Some principles never change – even in the ever-changing digital marketing world – like the evergreen “content is king.” In 2021, one of the most effective marketing strategies is still the creation of digital content for our audience, even though our ability and the technology to do so have significantly evolved. In this context, content automation is now king.
Companies and individual marketers alike are using more and more digital platforms and SEO tools for content writing. AI is now able to support us in better ways to produce content (also publishing and distributing it), and the market is offering more and better ways to satisfy our needs. Most likely, you have already been using these very tools.
We believe that SEO automation will be huge in 2021. Content creation will increasingly be a task performed by humans and AI working in tandem.
This is happening due to technological advances, of course, but also to a highly competitive market. The Internet is now a boundless ocean of competing content. To get the attention of our target, we must compete in quality, uniqueness and authority with a fierce crowd of competitors.
This article will define content automation, discuss how AI can help in generating content in a timely fashion, argue the reasons why we should use it, and provide a list of SEO tools and platforms for content writing.
1. What is content automation?
2. The ways in which AI generates effective content in a time-efficient manner
3. Why we should automate SEO content writing
4. SEO tools for content writing
4.1. MarketMuse
4.2. Topic
4.3. WordLift
4.4. QuillBot
4.5. Frase
4.6. Semantika
4.7. Clearscope
4.8. NeuralText
What is content automation?
Content Automation is the use of technologies, systems, and strategies that eliminate or significantly reduce human intervention at every step of the content creation process.
Its main goal is to be of assistance to professionals and companies by delegating the most repetitive and tedious work to AI. It revolves around the same principles and needs of industrial automation, although applied to digital marketing and, more specifically, to the sub-sector of content marketing.
The ways in which AI generates effective content in a time-efficient manner.
AI helps us at every step of the way in content creation, especially in the most time consuming and repetitive tasks.
Thanks to machine learning, a few platforms are able to analyze the structure of articles better suited to our needs through specific keyword usage and then generate detailed reports on them in a few seconds.
Moreover, advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) allow algorithms to better understand our inputs and then select content with pertinent information and with language closest to natural human expression.
With these improvements, we can summarize even very long excerpts. Just think how convenient this could be in creating meta-descriptions of our articles or texts accompanying social media dissemination.
We can ask AI to look for the most suitаble images to accompany our text.
We can even ask AI to create a whole text following our input, like in this famous example from The Guardian or to answer specific questions, like the ones Andrea Volpini, our CEO, asked to the davinci model on GPT-3 in an article on SEO trends in 2021.
Just imagine how much faster these tools can generate your content.
Why we should automate SEO content writing
The first reason is extremely simple: it’s time-saving and, consequently, cost-effective.
Just imagine you’re writing an important piece for your target. How long would it take to identify the best topic, find your keywords, research your sources, and analyze your competitors? How long would it take to manually apply the markup of structured data on your article in order for Google to fully understand your content and disseminate it as widely as possible?
Have you completed your estimate? Excellent. Can I give you some good news?
There are already a number of solutions in place that can do all this in a few clicks.
You can even estimate the time you’ll save by automating one or more of these tasks and multiply it by the number of contents you generate in a year. You will then have a realistic estimate of how much AI can contribute in cutting marketing costs.
Another reason to automate content is cutting down on human error. Just think of the time spent in looking for typos. An algorithm is never tired at 5pm on a Friday – but we are. When properly programmed, your tool will always find typos. As trained as our eyes can be, we will always make mistakes because of exhaustion, distraction, or simply … being human J. AI will always be more efficient than we could ever be in tasks like these and it would be wise to delegate them to AI.
Lastly, because it can process an enormous amount of data, AI can improve the quality of your content.
And just to calm those nagging fears, let me say one last thing about this: AI will never “steal” your job (maybe just a few monotonous tasks). Rather, it will allow you to do better work and to devote yourself to the tasks where you can really make a difference.
We’ve been suspicious of AI for more than two centuries, but machines do not take away our jobs. Jobs change and evolve because of technological advances. Whether we like it or not, this is also the future of content marketing.
SEO tools for content writing
Now that we know what content automation is, and how it can help us in digital marketing, let’s have a look at a few of the solutions available. This is a list of 8 tools that can help you in automating the writing of your SEO content.
MarketMuse
MarketMuse is a content marketing platform that, thanks to AI, transforms the way we research, plan and create our content.
Thanks to machine learning, MarketMuse’s algorithms can analyze a vast amount of data from published content on a specific topic, and it can create detailed briefings containing information on important related subjects. Plus, this platform can generate a detailed first draft based on KPI found in the briefing.
MarketMuse can also perform a comparative analysis of our competitors’ content using the same keywords, showing us how well we covered the subject compared to others.
This Boston-based firm offers various pricing plans to marketers and SEO professionals.
Plans start at $79/mo., paid annually. There is also a free trial option.
Topic
Topic is a platform that helps agencies and editors create briefings based on their content in half the time usually needed.
By inputting a keyword, Topic will analyze the first 30 results, highlighting not only the headings and keywords to include in your content, but also the questions to answer. You can also use this platform to create a rich outline.
Topic is therefore a tool to create content more swiftly, employing the model of GPT-3 language and machine learning.
This is a platform aimed primarily at agencies and editors.
Its plans start at $50/mo. There is no free trial option, but a demo is available upon request.
WordLift
WordLift is the AI-powered SEO tool that does the heavy lifting for you. In order to optimize your website’s content for search engines, it’s crucial to pay attention to the data that allow algorithms to better understand who you are, what you do, and what your pages are about. WordLift can automate this process and improve your position on SERPs, thereby increasing the volume and quality of your organic traffic.
WordLift uses natural language processing and linked data to automate semantic markup. It analyzes your content and identifies the corresponding entities organizing them into four categories: who, what, when and where. You can select the suggested entities and create your own in order to give your users useful context information.
Thanks to this glossary, all the search engines will be able to index your pages correctly, leading more traffic your way. It will also be easier to have SERP Knowledge Graphs associated to your business and your product.
WordLift offers various widgets and tools to guide you in content creation by suggesting free stock images to display, and by summarizing content you will be able to use for your meta-descriptions or social media posts.
WordLift is a useful tool for all marketers, editors and companies that want to automate a fundamental part of their SEO. It’s perfectly integrated with WordPress, can be used on other CMS, and is now available with a brand new add-on for WooCommerce. Plus, many more AI-based solutions are being developed exclusively for VIP clients.
The base plan starts at €47/mo., paid annually. WordLift has a 14-day free trial period.
Do you want to start now with your free trial?
QuillBot
QuillBot allows for content creation in half the time thanks to its algorithms. This tool supports British, American and Australian English.
QuillBot has two major features. “Paraphrasers” allows you to paraphrase texts following certain parameters, like length of output text. You can customize it to obtain output texts with different characteristics: you can have a “standard” text, one with as many possible variations from your input text as possible, or one as close as possible to natural language and correct grammar.
Its second feature is the “Summarizer,” summarizing a text in a few clicks. You can choose between key sentences and paragraph. The former will highlight the most important sentences of your input text, the latter will create a paragraph based on key information in your input text. The final result will combine both the paraphrase and the summarizing features. And remember that you can always choose the length of your output text.
QuillBot helps in writing emails, posts, articles, and much more, all in English.
Most of its features are free, but if you want to get the most out of it, you can choose the premium package, with more features, no character limit, and more processing speed.
The premium package starts at $6,67/mo., paid annually.
Frase
Frase believes that the future of SEO is in answers, not in links. In conversations, not just keywords. Its mission is to help you develop an SEO that “will still work in 2030.”
Frase offers two primary solutions on subscription: Content and Answer. Frase Content significantly reduces content production time, automating many steps of the process and offering an editor tool where team members can collaborate.
Once you insert a keyword, this platform will display a list of topics, FAQs, statistics, news and related facts. You can also check how your final text does compared to competing software, thanks to Frase Topic Score.
Frase Answer trains and implements chatbots in a few steps by analyzing the content on your website. You don’t need any starting knowledge to train its AI, just some content, such as, a product page or blog post. It just needs to have a url. At this point, you will be able to train multiple bot personas that can specialize in different tasks (support, commercial, etc.), or, if you prefer, you can create one single super-intelligent bot.
Frase is best for teams working on content marketing or on SEO, and for agencies. This tool supports Italian as well, although only for Frase Content.
Starting price for subscriptions is $45/mo.
Semantika
Semantika is an Italian tool developed to put NLG at the service of content marketing.
This tool uses your data to generate content through AI in a few steps and following your parameters. During this process, you have the assistance of a project manager.
For example, an e-Commerce project could upload its catalog and leave the automatic creation of product details to the platform. Alternatively, you could create financial reports for your firm, or publish the team scores on a sport news website in real time.
Semantika’s target is firms, e-Commerce and editors.
On their website you can find all the relevant information on pricing, although you can also contact them for a demo.
Clearscope
Clearscope is a tool created to optimize content through AI.
Its algorithms analyze the 30 best content results based on a chosen keyword and display related keywords, search volumes and other data crucial to create an optimized text. This tool also offers an evaluation of your content, providing suggestions on parameters such as readability or relevant terms density. Its interface is easy to use and this platform integrates with Google Docs and WordPress.
The Essentials Plan starts at $170/mo. without a trial period.
NeuralText
NeuralText is a platform using NLP to help marketers write rich content optimized for SEO.
Like the other tools in our list, Neural Text also analyzes SERP following your parameters and keywords. This tool generates reports with useful information, like questions and related topics, volumes, but also most cited entities and sources within the articles.
NeuralText offers an additional tool to evaluate your own content, a keyword tool plus a tool to analyze search intents behind every query.
We should give special mention to their Smart Writer, the text editor on their platform that, thanks to AI, gives suggestions on how to speed up content creation.
Their subscriptions start at $50/mo. and there is a 7-day trial period.
Interested in knowing more about how AI can help you automate your SEO and content?
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