Frase Review: An Unbiased Deep Dive From A Freelance Content Marketer

Ask any content strategist, and they’ll tell you that their strategy involves:

1. Researching SEO keywords
2. Analyzing competing posts
3. Identifying content gaps
4. Filling in content briefs

If you’ve been at your content job for a while, you’d know this process can eat up hours to days.

Put it bluntly, it’s a time suck.

So when Frase was featured on the AppSumo deal page, a lot of content marketers understandably got excited.

“You’re telling us we don’t have to manually create a brief from scratch? Well, sign us up!” 

But like all new tools, you have questions. How does it work? What are the pros and cons? And more importantly, can it replace your current (read: expensive) SEO tool?

This Frase guide has all the answers you need.

What is Frase?

Frase is an AI-powered content platform that offers two main products: Content and Answers.

Frase Content, an SEO tool, identifies the questions your target audience’s asking.

It automatically creates in-depth content briefs and offers suggestions to further optimize your post, raising your odds of ranking on the first page of the SERP.

Next up, we have Frase Answers, an AI chatbot that crawls your entire website to create an intelligent knowledge base.

It answers your web visitors’ questions 24/7,  improving user experience and leaving you more time to focus on running your business.

Frase Pricing Plans

Frase starts at $39.99/month when billed annually.

It includes just one user and 30 documents a month. It’s perfect for freelance content marketers and small agency owners who work on a few projects a month.

For agencies and startups that produce content daily, the Growth and Answer Engine plans might be a better fit.

Frase offers a free trial. If you’re not sure if it’s the tool you’re looking for, try it out yourself.

The free trial includes:

• Unlimited Question Research
• Five documents (Note: Creating one article or optimizing an existing article counts as one document.)
• One crawl through Google Search Console
• One Answer Engine 30-day test

For a limited time, you can get lifetime access to Frase during this Black Friday at $79.

Core Features

There’s a lot to like about Frase.

But for the sake of relevance, I’ll focus on the top three features that are the most helpful in content creation. Alright, let’s get moving!

1. Question Research

It takes a long time to research your target audience’s questions.

You know what I’m talking about.

You enter a keyword on Quora, analyze the search results, and select the most popular questions. Then you gather them up in a new document. Finally, you visit Reddit and do the same thing over again.

Source: Quora

Sounds familiar? (Keep in mind that this doesn’t even include Google search, which is a whole other tsunami of information.)

Now you can remove this tedious task from your to-do list and leave it to Frase.

Frase’s Question Research crawls the places your customers are asking questions, saving you multiple steps (and time) in your content research process.

It takes only a few seconds.

Input your keyword, and Frase will return a list of questions (extracted from People Also Ask, Search Autocomplete, Quora, and Reddit), along with the source and keyword data.

You can select the ones you find the most promising and transfer them into a new document.

Note: If you’re wondering why the monthly search volume is locked, stay tuned. I’ll address this in the next section.

2. AI-Generated Content Briefs

17.3% of content marketers don’t work with a content brief.

One of the biggest reasons? They don’t know how to create one.

Fortunately, this is where Frase comes in: it automatically creates a content brief based on your search query in under 12 seconds.

 

Mind you, this isn’t a bare-bones brief that only includes SEO keywords and a post overview.

You’ll get a comprehensive content brief with details such as headings, keyword count, and relevant subsections.

Sweet, isn’t it?

This makes analyzing competitors’ posts a lot easier, since you can assess all these important data points without ever leaving the platform.

3. Answer Engine

If you want to distribute content in a targeted way or lead users through an answer funnel, you’ll love Frase’s Answer Engine.

This cool tool crawls your website (from blog to landing page) to create an intelligent knowledge base in only a few minutes.

Each time a web user asks a question, Frase’s answer assistant will deliver answers 24/7.

Want to drive targeted traffic to your blog? Use Frase’s custom call-to-actions to deliver an answer and follow up with a relevant blog post.

Frase even automatically recrawls your website every week, so you can ensure your answers are always up-to-date.

There’s more, too.

You can optimize your knowledge assistant by analyzing user intent data. Each question asked will show important data such as the user’s geolocation, click-through rates, and ratings.

Imagine what this means for your content. You’ll be able to identify what’s working and not and further improve your posts.

Potential Drawbacks

There’s no perfect tool, and that includes Frase.

While exploring the AI content tool, one drawback stood out: the answers limit per month under the Answer Engine plan.

At 500 answers per month, a website that gets 20,000 views a month (and assuming a typical web user asks four, five questions) could quickly burn through them.

Frase also doesn’t offer keyword data in its plans. Remember that locked symbol you saw earlier on?

To access this data, you’ll need to buy Frase’s SEO add-on for an additional $34.99/month (early-bird participants get to enjoy 95% off the first month).

Initially, I was disappointed.

But as I explored the tool more, I noticed I was wrong. Frase didn’t set out to be an all-in-one SEO tool. It prides itself on its core function: Content.

The SEO add-on is the cherry on top, not the cake.

Judging by this thread on its Facebook group, it looks like I’m not the only one who shares the sentiment:

Source: Frase Insider

If you prefer to access keyword data on Frase, you’ll be pleased to know that its SEO add-on offers a lot more than monthly search volume:

Another minor drawback of Frase? The user flow.

Here’s what happened: When I entered my query in Question Ideas, Frase returned a list of questions on the results page.

Like all new users, curiosity got the best of me.

I wanted to explore how Frase’s features worked, so I clicked the left menu’s tabs.

When I clicked Question Ideas, I’d thought it would direct me back to the results page, but it went back to the original search page instead.

Which means I had to input my query one more time.

Granted, this isn’t a dealbreaker, but it would have been nice to save an extra few steps.

When I asked Matt Hurley, Director of Growth at Frase, if this was intentional, he said:

Valid point!

Awkward user flow or not, I applaud the Frase team for being so open to user feedback. This definitely won them extra brownie points.

Frase Review: How Is It Different From Other SEO Tools?

	FRASE	AHREFS	CLEARSCOPE
What is it	AI chatbot and content tool	All-in-one SEO suite	AI-powered keyword research and content optimization tool
Use it to	Automatically create content briefs and answer website visitors’ questions without the legwork	Research SEO keywords, track backlinks, and analyze SERP history	Research SEO keywords and optimize SEO for your blog posts

You’ve probably read reviews drawing parallels between Frase and other SEO tools such as Ahrefs and Clearscope.

Having used these software tools in my freelance writing business, these comparisons are like apples and oranges. Yes, they’re geared towards SEO, but they’re starkly different when you look at the specific features.

Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO toolkit. It’s the best in the market when you want to track your backlink growth, analyze your SERP history, and research keywords.

Clearscope shines at optimizing on-page SEO. It suggests important keywords that you should include in your blog post to create content relevant to what users are searching for.

Now that we’ve compared these SEO tools, let’s take a deeper look at our main star for today.

Frase Review: How Does It Work?

Usually, you’ll head to the Frase homepage to sign up for a monthly subscription plan OR a free trial. But for a limited time, you can get lifetime access to Frase on AppSumo.

After you purchase the Frase deal, follow the instructions to redeem your purchase and set up your account.

You should land on your Frase feed when you’re done with the account setup. Click Get Started under Frase Content. Alternatively, click Content on the left menu.

Click Question Ideas on the left menu, and input your keyword in the search field. Hit enter.

Now, wait for the magic to happen.

Frase will crawl four places (People Also Ask, Google Autocomplete, Quora, and Reddit), saving you hours on content research.

You have two main options:

Click Excel at the top right corner if you want to import the data.

Or select the questions with the highest traffic potential and click Create Document.

Pro Tip #1: If you run a website with regular traffic, click Google Traffic (below Question Ideas) to integrate your Frase account with Google Search Console.

Frase will analyze your website data and extract the queries your web visitors are asking from your web pages.

Pro Tip #2: Wondering if there are topics gaps in your post? Click Concept Map, and Frase will crawl Wikipedia and offer relevant suggestions.

Next, in your new document, select your Workflow and Search Type.

Under Workflow, click Create new content. For content optimization, click Import and optimize content.

Under Search type, pick either Top Google results or Results from a specific domain. In this example, we’ll go with the former.

Click Create Document.

Now for the cool part.

Frase will start crawling the top Google results for your keyword.

In about 12 seconds, it’ll direct you to a page that looks something like this:

On the left, you’ll see a new document with your SEO keyword and selected question(s) on top.

On the right (i.e. what you’re here for), the content brief.

You can either paste the whole content brief (click Paste Brief) in the document and finetune from there. Or you can go through each block, select the ones you like best, and paste them into the doc.

If you spot a section or statistic (from a competing post) that you want to use, all you need to do is click it, and Frase will automatically paste it into the document on the left.

This will save you the extra steps of having to drag your mouse to highlight and paste the text.

Another great feature of Frase is its topic density.

It tells you the average number of keyword mentions in your competitors’ posts.

Without a doubt, this Clearscope-esque feature is helpful if you want to further optimize your post when you’re done writing it.

Once you’re happy with your content brief, click Export on the top bar and assign it to your content writer.

Final Thoughts: Should You Get Frase?

Frase is a wonderful tool for creating content briefs. I can see it reducing creation time by at least 50%.

It’s also a great tool when it comes to updating existing content. When I imported one of my blog posts, it uncovered keywords I’d never thought of adding in the first place:

Frase works amazing well with other SEO tools.

Research keywords on Ahrefs. Structure and write a post on Frase. Track backlinks on Ahrefs. You get the idea!

If you’re an editor or content strategist who manages a team of freelance writers AND wants to automate research, this tool will definitely make your life easier.

Sign Up For Frase Today

Will Frase take over other SEO tools in the market?

Probably not. But it’s not meant to replace them.

It’s meant to complement your current SEO stack and help you work more efficiently in content creation.

At 8,266 users and counting, it looks like this new tool on the block is winning hearts from content marketers.

And lucky for you, you can get the Frase Black Friday deal on AppSumo today for just $79.

Let’s level up your marketing game and start creating better content!