Our company generates hundreds of pages of content each month for clients and our own site. We write blog posts and informative articles as well as develop on-site content. However, our ability to measure the effectiveness of an individual piece has largely been at the page level, which combines the content with meta tags, URL structure and other components. However, at this level, good page settings can overshadow problems in the content itself, which is why I was intrigued by a new web based application called Inbound Writer.
The program analyzes your content in real time and assigns a score based on how well you use the keywords you want to pursue. The use of keywords is more than just instances–it measures placement and how well you use long tail and head terms in your document.
I started by inserting an article we created for a client about inaccurate breathalyzer readings. The next step involved choosing three keywords we wanted to target/attempt to rank for within the document; for this example I chose “breathalyzer,” “DWI,” and “alcohol.” Afterwards the program asked me to select 1 to 3 sites that are similar in content or rank for those terms.
It then loaded the content, and I added the title from the client’s page and the program assigned a score of 58 which was quite surprising. The main problems that the program identified was that the terms I wanted to rank for weren’t near the beginning of the title tag or the start of the body text. The tool was correct on the body text because the page itself uses a long introduction before starts to analyze potential problems with breathalyzers. However I disagree with their title tag assessment because I think its better for organic CTR in this instance to start with “Why” rather than a keyword.
On the right hand side was a list of my target phrases and other related keywords and how many times each one had been used. The more terms you bring in and the more times you use your main terms, the higher the quality score. The only thing authors need to be careful about is writing with a certain score they want to attain and sacrificing the quality by overloading search friendly content and ignoring readability. If Inbound Writer’s algorithm was able to measure readability, composition and optimization, that would make this tool a must have.
The main problem I had was that the program didn’t have a keyword density feature. It would be nice to see the density because that is just as important as the number of instances. Additionally there is no spell check feature which might cause problems if a writer is developing content in that program then porting it directly to an article or blog post. The program runs in Flash so it is not compatible on the iPad or for people who have Flash disabled in their browsers.
The program gives users 8 free articles per month and if you need to optimize more content, their unlimited plan is just $20/month. Overall the program is a promising tool for content writers and SEO professionals but needs a little more polish before it’s ready for more widespread use.
Update: See comments below for some more information about the product