How And Why We Use Frase.io At Embryo

I check a website called producthunt.com for new software every day, looking for diamonds in the rough.

As an SEO agency owner with a passion for quality content, and indeed a team of already great content writers, when I came across something called ‘Frase’, I was intrigued.

Embryo is a content-first, search-led digital agency in the United Kingdom that specializes in helping clients to build great online presences through long-form content, and precision-SEO.

Would it be a letdown like so many other finds on Product Hunt – or would it be the ‘1-in-100’ that I love to discover?

I guess you can tell from this blog post that Frase was in the latter category. However, as someone with a cynical view of software and products, I saw that the description of Frase on Product Hunt included the term, ‘AI’.

This meant that I was not hoping for too much. Almost every product I encounter that uses ‘artificial intelligence’ in its description seems to be a massive let down and is not actually using AI at all.

However, the first time I used Frase – selecting the ‘Content Briefing’ tool – I was literally blown away – and that is something that has not happened in a long time when it comes to software and applications.

This is the literal timeline of what happened when I used the tool:

• I created a content briefing for the term, “search engine optimization” and pressed submit.
• When the results came through, and I saw 18 pages of very accurate research had been done in less than 20 seconds, and genuinely stared at the screen, agape for about a minute.
• I read through the research, and the subject matters within it were ‘spot on’ about ranking well in Google, references to social media, content marketing, keyword research, online marketing, and lots more.
• I stared at the screen some more.
• I called the head of the content team to my office, and told her that she “wouldn’t believe what I’m going to show you now”, and created another content briefing – this time about “aesthetic clinics” as we have several clients in this field. I ran the content briefing tool again.
• As the results came in, I didn’t stare at the screen but looked at her reaction to it, which was pretty much the same as mine previously. A very confused face, emitting a “how the heck have they done that?” expression. Once again, it was full of extremely useful information that would save us so much time as a business.
• At this point, Frase became even more special. I butt heads with my content team because they always (correctly) state that they need more time to research content before writing, but as a business owner, I want more content writing to happen. Both she and I knew at this moment that my dream of less research had been turned into a reality. There was no getting around it – Frase had replaced much of our research time as a business!
• I called the rest of the content team over and ran another content briefing. The same thing happened. This time both I and the head of content watched their reactions, rather than what was displayed on the screen. Once again, amazing reactions.
• A few minutes later, I called in two members of the SEO team. I said to them that this is the “best content tool you will ever see”, and they looked at me with not much confidence. Once again, I ran the briefing tool. The same thing happened again. At this point, my business partner – who is not interested in tech at all – came over to see what the fuss was, so I ran the tool again. Even he was impressed with what happened – and especially when I explained that this will save us massive amounts of time on research – even to the point where we would probably now be able to not have to hire an SEO content writer position as we were planning to do!
• I then spent the next 20 minutes showing team members various other aspects of Frase, including the features that were useful for SEO, not just for content strategy. We were impressed by all four major content tools. The content team was all big fans of content monitoring from the off, where the SEO team found that they liked the data that website crawl options gave.

This all happened over the course of one hour, and after that hour, four of the team signed up to be full users of the platform.

We now use Frase as our official content writing tool. Any new members of the content team that we do need to employ will be lucky enough to work with Frase, which will improve their written content for sure.

Hidden Gems

Frase is one of those pieces of software where you find new features over time. The questions feature, as with the concept map feature really are very useful indeed, as are several other tools for any website content writer.

So many options, tweaks, buttons, and features. There literally are so many features to enhance each piece of content that is written for a site.

When writing, the pane that appears on the right of the screen lets you choose from so many sources from the web to news sources, Twitter, YouTube, and Wikipedia. And even then you can choose based on the relevancy of content, or recency.

I genuinely can only think of one piece of software (Notion) over the past few years that have struck me the way that Frase has.

It has changed how our business works overnight. It has saved us HOURS of research time per month (easily 2 hours per day per content person, which means around 180 hours per month saved – and I’m being conservative with this number).

Not only has it saved the company money, but it also works to make the company money by the time we have freed to write even more content. Putting it this way, it’s easily the best money I have spent in a long time.

Summary

Frase is like hiring a real research assistant for the company, without the hassle of it taking time off to go to the dentist, or taking a vacation. Not only that, Frase improves the output of each one of our content writers, helping our client sites to rise in the search engines.

James Welch is Director of UK SEO agency, Embryo Digital