If a content marketer’s goal is to publish blog posts that rank well in Google, a couple of non-AI tools could make the process relatively easy.
The goal of content marketing is to attract, engage and retain customers. It takes many forms, including videos, podcasts, graphics, articles, and white papers. Each of them could have a subtask.
This article focuses on attracting an audience, driving top-level leads, with blog content.
The blog publishing process typically involves:
Keyword research, Identifying a topic, Creating an outline, Writing the post, Optimizing.
RankIQ
A blog post that will rank well in search engine results pages must include searchers’ words and phrases.
Tools to help you find the best keywords for your content include Google Keyword Planner, Moz Keyword Explorer, Ahrefs, Semrush, and WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool.
But let’s look at it RankIQ. It combines a human-curated keyword list and an AI engine to optimize rankings.
Research keywords. The human side of this tool is a curated (and frequently updated) list of keywords targeting popular blog niches. The list is beneficial if your content fits into one of these niches.
The tool’s keyword database is smaller than Semrush or Ahrefs, but it uses IBM Watson to provide useful information for each phrase it includes. The advantage is good data. The potential downside is that there are no relevant keywords.
Each keyword suggestion includes three statistics: competition, visits per year, and time to rank. A higher competition score means you need to produce a higher blog post to rank on the first page of Google search results.
RankIQ aggregates its many calculations into three relatively easy-to-understand metrics: competition, visits/year, and time to rank.
The time to rank score is also useful. If it’s “average,” expect it to take 180 days for a post to rank on the first page. If it’s “very fast”, it could happen in a month.
Finally, the visits per year metric provides a range of traffic that your blog post would generate if it ranked on the first page of Google. This estimate is much higher than the keyword volume often reported in SEO tools, as RankIQ doesn’t look at the search frequency of a single phrase, but instead considers others that are similar.
Identify a topic. Write a report once you’ve identified a keyword phrase in RankIQ. Type the phrase if it was not found in a RankIQ keyword library.
If you haven’t found any keyword phrase ideas in the Keyword Library, you can also type in your own keywords from the RankIQ home page when you’re signed in.
The main report page has three components.
The former is what it takes to get your content ranked on the first page of Google. An “A++” score means you will have to channel your inner Shakespeare and write a masterpiece. An “F” means you could apparently post in Pig Latin and still rank.
Next, RankIQ suggests a word count for your post. A general topic like “classic sci-fi movies” requires a lot of words to cover everything Google searches for a first page ranking.
It is usually acceptable to include more words than the suggested count as long as they add value. The report also shows how many sources it consulted to provide its estimates.
Further down in the report, RankIQ:
It suggests about 40 topics to include in the post, provides analysis to help develop a compelling headline and theme, and shares competitive content for inspiration.
RankIQ lists the top 40 topics an article will need to cover to have a chance to rank on the first page of Google results.
RankIQ recommends including all 40 topics, which it lists in order of importance. Organize these 40 topics into a comprehensive topic of primary and supporting ideas.
For example, an article about classic science fiction movies should mention “Star Wars” as the main topic and “The Empire Strikes Back” and “George Lucas” as supporting.
RankIQ recommends keywords for a title and displays top-level titles for comparison.
Finally, the blog post should embrace what SEO professionals call “latent semantic indexing” key phrases. These are subtopics related to the main topic. For a post about classic sci-fi movies, “special effects” might be an LSI phrase.
Develop an outline. Once you have a topic and title, it’s time to develop a post outline. Use the 40 topics recommended by RankIQ.
For example, the outline of a classic science fiction publication might include:
Stars Wars George Lucas The Empire Strikes Back Blade Runner Star Trek Mad Max
You can fill it with additional sub-topics – the more the merrier.
jasper
Now is the time to meet jasperthe second tool powered by AI.
Jasper is an automated writing assistant for generating sentences, paragraphs and almost entire articles on command. It uses artificial intelligence to develop content ideas, outlines, and even drafts optimized for search engines.
Don’t think of Jasper as a replacement for human typing, but rather as a tool for crafting content. For example, the above paragraph (“Jasper is an automated…”) started with a Jasper command. In Jasper’s editor, I wrote, “Write a paragraph about Jasper.ai explaining what it does.”
In Jasper, you can type a command in the context of a draft, and the AI will act on it.
I then highlighted this sentence and pressed the Command + Enter keys on my Apple MacBook. Jasper produced a paragraph quoted below.
Jasper is a content marketing platform that takes the guesswork out of content creation. It uses artificial intelligence to help content marketers develop SEO-optimized content ideas, outlines, and even drafts. This makes it quick and easy to create content that not only looks great, but also ranks high in Google’s SERPs.
Jasper generated this content in response to the above command.
I modified this copy and included most of it above.
Jasper read everything I had written (including a couple of other sections I asked Jasper to generate), so I knew my topic was SEO.
Writing the post. Let’s now move on to the schema created with RankIQ for a proposed blog post about classic sci-fi moves. I will put this schema in Jasper.
In this case, the main sections of the outline are denoted by H1 tags in the Jasper editor, while the subtopics are H2.
Jasper adds the draft built with RankIQ suggestions to his draft composition.
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Click on any section, type a simple command, and Jasper will try to type a relevant sentence or two.
For example, given an H1 tag that read, “The Force and its religious implications in Star Wars,” Jasper wrote:
In the classic Star Wars science fiction film series, the Force is an energy field that binds the galaxy together and gives the Jedi Knights their power. It is also a metaphor for religious faith.
The original film trilogy (Episodes IV-VI) was released between 1977 and 1983, at a time when traditional religion was in decline in the Western world. The films were very popular and their success coincided with a resurgence of interest in spirituality and religion.
One of the things that made Star Wars so appealing was its positive portrayal of religion. At a time when many people were skeptical of organized religion, the film showed that faith could be a force for good in the universe.
This is the copy that Jasper wrote on his first try.
Similarly, Jasper can populate each section of the blog post outline.
A human should fact check Jasper and refine his writing. However, the tool makes composing a long article much easier.
Optimize the post. With the help of Jasper, a content marketer would quickly have a meaningful draft, ready for search optimization.
Return to RankIQ. In the same report that was generated for your keyword phrase, there is a content optimization tab. Paste your Jasper draft into this optimizer. He’ll review your draft, making sure you’ve included the suggested topics and reached your target word count. It also provides an overall quality score and compares it to the score that RankIQ considers necessary to rank on the first page of Google results.
Note that at the time of writing, the content optimizer did not like external formatting. So use Option + Command + Shift + V on a Mac or Windows device when pasting into RankIQ.
RankIQ will grade the draft based on topics covered, length and quality. The 127 words in this example are nowhere near receiving a good grade.
Refine your draft until it meets RankIQ.
Combination tools
Using this combination of content marketing tools, you can easily write an SEO friendly article. First, use RankIQ to develop a keyword objective and content topic. Then use Jasper to produce a draft. Finally, use the RankIQ content optimizer to make sure your post hits all the right marks.
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