ContentInboundWriter Promises More Insight into How Content Will Perform Prior to Publishing

InboundWriter Promises More Insight into How Content Will Perform Prior to Publishing

The company’s latest feature gives more data to users of its application about the competition for the topics that content creators want to write about, promising better decisions about the performance of the content before it’s even written.

InboundWriter released research findings in September that stated just 20 percent of a site’s web content is responsible for driving 90 percent of the traffic. With that, InboundWriter is advocating that brands focus on quality not quantity, and said a new feature release will help them do just that.

InboundWriter’s latest release takes into account “where a user will publish content in addition to who the user’s competitors are for that piece of content.” InboundWriter said this data coupled with the tool’s analytics offers insight into how a piece of content published on a particular site will perform.

InboundWriter Competitive Data

Brent Rangen first introduced InboundWriter and its functionality to Search Engine Watch readers back in 2011. In a nutshell, the tool offers a straightforward way for content producers to optimize their content without a lot of technical knowledge – but some features could also be helpful to experienced marketers, too.

In a demo of the new functionality, CEO of Inbound Writer, Skip Besthoff, said the competitiveness data they provide can predict if writing content on a particular topic will yield results on or near Page 1 in the search results.

Now, that’s a bold statement, and when I asked Besthoff how the tool reconciled that data against things like personalization in search, he said its algorithm does factor that in.

“There is a certain set of factors that will be consistent between one person’s search results and another’s that statistically over time will yield the same outcome,” Besthoff said. “We’ve studied those factors very carefully and we understand what those are, and those are baked into the software.”

InboundWriter doesn’t disclose its data sources but Besthoff said some of it is third party, and some is independently gleaned from the web. And because the tool does not make use of referral data, InboundWriter confirmed it is not affected by the unleashing of Google “(not provided)” from secure search.

InboundWriter’s competitive data also allows users to view the search results for a particular topic right in the user’s dashboard. That means, content creators can get a feel of the content that’s already out there on a particular topic they’re thinking about writing, and see what keywords those content pieces are using.

inboundWriter SERP Competition

The competitive data is also meant to analyze how authoritative your site is versus the websites you’d be competing with over a topic in the search results, for example. With this data, Besthoff said brands don’t have to see the actual content to know whether or not a particular piece of content is going to perform well against the competition.

“We’ve confirmed a statistically significant relationship between the traffic that a piece of content generates and its InboundWriter content quality score, thereby validating that InboundWriter’s technology can be used as an indicator for accurately predicting content’s performance on the web,” said an InboundWriter representative.

In its simplest form, Besthoff said that in any given scenario, InboundWriter’s functionality shows the content creator what their constraints and opportunities are for any given topic.

“We intentionally simplify the complexity of the software because we think writers want to write, and they don’t want to be stuck in analytic complexities and the realities of the Web,” Besthoff said. “At the same time, we know that these web laws of nature can’t be ignored if you want to have strong and consistent performance.”

So writing purists aside, how do more technical-minded marketers take advantage of InboundWriter? Besthoff said agencies often integrate the tool within their topic research efforts.

“Agencies know they need the discipline and rigor that good topic research brings, but everyone is frustrated with Google Analytics and the different types of PPC-related applications,” Besthoff said. “InboundWriter brings a higher level of precision and automation to topic research.”

Besthoff is referring in part to the level of detail the topic research provides within InboundWriter. In the following screenshot, we can see the differences between standard topic research through tools like Google and InboundWriter’s research:

Comparison to Status Quo

Another way agencies are using InboundWriter, said Besthoff, is using it on a mass scale and making it part of their toolkit for clients.

While InboundMarketer does have subscriptions that come with heftier measurement capabilities and usage access, the competitive data covered in this article is available in the free, basic version of the tool.

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