6 Problems Scalenut’s SEO Assistant solves for Content Marketing Managers

You might often find yourself wondering - Is content marketing hard?

Let’s break the ice.

Content creation is hard - and we often learn that the hard way. 

Actually, creating valuable content is hard. Content that is worth the time and effort you put in. Content that helps your business grow.

An average piece of content takes rounds of planning, research, writing, editing, optimizing, and publishing. And when you put in that effort, you want returns. You want visibility, ranking, qualified leads.

With around 7 million blogs published every day, the competition is real. You can’t just publish and pray.

At the same time, you can’t do without content marketing. It’s like brushing your teeth. You like it or you don’t - you have to do it, and do it consistently.

But why are we talking about this, you wonder?

Scalenut is a marketplace for content creation services . We make it simple for businesses to create valuable content. Our pool of creator experts across a variety of verticals & industries deliver content that helps businesses grow at scale.

With that context, we decided to dig deep into what makes content creation hard.

So, we interviewed our clients - we asked them what are some content-creation problems they faced before partnering with Scalenut.

To our pleasant surprise, most creators & businesses face the same challenges. These are-

1. Understanding User Intent
2. Performing Competitor Research
3. Creating Content on New & Hard Topics
4. Publish & Pray
5. Content Creation & Management
6. Outsourcing to Freelancers
   

Keeping these in mind, we have launched an all-encompassing content creation tool that will make you fall in love with the process of content creation.

In this article, we take a deep dive into what the most common content-creation problems are. And we find out how Scalenut’s creator tool solves these problems effectively.

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Before we dive into the problems, let’s learn a bit about what the magical tool does.

Scalenut’s creator is an AI platform that transforms how you research, plan, craft, and optimize your content. 

It helps writers create content that ranks better than the competition’s. Employing AI-backed technologies like NLP and GPT-3, it  removes the manual effort involved in analyzing the competition to achieve higher rankings. 

Doing all the heavy lifting with AI, it frees up human potential to create unique content that adds value to the readers & the business.

Now, we are ready to dive in and understand AI for content marketing in depth.

With that broad context, we will analyze the content creation problems creators & businesses face, and understand how the tool solves them.

Understanding User Intent

Understanding user intent is a decisive factor in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to get a higher ranking and improve traffic on your website.

User Intent represents the objective that someone has in mind when typing a search query in Google. 

Some users are interested in purchasing a product or service, others are looking for information on a specific topic, and some might need details or want to connect with a company or individual. 
It differs from person to person and might change during their user journey. 

For example, one person can start with an informational intent and might change their intent into a transactional one. 

Tailoring content for one of these types of user intent is vital to ensure your website is discovered by users and goes hand-in-hand with ranking on Google too.

In fact, search intent targeting and user intent marketing are techniques widely used by growth hackers.

Discovering user intent is a time-taking process and requires a certain level of expertise. Broadly speaking, you have to “walk in your customer’s shoes” to understand their user intent.

Specifically, here are a few places you’d spend time at, while investigating user intent-

• Q&A tools like Reddit and Quora
• ‘People also ask’ box on Google
• ‘Searches related to’ box on Google
• Keyword research tools like Semrush
• Top few articles for the search query
  

How can Scalenut’s tool help?

Scalenut’s creator is very useful in understanding the user intent for any given keyword. When you enter your keyword on the tool, it generates a Report that looks like this.

This comprehensive report analyses the top 30 SERPs for your keyword using Natural Language Processing (NLP). It includes-

• Average word count, images, readability, H tags of the top 30 SERPs
• Average quality score of the top 30 SERPs 
• Average search volume of the keyword on Google over the last 12 months
• Key Terms from the top 30 SERPs - importance, occurrence frequency, presence in headings, example usage in each website
• Competition - Quality Score (how complete the content is in terms of containing the key terms)
• Themes (related searches on Google)
• Questions (from Reddit and Quora) 
• Citations (most commonly referenced URLs in top 30 SERPs)
  

If we look at the report generated for the keyword ‘travel tips’, it is evident from the key terms, questions, themes that the user’s intent is informational.

SEO Competitor Research

When investing time in any piece of content, the first question you seek to answer is how to add value. This makes it imperative to understand what you’re up against.

Competitive analysis is a marketing strategy to gather deeper understanding on who your competitors are and what makes their blog rank.

The goal of a competitive analysis is two-folded - to peek into the inner workings of your competitor and to validate your own content strategy.

Your competitors are a goldmine of information that can inform every aspect of your SEO strategy, audience research, and help to skyrocket your website’s organic traffic.

In concrete terms, performing an SEO competitor analysis lets you:

• Learn what your target audience & the industry is curious about
• Find weak points in competitor’s blogs and capitalize on them
• Find the strong points in competitor’s blogs and replicate them
• Make a SEO strategy in terms of keywords, backlinks, internal links, etc
• Understand how difficult outperforming competitors in the SERPs is likely to be
  

The first step to competitive research is understanding who your competitors are. For blogs, the benchmark is the top 10 ranking websites.

Next, you need to scan through their content to identify the strengths and weaknesses. Here are a few questions you can answer for yourself-

• How interesting are their topics and how detailed are they?
• How many words, on average, are they writing?
• What kind of structure is working the best - listicles, how-tos, interviews, etc?
• Are the pieces analytical, op-ed, thought-leadership inspired, story-format, etc?
• How engaged are readers to their blog?
• What are the keywords used?
• What is the keyword density and frequency?
• How many backlinks have they achieved, on average?
  

And so on.

Naturally, performing this analysis can get very overwhelming and time-taking. There are various content marketing tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, SEO analyzers, and more that can help you with different parts of this analysis.

How can Scalenut’s tool help?

Competitor research is a breeze with Scalenut’s creator. For any given keyword, the tool generates a comprehensive report that gives insights from the top 30 SERPs for the keyword.

As we saw above, the Report includes -

• Average word count, images, readability, H tags of the top 30 SERPs
• Average quality score of the top 30 SERPs 
• Average search volume on Google over the last 12 months
• Key Terms from the top 30 SERPs - importance, occurrence frequency, presence in headings, example usage in each website
• Competition - Quality Score (how complete the content is in terms of containing the key terms)
• Themes (related searches on Google)
• Questions (from Reddit and Quora) 
• Citations (most commonly referenced URLs in top 30 SERPs)
  

Digging deeper into the Competition section of the report, we can see that the tool 

Create content on NEW & HARD topics 

There is no shortcut to creating good content. It requires patience, interest, time, and effort in the form of research, reading, analysing, optimizing, and more.

When you write good content, you’ll ideally be speaking to your audience in a way that’s familiar and comfortable to them. 

You’ll be hitting their pain points, piquing their interests, and convincing them your product or service (or that of your client’s) is the answer they’ve been looking for.

But quite often, you will need to create content you’re not particularly knowledgeable in. How to come up with ideas for content you don’t care about?

Harshita, a content creator, shares her experience writing about new & hard topics -

“I had to write about bone broth - and as a vegetarian, I didn’t even know what it was. I started to read about it, but found the topic way out of my comfort zone. Not only was it uninteresting for me, but also unrelatable because I didn’t know what the terms meant. But when you got to write well, you got to read well - especially if you want your content to rank. Performing keyword and competitor research for this blog was such a task for me!”

You might use tools for keyword research and optimization to plan your content. 

But even the most advanced keyword tools don’t consider context, nuance, or usage - they’re simply generating keyword terms, either around a specific combination of words or what they perceive as intent. 

In such a scenario, what typically happens is that you end up creating content with a narrow perspective that lacks nuance. Or content that is superfluous and overstuffed with keywords.

Because there is only so much that your brain can process and understand about a new topic in a limited amount of time.

And that’s not where the story ends.

Despite all your efforts, the content you publish does not perform/ rank as you expected. This is because Google’s algorithms give the most value to relevant content. 

Relevant, high-quality content answers a searcher’s query by understanding their intent through proper research and including the key topics. It will signal to Google that this is a perfect match for a person’s search results. 

How can Scalenut’s tool help?

Scalenut’s creator tool can really simplify the content creation process for new & hard topics.

The related terms and relevant keywords suggested by the tool can bring you up to speed on any topic and help you create content as if you know it from the back of your hand.

In addition to analyzing the competition and suggesting key terms, the tool helps you generate content using GPT-3. 

Once you have your research from the report in place and move to the editor, the Generate section powered by GPT-3 suggests the most relevant use cases to beat writer’s block as you’re writing the content.

Publish and Pray

Chat Pollitt, Partner at the Native Advertising Institute and Co-founder of Relevance said,

"There’s too much competition for an audience today, in most industries, to sit back and pray about anything in marketing."

And yet, that’s what most businesses end up doing - because they don’t know better. 

What it means is they’re spending all their time, energy, and effort producing this wonderful piece of content.

They throw it up on their website, tweet it, put it on Facebook, Google, and maybe LinkedIn, and then sit back and hope something happens.

While many SEO tools help with research and strategy, few help grade your content against your competitors and optimize it.

Which is why, when you’re writing and publishing content, you don’t know what to expect.

That is true even if you feel you’ve written a great piece. Because SERP rankings depend on a bunch of factors, other than the quality of content.

How can Scalenut’s tool help?

Average quality score + optimize + get quality score on your content while writing on the editor
Keywords to use - content creation tips, user intent, make article rank, ai content optimization

Content Creation & Management

Imagine you’re writing a 3000 word article. You’d have performed a good amount of research for the job - what keywords to use, what questions to answer, topics to cover, etc.

Doesn’t it get messy to manage so much and incorporate it into a coherent piece? 

If you’re feeling guilty, it’s not unusual to have 10 tabs while writing a piece of content. All of us have been there.

In fact, part of the reason why it takes so long to write a good piece is because it’s not easy to create and manage content with so much information.

It is distracting. You miss out on content. 

And then you wonder whether your 3000-word article will even be worth the effort and time you’re putting into it. 

Neil Patel, the SEO expert and a New York Times Bestselling author, conducted a study to calculate the average writing time for bloggers for a 2000-word article. The result-

• The average writing time (calculated by maximum time) is 10 hours.
• The average writing time (calculated by minimum time) is 7.6 hours.
  

Some people are a lot faster, obviously. But some - including some of the most respected professionals in the field - are slower.
A blogger like Jon Morrow takes two hours just to write his headline! One of his best articles took him over 50 hours to write!

That’s a LOT of hours!

How can Scalenut help?

With Scalenut’s creator, it becomes easy to write high quality SEO articles.

The in-built content editor enables you to write the content in the tool itself. It puts all of the intelligence it collects on keywords and topics on your writing screen - and gives content creation tips as you write. This keeps the strategy always on your radar and helps you write more optimized blogs. 

Here are all the cool features the editor comes with-

The editor allows you to write the content directly in the tool with cool features like - 

• Formatting controls, link support, images.
• Real-time feedback on all things you need to keep in mind when writing content.
• Key terms (sort by unused, heading presence, frequency) 
• Readability score, word count, and quality score to guide your writing.
• Insights section that has popular themes, competitive blog insights (quick access to all headings - that’s very useful in drafting blog outlines), Questions  from people (Reddit, Quora) and suggested questions (generated by GPT-3).
• Generate section for ai powered content creation through GPT-3 that suggests the most relevant use cases to beat writer’s block.
  

Outsourcing/ Hiring & Managing Freelancers

Technology cannot replace creativity. Indeed there are various tools that can help you plan, write, and optimize your content, but technology cannot write a coherent piece of article for you all by itself.

As a writer/ content marketer, you might often have to work on content that requires subject-matter expertise. Or content that doesn’t particularly interest you. Or sometimes, you might simply not have the time to create so much content by yourself.

In such cases, outsourcing content, or a part of it, to a freelance expert is a great option. In fact, more businesses than ever consider outsourcing content - including 30% of Fortune 500 companies.

This is because companies can bring a unique, expert skill set and new, powerful ideas to the table if they outsource content writing.

However, finding a suitable writer, managing communication, giving content briefs, negotiating prices, reviewing work, maintaining quality - these are just a few among a bunch of things that are a part of outsourcing.

In other words, it’s not as easy as it sounds. Which is why many businesses still struggle with content creation, management, and outsourcing.

How can Scalenut’s tool help?

Scalenut’s creator tool is integrated with Markeplace.  The Marketplace is where you can outsource your content requirements to Scalenut’s freelance experts.

It makes the process of outsourcing your content simple, easy, and convenient.

We hire freelance experts across various industries & verticals to make sure that all your content requirements are met by the best in the field.

Here’s how you can request content on the marketplace-

• Choose the content type you need.
• Fill in the content brief tailored for that content type.
• Pay as per the standardized rates.
• Use the collaboration tool to track WIP or manage communication.
• Receive the content on the due date, rate it, and you’re done!
  

We hope that this provides you a deep insight into major content-creation problems and how to solve them with the Scalenut creator tool.

If you find it interesting, you can sign up to be on the waitlist and get a free trial of the Scalenut tool.

We would love for you to try the tool and share your experience with us. :)

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