Important questions from the community
Workflow
The setup up process is quite intuitive. It does take a bit of time for the tool to conduct its initial research (10-15 mins) which is understandable.
This is what the KW clusters look like once the research is done. Note that Competition means the competitiveness of the KW on Google Ads, not keyword difficulty which is an entirely different metric.
I do like that they have broken it down to TOFU, MOFU and BOFU. I would like to understand more about the logic & science behind that though - because like anything else, we’re taught not to take anything on face value 😄
Once I selected a few KWs & click Generate Brief, these are the topics that were created.
We’ve been writing a lot of TOFU and MOFU content lately, so I intentionally picked more BOFU topics to start with. And here comes the first problem.
Notice how they all have the same structure? Best [insert kw] for [insert more kw]
That’s not gonna work for us, simply because biodegradable mailers, compostable padded mailers, eco friendly bubble mailers, biodegradable packaging bags are practically the same thing. Correct me if I’m wrong but writing a different article for each of this keyword would result in a lot of redundancy.
I asked Claude for some alternate article topic ideas and here’s the output
Note: I realized some of these topics aren’t exactly BOFU, but I’m pretty sure with some fine-tuning, I can weed those out.
My point is that there are many different ways we can cover the BOFU keywords and not have to stick to the rigid structure of “best X for Y”.
The briefs
This, and the suggested article topics would arguably be the most important features of Yahini.
BOFU topic
Let’s take a quick dive into the BOFU content outline
First off, I like the layout. It’s minimal, allowing you to focus on the main thing: The key info such as meta title, description, kws to focus on and the word count. The Outline itself is also clutter-free.
Frase’s outline is a bit like that. This is what it looks like - even when you skip the step to handpick the H2s & H3s and let the tool do it for you.
“How can an outline be complicated???”
Outranking would ask you to kindly hold their beer 🍺
3 steps in and I’m nowhere near getting my outline https://share.cleanshot.com/dXGjWjl7 (it’s so bloody long I had to upload it as a link so it doesn’t flood this post.
Ok enough about Outranking, the tool that never was… Let’s talk about the suggested content in Yahini’s outline!
- It starts with highlighting our brand as the obvious winner. We don’t usually do that (as our approach is to be objective and let people decide, hopefully based on all the pros we highlight, people can see that we’re the obvious choice), but I can see why that would work.
- I noticed quite a few claims about our competitors are simply untrue. E.g. EcoEnclose have mailers in a lot of different sizes (Yahini claim: limited in size options), Noissue has long lead time (yes, but that’s their customized mailers, in which ours would take the same - their stock mailers ship out just as fast as the equivalent product on our site.
So bottom line is that I’m not sure if I want to use this outline, or any of Yahini’s BOFU outlines for the above two reasons. From the first screenshot, I understand that their first step is to focus on SAAS businesses. I’m curious to see what they build from here.
TOFU topic
Example below 👇🏼
Why Jewelry Packaging Is Hurting Our Planet and What We Can Do (1)In short, it created a very comprehensive outline, covering many good aspects. It does feel at times to be too technical, which leads me to two questions:
- I put down “small shop owners selling products online” as the audience. I wonder if Yahini ever took that into account when prepping this brief because some of the things mentioned in the outline is way beyond what a typical small shop owner would be able to consider, let alone execute. Also, can we go back and see what we entered at the beginning? E.g. competitors, about our brand & its audience, keywords, etc.
- Can we have an input box somewhere in the settings to specify the tone and writing style? If not it would all sound the same (overly technical).
Final verdict - where would this fit into our content workflow?
Due to time constraint, I’m only able to test Yahini this much. At this point, I’ll say that I love the approach and the concept behind the tool. It simple but thorough. It takes into account the competition and the main keywords (which we entered at the beginning), and (supposedly) the audience.
If you were to repeat this process with AI manually (e.g. chat with ChatGPT or Claude), you’d hav to enter the custom prompt at the beginning to do a quick intro about your company, mission, audience etc. Even then, you’d still have to enter your competitors’ info, and it may or may not do much research on your competitors as you would have liked otherwise.
(Btw, this is another reason why I’d want to know what Yahini’s recommendation is based on).
Other than the layout and how easy it is to get a decent brief, I also like the topics Yahini created for our TOF and MOF kws. Hope they can improve the suggestions for the BOF kws.
At this stage, we would probably use it alongside the likes of Spyfu, Writerzen, and Frase for kw research and topic planning, as it would give us additional topic ideas.
Would it replace any of the tools we’re using, especially Frase?
No. Frase allows us to build our own outline, which is important in our space, where things can get quite technical, and the existing info on the web is often just not good enough.
It also has the content optimization feature which is handy for our writer to use (This is not a deal-breaker for me with Yahini) but all in all, Yahini doens’t necessarily replace anything we’re currently using.
I would wait for a bit to keep an eye on their upcoming updates before deciding. Right now I’m thinking to refund and maybe come back to buy it at a later date if the deal is still available.
I can definitely see the potential and given how hard they’ve been working to promote & answer people’s questions, I do hope they would keep up this momentum 💪🏼
