based on these topic groupings rather than keywords alone. Of course, SEOs still wish to use keyword research to help focus their blog or page. Still, if the content is first analyzed semantically, the chances of answering the user’s query can dramatically increase. Good strategic management can dramatically improve content marketing.

Highlights of the Content Optimization Tool

All these features are in the launch release of the SEO Content Analysis tool:

• Creates a knowledge graph of the content already ranking
• Maps that knowledge graph against your own content’s knowledge graph
• Shows what topics are common and the topic density
• Provides a gap analysis between your content and the ranking content
• See the topics defined by Google’s NLP API ON top of our powerful NLP.
• Word counts and topics added are updated in real-time
• Powerful Question finder makes adding FAQs a breeze
• Shows where topics are overused or underused within the corpus of results
• Shows the main topics used in each of the top resulting URLs, together with the links in the body content to other pages on the same site and the number of links to external content
• Offers a Gap analysis on the topics you are missing
• Shows Long tail keywords
• Suggests a proposed content structure
• Shows questions being answered
• provides a WYSIWIG onscreen text editor to help you improve your content.

Let’s show you how it all looks and works. For some SEOs, it might change your life.

How to Optimize Content for SEO

1: Decide on a Keyword, Key Topic or Question

Even though Search is moving towards answering user intent, that intent still has to start (for SEO) in user input. Customers and SEOs alike are still keyword focused, but your query could be a question such as “How does the Knowledge Graph work”. In this case, we selected the more generic phrase “knowledge graph”. Note that the keyphrase will be checked against a specific market/country, as defined by the user’s project. You select the query when you create the brief, and from here, Inlinks uses the Google API to return the top results. These are then crawled, and a knowledge graph of the combined topics is created.

2: Note the SEO score (and its limitations)

The Content Optimization Tool’s SEO score should be one part of your content strategy quality checks. It is shown as a percentage and is based on all the combined analyses in the SEO Content Optimization tool, but does not address the overall quality of links into the site or take into account how Google might change the results for the user depending on (say) their location, age or past search history. Adding these metrics into the score would be unfair to the copywriter who will be aiming to perfect their content based on these steps, as these are factors beyond their ability to influence.

3: Understand the Serps Orientation

The blue bar at the bottom left expands the analysis pane to almost the full width of the page. This expanded view helps you to dig deeper into the audit.

The Serps Orientation pie chart gives an overall idea of what categories the topics discussed fall into when answering the query. That is to say, a third of the topics mentioned in the resulting Serps are around technology-based topics in this example. This should help decide who would be best to write the content and what overall approach they should take. Technology heavy SERPs may require someone with an engineering or problem-solving style, whilst a category like “society” might require a more flowery writer.

(You may also see “User Intent” there… this is in beta and we’ll discuss this later. contact me if you are interested in this and would like to blog about it.)

@Dixon_Jones

4: Address the Low-Hanging Fruit

In the example here, the content analyzed in the Serps is compared to the content you have created. If you have not yet started on content, the recommendations will be a little less specific. Note that Inlinks looks at the average length of body content contains all the URLs currently ranking. Whilst the length of an article is not necessarily a ranking factor, this may give you an idea of the workload involved in creating better content than the top-ranking pages. Also, note that there are a LOT more topics to consider than just the one you started with. The Key recommendations will either prompt you for the most commonly discussed topics or give you a list of the most significant topics missing from your content if you have specified any content.

5: Note the Topic Filtering

The Topic Analysis tab shows the total number of topics Inlinks has built into the knowledge graph used to answer the query. 167 in this example. To the right is an arrow allowing you to filter the results. This may be very helpful if the search query has several unrelated groups of resulting ideas. The concept of “Gold” might be relevant in design or investments, but you may not want to concentrate too much on topics in the wrong category. A very useful filter, here, is the “Gap Analysis” filter, which will only focus on the topics others have written about, but you have not.

The other descriptions map onto the pie chart in step 3. So Technology is at the top. This also lets you break down the “others” listing in the pie chart.

6: Drill into each Topic

It will be important not just to use the words used to label each topic! If you click on the topic label, inLinks will drill into what it means. It will bring in the underlying concept from Wikipedia and also show related topics to the one under analysis.

Clicking on the topic label “Infromation quality” reveals the definition of according to Wikipedia. We then show you other synonyms that Inlinks believes is semantically close in this context. If a topic seems to be of interest to you and you want to add it to your copy, the “+Add” button literally pastes the Wikipedia definition into the Content Ideas on the editor, for you to fill in the details later. If you think our AI made a mistake, press “Report an Error” to let us know that we need to look again at this area of the Knowledge Graph. You might find next week we do better!

The Competitors’ related topics is a new insight for 2021. You can click on these to get more insights into what they are saying about these topics.

Then we do not stop there! We start to show semantically related topics to “Information Quality”, and we break these up by category. This allows you not just to copy the others but go one step further, delving deeper into the topic in verticles that make sense for your business. Inlinks is a Technology company, so it looks like “Google”. “Web Content” and “Bing” are salient concepts to add. I’ll click the “+” symbols to add these into my content ideas on the editor.

7: See Each Topic’s Importance and Presence

However you filter the results, the green counts represent topics you have mentioned, and the blue circles represent gaps in your content. The number on the bar also gives you an idea of how often you use the content. When you see a green dash, chances are you have used a synonym. It is also possible that you have a number in yellow. This means you have indeed used the topic, but when compared to the competition, it is either overused or occasionally underused.

In general, the more important topics appear at the top of the list, but since Inlinks is displaying results against various factors, this is not always the case.

8: Avoid too much of a good thing!

Inlinks is pleased to demonstrate when you (or one of the competitors) might be over-emphasizing a topic. The numbers represent the low, mean and high usage in the ranking results. The circled number shows how your content compares. This metric allows you to see whether a topic is discussed and how heavily the content focuses on each topic. This, in turn, allows individual suggestions or recommendations around topics. In the example shown, the first topic is already mentioned 29 times on one competitor’s page, but on average, your competitors focus on the idea 17 times! Perhaps a little more focus needed here. Then again, the third line shows one competitor using a topic some 81 to 4 times, so a simple reference to the topic is probably OK..

9: Filter down to the good stuff

Whilst there is a lot on the screen, there is plenty more to discover and use to improve your SEO Content optimization. To help users mould their content around their own business, you can filter the topic suggestions using this dropdown. You can just see the missing topics in your content or find the topics in the categories most suited to your verticle. This quick filtering can often weed out generic content like social media signals.

10: No more forgetting to save!

One of the biggest frustrations for users in the original content optimization editor was that there was no Autosave feature, We later addressed this, but now the system detects when you have changed the text in the editor and will autosave every 30 seconds. If that’s not quick enough for you, this button shows you whether the saved version is up to date and clicking it saves the copy in the content editor.

You can also click on the “confrim score” button as well. This rund the full NLP algorithm over the editor and creates a better SEO Score than making changes on the fly and haviung an estimate.

11: See competing Serps in a whole new way

Back in the expanded view, the SERP Analysis tab shows lots of good things about what your competition is saying in the content. We show their article length and some of our key metrics. If you click on the headlines button or more info button for any competitor you get even more inspiration.

12: Easily generate FAQs with our cool question finder

Still not able to crack the SERPs? The Questions tab means you can throw away most other Question finder tools you might use. If we don’t find a bunch of questions that are relevant even before you click on this tab, you can simply type a word or short phrase and we’ll generate the questions on the fly.

12: Develop a content structure

The structure tab may not be for everyone but is especially useful when starting to create content from scratch. It gives a suggested hierarchy to your ideas. This may not be appropriate for your use case but is excellent if you are outsourcing the writing and do not want the copywriter to stray too far from the core concepts.

Edit your content in a safe environment

Optimizing your content SEO based on Topics rather than just keywords will significantly increase the variety of content you might create. This handy text editor allows you to edit the content in a sandbox without the need to update your page or blog continually. Initially, there will be no content to score against when creating a brief – just the competition cohort. You may choose to start writing here, and as soon as you do, the tool will be able to analyze your draft content. On the other hand – if you already have live content, this editor can automatically bring in the live content, allowing you to edit it in the safety of the Inlinks platform. As soon as you edit this content, the system reverts to the local version. When you make that content live, update the article URL to revert to analyzing the live content.

Some Concluding Thoughts

Are links less important now?

Not at all. Wikipedia describes the Internet like this:

The Internet (a portmanteau of interconnected network) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that use the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link devices worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies.

Citation from Wikipedia.

Links form the very fabric of the Internet. Not only do they link devices, but they link websites. Not only do they link websites, but they also link web pages. Now, with topic centred optimization, links also connect topics and ideas. They allow machines to more easily find related concepts and in doing so, so Google would have you believe, increases the ability for machines to better understand your content. Indeed, from the examples in this post, the pages on the web that seem to get the most visibility are the ones that link out the most. We also know that PageRank was the foundation of Google well before topical PageRank or semantic analysis was in the public consciousness. Reputable links INTO a web page help give the content authority and context.

Can I share with my Bloggers and Writers?

You may have noticed a “share link” button in the screenshots. This generates a read-only URL which you can share with anyone. Here is the current state of play for THIS article.

How to get started

Using the Inlinks Content Optimization Tool is simple:

1: Log in or sign up for a free account at inlinks.net if you have not done so already.

2: Find the Content button (top right)

3: Click “Create a new Brief”

The free account limits the content brief creation, but starter plans won’t break the bank.

Is this tool affordable?

Of course! Inlinks is one of the lowest entry cost content optimization tools on the market! Whilst there is a free version of Inlinks for up to 20 pages, this module becomes useful when users are on a paid plan which starts at thirty-nine bucks a month. Other comparative tools start in the thousands and do not contain this level of sophistication.

Author: Dixon Jones.