Change your Competitor List

When trying to write better content than anyone else, our content optimization tool uses the top search results to build a content brief. At times, though, you know better than the search engines as to what is the BEST content out there, so we have given you the chance to change the competitor cohort list for any given keyphrase:

Knowledge Graphs and Training Sets

When inLinks creates a content brief for your writers, it first creates a dedicated knowledge graph around the search term. This is a “training set”. By looking at a set of pages already seen as relevant or authoritative around a certain phrase, our NLP algorithm uses pattern matching and all sorts of jiggery-pokery to learn what topics are semantically close to the subject matter in this context.

That’s pretty cool, but the knowledge graph that is created is only as good as the training set the algorithm is given. So if the top results are not the best (and in my opinion, that is increasingly the case), then why not change the training set? Just switch out bad results and enter a URL that you feel we should crawl instead.

Beware of your own Bias

One thing I should say when using this feature… do not assume you are not being biased when you switch out a result. For example, I can absolutely imagine a brand like Nike thinking “I compete with Adidas and HiTec and Converse, so I would like URLs from these sites in my training set.” This would intuitively make sense for a marketing executive or SEO at Nike, who is fixated on beating these brands, not the market as a whole. The problem is that the “Best content” is brand agnostic and so making changes on this basis may well make your content brief worse. You might find yourself beating all the big brands, but actually NONE of the big brands is ranking on the search term you are optimizing for… or at least… not ranking due to better content.