Let’s face it – Surfer SEO has been the go-to tool for content optimization for years.

But it’s not the only tool. There are various Surfer SEO alternatives with more advanced features, affordable pricing, and a better approach to content optimization.

If you’re looking to explore alternatives to Surfer SEO you’re at the right place. This blog post covers the top 10 Surfer SEO alternatives that you can go for. Here’s what you’ll discover:

Whether you’re a content creator, digital marketer, or business, you can find options here to help boost your content’s performance and search rankings. So, let’s get started.

How we selected the best Surfer SEO alternatives

Wondering how we selected the best ones out of so many available options? Well, here are 5 factors we considered:

Reasons to consider alternatives to Surfer SEO

Here are a few reasons why you might want to consider Surfer SEO alternatives:

Remember, the best tool is the one that fits YOUR specific needs and workflow. So, let’s explore these alternatives and find your perfect match!

Top 10 Surfer SEO alternatives to try in 2024

Here’s a more detailed comparison of our top picks:

Tool NameBest ForPricing
WritesonicAll-in-one content creation and optimization toolFree trial available. The paid plan starts at $12/month.
FraseContent optimization and researchFree trial available. The paid plan starts at $15/month.
MarketmuseAI-powered content strategy7-day free trial. The paid plan starts at $149/month.
ClearscopeContent optimization for enterprise-level content teamsThe paid plan starts at $189/month.
SemrushComprehensive SEO and marketingSemrush offers a 7-day free trial. The paid plans start at $139.95/month.
AhrefsBacklink analysis and keyword researchAhrefs offers free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. The paid plan starts at just $129/month.
TopicContent outline and optimizationThe paid plan starts at $99/month.
DashwordContent briefs and optimizationFree trial available. The paid plan starts at $99/month.
Page Optimizer ProOn-page SEO and content optimization 7-day free trial. The paid plan starts at $34/month.
SE RankingAffordable, comprehensive tool14-day free trial. The paid plan starts at $65/month.

1. Writesonic

Writesonic is one of the best Surfer SEO alternatives, providing a comprehensive set of tools to create and optimize your content and make it rank well on the SERPs.

Writesonic - Surfer SEO Alternatives
Writesonic

Writesonic is an AI-powered content creation and optimization powerhouse that helps to 10x the content creation process while maintaining top-notch SEO standards. It leverages advanced AI models to come up with high-quality and contextually relevant content across diverse areas.

The tool is ideal for content marketers, bloggers, SEO professionals, and businesses looking for Surfer SEO alternatives that offer more features at a lower cost. Moreover, the robust set of features, user-friendly interface, and extensive template library are what sets it apart from other tools in the market.

Key Features:

Pros:

Cons:

Pricing:

Writesonic offers a free trial where you get 25 credits for free. The paid plan starts at $12/month.

Ratings:

G2: 4.7/5

Capterra: 4.8/5

Why go for Writesonic over Surfer SEO?

If you’re looking for a tool that goes beyond Surfer SEO capabilities, go for Writesonic. It helps you create superior quality, SEO-optimized content at a lower cost. Additionally, the SEO toolkit offered by Writesonic is way better than Surfer SEO, ensuring that all content is original and ready to make its mark on the web.

Unlike Surfer SEO’s complex interface, Writesonic offers a very user-friendly interface, which is suitable for beginners. And the best part? The comprehensive set of content creation tools, along with the best AI SEO tools offered by Writesonic, makes it a smart choice for people looking to automate their entire content creation and optimization process.

Why do I like this tool?

As a content marketer, I love how Writesonic provides tools for every use case, starting from generating content ideas to optimizing content so that it ranks well.

The AI Article Writer is a game-changer, allowing you to generate well-researched, SEO-optimized articles in minutes. Plus, the affordable pricing makes it accessible to businesses of all sizes, helping them get access to top-tier SEO and content creation tools.

When comparing it with Surfer SEO, here are 3 quick reasons why I would recommend Writesonic: A comprehensive set of features, affordable pricing, and a user-friendly interface. The tool has been a fantastic addition to my AI toolkit.

2. Frase

Next comes Frase, another Surfer SEO alternative that helps to do research, generate outlines, create content, and optimize it to rank higher on SERPs. The tool is ideal for anyone looking to generate SEO-optimized content at an affordable price.

Frase - Surfer SEO Alternatives
Frase

Frase is best known for its SEO workflow, where you just need to add a keyword phrase, and it will come up with questions people also ask, search results, and more. It also lets you create an outline by calculating how long the article needs to be, how many headers need to be there, and other SEO elements.

Key Features:

Pros:

Cons:

Pricing:

Frase.io offers a free trial. The paid plan starts at $15/month.

Ratings:

G2: 4.8/5

Capterra: 4.8/5

Why go for Frase over Surfer SEO?

Frase excels in helping you create comprehensive content that answers user questions, which is crucial for topic authority. Unlike Surfer SEO, Frase offers a question research feature that is particularly powerful, giving you insights that can help in creating high-quality content.

Why do I like this tool?

I like how Frase focuses on creating content that truly serves the needs of the users. However, if given the choice of a top-notch content creation and optimization tool, Writesonic is hands down the best tool to go for.

3. Marketmuse

Marketmuse is another Surfer SEO alternative best for creating impactful content strategies. It’s ideal for teams looking for deep insights and data-driven content planning.

Marketmuse - Surfer SEO Alternatives
Marketmuse

The tool quickly analyzes the entire website to come up with personalized insights, helping you plan your content in an effective manner. In short, Marketmuse helps to automate the content audit process and helps to find what’s working and what’s not quickly.

Key Features:

Pros:

Cons:

Pricing:

Marketmuse offers a 7-day free trial. The paid plan starts at $149/month.

Ratings:

G2: 4.8/5

Capterra: 4.8/5

Why go for Marketmuse over Surfer SEO?

If your priority is creating a killer content strategy, Marketmuse can be a good Surfer SEO alternative. Its AI-driven insights are particularly valuable for larger teams looking to scale their content operations effectively.

Why do I like this tool?

Marketmuse provides an in-depth analysis and offers personalized recommendations. Also, check out the 9 best SEO competitor analysis tools.

4. Clearscope

Clearscope is another powerful content optimization tool that has gained a good reputation as a Surfer SEO alternative, especially among enterprise-level content teams.

Clearscope - Surfer SEO Alternatives
Clearscope

The tool uses AI to analyze the top-performing content and provide data-driven insights to improve the overall search engine performance. It helps to create content that not only ranks well but also provides value to the readers.

Key Features:

Pros:

Cons:

Pricing:

Clearscope’s pricing starts at $189/month for the Essentials plan, with higher tiers available for larger teams and enterprises.

Ratings:

G2: 4.9/5

Capterra: 4.9/5

Why go for Clearscope over Surfer SEO?

Clearscope offers a more holistic approach to content optimization as compared to Surfer SEO. While both tool provides recommendations, Clearscope places an emphasis on content quality and relevance, which helps to create high-quality and valuable content.

Why do I like this tool?

The tool not only tells you to stuff keywords but also helps you understand which topics and concepts to cover to create valuable content. Moreover, Clearscope integrates with both Google Docs and WordPress, which streamlines the workflow.

5. Semrush

Next on the list of alternatives to Surfer SEO comes Semrush – a comprehensive digital marketing tool for SEO, content marketing, PPC, and more.

Semrush - Surfer SEO Alternatives
Semrush

Semrush’s AI writing assistant helps to enhance the content by optimizing it for keywords, improving readability, maintaining tone of voice, and ensuring originality. The tool provides suggestions for readability, word count, originality, and tone. It’s a go-to tool for people looking to come up with SEO-optimized content.

Key Features:

Pros:

Cons:

Pricing:

SEMrush offers a 7-day free trial. Paid plans start at $139.95/month for the Pro plan, with higher tiers available for larger teams and agencies.

Ratings:

G2: 4.5/5

Capterra: 4.7/5

Why go for Semrush over Surfer SEO?

While Surfer SEO focuses on content optimization primarily, Semrush offers a much wider range of SEO tools, giving you a more holistic view of SEO. So, if you’re looking for a tool that can handle not only content optimization but also keyword research, backlink analysis, and more, Semrush can be a great choice for you.

Why do I like this tool?

For those already invested in the SEMrush ecosystem, the Writing Assistant is a no-brainer. It provides solid content optimization capabilities without the need for an additional tool.

6. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a powerful Surfer SEO alternative, offering a wide range of features like keyword research, competitor analysis, backlink checker, and more.

Ahrefs - Surfer SEO Alternatives
Ahrefs

While it’s not primarily a content optimization tool like Surfer SEO, its robust SEO features make it a strong alternative for content teams looking to improve their search performance. It can be your go-to tool for backlinks, keyword research, and content gap analysis.

Key Features:

Pros:

Cons:

Pricing:

Ahrefs offers Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, where you get free limited access to a few features. The paid plan starts at just $129/month.

Ratings:

G2: 4.5/5

Capterra: 4.7/5

Why go for Ahrefs over Surfer SEO?

If you’re looking for a tool that can offer detailed insights for backlink profiles, keyword ranking, and more, go for Ahrefs. However, if you are looking for a tool that can help you end-to-end, from content generation to optimization, you can try Writesonic.

Why do I like this tool?

I love how Ahrefs offers detailed insights.

7. Topic

Next comes Topic, another great Surfer SEO alternative that helps to research, outline, and optimize your content. It has a unique approach to content optimization that focuses on creating comprehensive content briefs.

Topic - Surfer SEO Alternatives
Topic

Topic analyzes top-ranking content for your target keywords and provides detailed outlines and recommendations to help you create content that covers all the necessary aspects of a topic.

Key Features:

Pros:

Cons:

Pricing:

Topic’s paid plan starts at $99/month.

Ratings:

G2: 5/5

Capterra: 5/5

Why go for Topic over Surfer SEO?

Topic is an easy-to-use content planning tool, unlike Surfer SEO, which is an expert-level SEO tool with a complex interface.

Why do I like this tool?

Topic’s focus on content briefs sets it apart from the other SEO tools. It analyzes top-performing content and provides detailed outlines, which is invaluable for creating comprehensive, authoritative content.

However, Topic is primarily a content planning tool. If you’re looking for an all-in-one SEO tool, it’s better to go for Writesonic.

8. Dashword

Dashword is another great alternative to Surfer SEO, which helps create high-quality content briefs, optimize content for SEO, and monitor performance.

Dashword’s strength lies in its ability to analyze top-ranking content and provide detailed insights on what you need to include to compete.

Dashword - Surfer SEO Alternatives
Dashword

Key Features:

Pros:

Cons:

Pricing:

Dashboard offers a free report. The paid plan starts at $99/month.

Ratings:

G2: NA

Capterra: NA

Why go for Dashword over Surfer SEO?

Surfer SEO gives you an in-depth analysis, which can be a bit confusing for beginners. Dashboard, on the other hand, shows exactly what you need to improve your content, which gives clarity and ultimately helps to save a lot of time.

Why do I like this tool?

Dashboard is a good tool for creating a content strategy, but when it comes to topic clustering, I mostly prefer using Writesonic.

9. Page Optimizer Pro

Page Optimizer Pro is an on-page SEO and content optimization tool that helps you create, optimize, and maintain high-quality content on Google. The advanced tool helps to zoom in on the tiniest details that can make a huge impact on your rankings.

Page Optimizer Pro - Surfer SEO Alternatives
Page Optimizer Pro

Page Optimizer Pro provides detailed recommendations based on the top-ranking pages for your target keywords.

Key Features:

Pros:

Cons:

Pricing:

Page Optimizer Pro offers a 7-day free trial. The paid plan starts at $34/month.

Ratings:

G2: 5/5

Capterra: 4.9/5

Why go for Page Optimizer Pro over Surfer SEO?

While both tools focus on on-page optimization, Page Optimizer Pro offers a more granular approach to page analysis. If you’re looking for detailed, actionable recommendations for optimizing individual pages, Page Optimizer Pro is an excellent choice.

Why do I like this tool?

I appreciate Page Optimizer Pro’s laser focus on on-page SEO. The detailed recommendations are incredibly valuable for fine-tuning your content for specific keywords.

10. SE Ranking

SE Ranking is another popular Surfer SEO alternative that offers a comprehensive SEO toolkit. It guides you through every step of your optimization journey with actionable and in-depth insights.

SE Ranking - Surfer SEO Alternatives
SE Ranking

SE Ranking offers a wide range of tools, including keyword research, competitor analysis, content editor, rank tracker, and so on. The tool is best known for its user-friendly interface.

Key Features:

Pros:

Cons:

Pricing:

SE Ranking offers a 14-day free trial. The paid plan starts at $65/month.

Ratings:

G2: 4.8/5

Capterra: 4.7/5

Why go for SE Ranking over Surfer SEO?

SE Ranking offers a more comprehensive SEO toolkit at a more affordable price point. If you’re looking for an all-in-one SEO solution that won’t break the bank, SE Ranking is an excellent alternative to Surfer SEO. However, if you are looking for an even more affordable SEO tool that offers many more features, try Writesonic.

Why do I like this tool?

I like the reporting feature, which is particularly valuable for agencies and consultants looking to present professional reports to clients.

Get your hands on the best Surfer SEO alternative – Writesonic

And, there you go! 10 best Surfer SEO alternatives that you can try out.

From Writesonic – an all-in-one content generation and optimization tool to Page Optimizer Pro, there’s a tool out there for every SEO need and budget.

Remember, the best tool for you depends on your specific needs, budget, and level of SEO expertise. Whether you’re looking for an all-in-one solution like Writesonic, a content optimization powerhouse like Clearscope, or a content brief generator like Topic, there’s an alternative to Surfer SEO that’s perfect for you.

And the best part? Most of these tools offer free trials or demos. So, why not start with the comprehensive SEO tool Writesonic? Its user-friendly interface, comprehensive toolkit, and affordable pricing make it a perfect Surfer SEO alternative.

Start your free trial now and see the difference for yourself!

Have you ever noticed how some articles just grab your attention and make it impossible to skip?

That’s the magic of listicle format blogs. They’re versatile, practical, and incredibly effective for readers.

In fact, research suggests that listicles get almost twice as much traffic than other types of blog posts.

Listicle blogs are popular simply because people are usually in a hurry to read, and lists make content much easier to scan, digest, and share.

So, if you want to learn about how to write a listicle that not only captivates your audience but also drives a ton of traffic to your site, stick around!

We’ll break down the key elements, show you some killer listicle examples, and give you practical tips to create your own.

What is a listicle?

A listicle is just a fancy term for an article that is structured as a list.

Think of it as a combination of a list and an article. You’ve probably seen titles like “10 Tips for Better Sleep” or “10 Best Content Optimization Tools.”

Each point on the list gets its own mini-section, making the blog incredibly engaging and easy to read.

The listicle template for blogs has taken over the internet for a good reason.

Listicles cater to our natural preference for organized information. Instead of wading through a wall of text, readers can quickly scan the points that interest them most.

Can you imagine reading a long, dense article about SEO strategies?

We’re pretty sure you’d much rather have that same content broken down into a listicle like “10 SEO Strategies for 2024.”

You’ll notice that listicle ideas are everywhere. From BuzzFeed’s quirky lists to Forbes’ prestigious “30 Under 30,” these structured articles dominate the content scene.

And it’s not just a fad — there’s data to back it up.

70% of listicle articles see an increase in CTR — just by adding a number to the headline.

But here’s the best part: listicles aren’t confined to any one niche. They’re like that versatile pair of shoes you rely on for every event.

A listicle format can make your content more engaging and digestible, whether you’re writing about tech, health, finance, or lifestyle. That’s why this blog format is a favorite among content marketers everywhere.

Why should you write more listicles?

Photo by Kaitlyn Baker / Unsplash

Let’s look more deeply into why you should be incorporating more listicles into your website blog’s content mix:

1. Easy to scan and read

Let’s face it: we’re all a bit time-crunched these days.

When was the last time you read an entire article without skimming through it first?

Listicles cater to this reality by breaking down information into bite-sized, digestible chunks that are super easy to scan.

A study shows that 79% of online readers scan rather than read word-for-word, which means your content needs to be easily skimmable, and listicles fit the bill perfectly.

And with readers’ attention spans now decreasing more than ever, they simply don’t have the time to read through long paragraphs.

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Here’s a pro tip: use clear subheadings and bullet points to enhance readability.

Each point in your listicle should be concise and to the point. This structure helps your readers quickly find the information they’re looking for without getting overwhelmed by a wall of text.

2. Highly shareable on social media

Have you ever noticed how listicles flood your social media feeds, especially on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter?

That’s because they’re inherently shareable. Their catchy headlines and easily digestible content make them perfect for social sharing.

You’ll be surprised to know that listicle blog posts receive 218% more social media shares than other types of content.

That’s a massive boost in visibility! Now just think about what it can do for your website’s traffic.

An extremely quick way to garner more shares for your blog is to create a listicle that covers other popular tools, platforms, or individual profiles, such as influencers.

Because you featured a particular person, you can reach out to the people behind each tool, and many of them will be more than happy to share your content on social media.

Plus, listicles are also great content for guest blogging collaborations, leading to higher visibility.

3. Listicles attract higher clicks on Google SERPs

Google loves listicles, and so do users.

When you search for something, you’re often greeted with listicles right at the top of the search results.

And this isn’t a coincidence.

Listicles often snag the coveted featured snippets spot because they provide clear, structured answers to users’ queries.

By structuring your content in a listicle format, you’re more likely to rank higher and attract more clicks.

Plus, the clear structure of listicles means they’re more likely to keep readers engaged, reducing bounce rates and improving your site’s SEO metrics.

Also read: How to Write an Article: A Step-by-Step Guide

How to write a listicle: 9 proven steps that drive engagement + traffic!

Creating a listicle that captivates your audience and drives engagement isn’t just about slapping a few points together.

It requires strategy, creativity, and a touch of data-driven insight.

So, let’s break down the steps to crafting a listicle that engages readers and ranks well in search engines.

Step 1: Choose a topic

Your topic is the foundation of your listicle.

It needs to resonate with your audience and align with your expertise.

Use keyword research tools like BuzzSumo and Google Trends to discover trending topics and listicle ideas. Aim for a topic specific enough to provide value but broad enough to attract a wide audience.

Buzzsumo

For example, a topic like “10 Content Marketing Strategies for 2024” can be timely and relevant if you’re in the marketing niche.

Ensure your topic addresses a common problem or interest among your target audience to grab attention.

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P.S.: Try Writesonic’s Keyword Researcher for an in-depth topic analysis!

Step 2: Write a click-worthy listicle headline

Your headline is your first impression, so make it count.

Craft a headline that grabs attention and clearly states the benefit or takeaway. For instance, “7 Proven Steps to Boost Your SEO Rankings” tells readers exactly what they’ll gain from the article.

Here are some tips to follow for a compelling and impactful listicle headline:

Here’s an example of a compelling listicle blog title:

Keyword clustering tools blog
Keyword clustering tools blog

As you can see, this blog title consists of a number and power words to attract readers.

At the same time, it’s short and sweet but also very clear and descriptive, so readers know exactly what to expect from this listicle article.

One thing to note here is that crafting an attractive title is also a great way to boost the SEO quality of your listicle blog.

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Pro tip: If you’re stuck and need ideas for your next listicle blog headline, try Writesonic’s FREE AI Title Generator!

Step 3: Write a compelling introduction

A captivating introduction is the key to setting the tone of your listicle blog and keeping your readers hooked.

You can do this by sharing an interesting fact, statistic, or personal example.

This sets the stage and entices readers to continue.

Finally, remember to clearly explain exactly what readers will learn from the listicle and why they should keep reading.

If you don’t offer a compelling reason to keep reading, you’ll just end up with a high bounce rate.

Step 4: Provide valuable content for each point

Each item on your list should provide actionable insights or valuable information. Avoid vague or generic advice. Enrich your content with data, examples, and practical tips.

Be sure to use your H2 and H3 headings properly.

Your list of items should be well-structured and have headings that are easily scannable and very clear for readers.

But it’s important not to make this structure too confusing for your readers otherwise, your listicle will end up serving more as an in-depth guide.

Remember that a lousy list post is filled with fluff and offers no tangible, valuable takeaways for the reader.

Your listicle should give readers more than a list of things to do. It should also include valuable content that explains each step.

Step 5: Use a consistent structure

type type type
Photo by Kenny Eliason / Unsplash

To improve readability, maintain a uniform format for each point. Start with a brief explanation, followed by tips or examples.

This consistency helps readers easily follow along and absorb the information.

For example, each point could start with a bold subheading, followed by a couple of sentences explaining the tip, and then a relevant example or data.

Also, avoid having large chunks of text throughout your listicle blog. Long paragraphs on a complex topic can overwhelm readers just by scanning an article.

To prevent this issue, keep each section between 100 and 200 words.

Making every sentence count is essential, so condense points wherever possible while maintaining clarity.

Some other strategies for a well-structured listicle include:

Also read: How to Write an Article: A Step-by-Step Guide

Step 6: Include relevant examples or data

Support your points with statistics or case studies to add credibility.

For instance, if you’re writing about social media marketing, simply discussing its importance, benefits, and types of strategies will not be enough.

To really tap into your reader’s mind, mentioning facts from valid and reliable sources backs up your claims and provides readers with valuable insights.

Including data and examples makes your content more trustworthy and engaging. It shows that you’ve done your research and provides concrete evidence to support your advice.

You might have noticed how some listicles have hyperlinks within the blog that lead to other pages of their website.

Adding links to your other relevant blog posts keeps readers on your site longer.

Interlinking improves SEO and provides additional value to your audience by offering more in-depth information on related topics.

For example, if you’re writing a listicle about content marketing strategies, you could link to a previous post about “The Ultimate Guide to SEO.”

This keeps readers engaged with your content and increases the likelihood they’ll explore your site more.

Here’s another example directly taken from one of our blogs:

How to write a listicle: Incorporate internal linking
How to write a listicle: Incorporate internal linking

These links should be hyperlinked to relevant target keywords and not randomly placed throughout your listicle.

Step 8: Proofread and edit

Ensure your listicle is free of grammatical errors and typos.

Reading your blog aloud is a great way to catch awkward phrasing and ensuring a smooth flow. This will also help you determine your listicle’s readability and engagement level.

Ultimately, a polished article enhances your credibility and reader trust.

Even minor mistakes can distract readers and undermine your authority. So, take the time to proofread and refine your content before hitting publish.

Step 9: Include a call to action

When concluding your blog, end with a clear call to action that encourages readers to share the post, leave a comment, or try out your product.

This drives engagement and provides a pathway for further interaction with your content.

The goal is to leave the readers with something actionable so you can get the most ROI out of your listicle.

You might also like: 13 Tips To Optimize Your Blog Post for Search Engines

7 types of listicle examples and templates to drive more clicks

When crafting listicles, the format you choose can significantly affect the effectiveness of your content.

Different listicle formats serve various purposes, and understanding which one to use can significantly enhance the impact of your content.

Here are seven popular examples of listicles to inspire your next blog.

1. Simple list post

7 Best Keyword Clustering Tools
7 Best Keyword Clustering Tools

Features: A straightforward compilation of items or tips with brief explanations.

When to use: Ideal for providing quick, actionable advice or resource recommendations without overwhelming the reader.

Example: 7 Best Keyword Clustering Tools to Improve Topical Authority (Tested)

What we love: This listicle template delivers exactly what it promises—a concise list of the best keyword clustering tools for content writers and SEO specialists.

Each tool is briefly described, allowing readers to grasp the benefits quickly. You’ll also notice how each tool’s section follows a particular pattern covering key features, pros, cons, and pricing.

With this skimmable structure, readers can find what they’re looking for in an organized manner.

2. Definitive list post

Hubspot Blog
Hubspot Blog

Features: A definitive listicle is an exhaustive compilation that covers all facets of a topic in great detail.

When to use: Perfect for creating in-depth guides that aim to provide an all-inclusive look at a subject, making it invaluable for readers seeking thorough information.

Example: Writing Formal Emails: The Ultimate Guide

What we love: This listicle is a masterclass in providing exhaustive, high-value content. The blog clearly guides readers through different scenarios like cold emails and follow-ups, making it an invaluable resource for sales professionals.

It dives deep into various sales email templates, offering specific examples, detailed explanations, and practical tips, ensuring that the content is immediately useful and adaptable.

3. Checklist list post

SEOWind Blog
SEOWind Blog

Features: A structured list that provides a series of steps or items to check off.

When to use: Great for procedural content where readers need to follow a series of steps to complete a task.

Example: The Ultimate Blog Post Checklist: 21 Tips for Success

What we love: This listicle offers a practical, step-by-step checklist for creating successful blog posts. Each item is clearly explained, making it easy for readers to follow along and ensure they cover all essential elements.

The checklist format is perfect for helping bloggers systematically improve their content, ensuring nothing is overlooked.

4. Resource list post

AIHR Blog
AIHR Blog


Features: A curated compilation of valuable resources, such as facts, articles, or references.

When to use: Best for sharing resource lists that readers can use to enhance their work.

Example: Top HR Blogs to Follow in 2024

What we love: This listicle compiles an extensive list of HR blogs, each with a brief description and link. The blog content serves as a valuable resource for HR professionals looking to stay updated on industry trends and best practices.

Readers can quickly discover new, high-quality content in their field, providing a centralized hub for ongoing learning and development.

5. Expert roundup list post

Orbit Media Blog
Orbit Media Blog

Features: A collection of insights and tips from industry experts.

When to use: Ideal for providing expert opinions and showcasing diverse perspectives on a specific topic.

Example: Should You Delete Old Content? 20+ Experts Weigh In

What we love: This listicle gathers insights from over 20 experts on the topic of deleting old content. Each expert shares their unique perspective and advice, providing readers with a well-rounded view of the issue.

The diverse opinions help readers make informed decisions about their own content strategy. This format not only offers valuable advice but also builds credibility by featuring respected voices in the industry.

6. “Best of” list post

Variety Blog
Variety Blog

Features: A compilation of the best items or resources in a particular category.

When to use: Ideal for reviews or recommendations, helping readers make informed decisions about the best options available.

Example: Best Movies of 2024 So Far

What we love: This listicle provides a curated selection of the top movies released in 2024, each accompanied by a brief review and insightful commentary.

It’s perfect for film enthusiasts looking to catch up on the year’s standout films. The post offers a diverse range of genres and styles, ensuring there’s something for every taste. The engaging descriptions and expert reviews help readers decide which films are worth watching, making it an invaluable resource for staying updated on the latest cinematic highlights.

7. Step-by-step list post

Writesonic Blog
Writesonic Blog

Features: A detailed guide that breaks down a process into manageable steps.

When to use: Perfect for tutorials or instructional content that requires clear, sequential guidance.

Example: How to Outsource Content Writing: A Step-by-Step Guide

What we love: This listicle provides a comprehensive, step-by-step guide on outsourcing content writing. Each step is clearly explained with practical tips and examples, making it easy for readers to follow and implement.

This format ensures that readers can systematically follow the guide and achieve successful results in outsourcing their content writing tasks.

Listicle ideas for your next blog

Finding the right topic for your next listicle can make all the difference in engaging your audience and driving traffic to your site.

Here are some sample listicle blog titles tailored for various domains, designed to spark your creativity and help you brainstorm compelling content.

Listicle ideas for e-commerce or B2C companies

Listicle ideas for B2B companies

Listicle ideas for health and wellness blogs

Listicle ideas for technology and innovation blogs

Listicle ideas for travel and adventure blogs

Write Listicles that go viral with Writesonic AI Article Writer 6.0!

There you have it!

It’s clear that listicles are a powerful addition to your website’s content strategy.

But if you’re looking to take your listicle game to the next level, Writesonic AI Article Writer 6.0 is your go-to solution.

Writesonic’s AI makes the entire listicle creation process smooth and efficient. Here’s how:

With Writesonic, you can save hours of writing and editing while boosting your content’s reach and impact.

Just let our cutting-edge tech handle all the heavy lifting, so you can focus on being creative and strategic with your content!

Why not give it a try?

Incorporate Writesonic AI Article Writer 6.0 into your workflow today, and watch your listicles go viral!

One of the most critical steps of owning the top Google spot for desired keywords is ensuring that SEO is set up correctly. SEO is an ongoing process with many moving parts—on-page, technical and link-building.

That’s not to mention the frequent Google algorithm updates that are hard to keep up with.

Given these challenges, it’s understandable that SEO can be complex, manually tasking and time-consuming. Thankfully, lots of SEO professionals now use AI for SEO to automate many of the tedious tasks involved in SEO.

If you want to take your SEO strategy to the next level, utilizing Artificial Intelligence (AI) for SEO is the smart way to go. This article will guide you through using AI in SEO and help you discover its full potential.

What is AI-based SEO?

AI-based SEO involves integrating AI into SEO tools to automate and optimize various aspects of an SEO strategy. These SEO tools use AI to speed up manual tasks and automate repetitive SEO tasks like keyword research, content ideation, optimization and analyzing competitor strategies.

And that’s just scratching the surface of its potential. AI tools have many undiscovered capabilities, but for now, here are some ways to use AI for SEO.

How to Use AI for SEO Optimization?

SEO specialists use AI tools for various tasks, from keyword research to on-page optimization and technical SEO. But that’s not all there is to using AI. Here are some ways to align AI tools with your SEO strategy.

Before Writing

Much work goes into laying the groundwork for a successful SEO strategy to ensure it drives organic traffic. Here are some essential SEO tasks to perform and how AI can help.

1. Automated Keyword Research and Targeting

Keyword research identifies search terms your target audience uses on search engines like Google when searching for information. These could be questions, phrases, or specific words related to a topic of interest.

Before AI, keyword research used multiple keyword research tools to find thousands of keywords. Then, you’d have to gather data on search volumes and manually analyze each keyword in Excel. This was time-consuming and often required the expertise of a senior SEO specialist.

Thanks to AI, this process has been cut short so anyone with basic knowledge can carry it out. AI-powered keyword research tools, such as Writesonic’s Keyword research tool, can help find valuable keyword ideas quickly.  

To get started, Writesonic asks for a seed keyword or popular phrase related to your business to generate a list of keywords. For example, if you sell fashion items, your seed keyword might be “sustainable fashion.” This is your primary keyword.

Writesonic Keyword Research Tool - AI for SEO
Writesonic Keyword Research Tool

For each keyword, Writesonic displays its search volume, keyword volume, difficulty, potential traffic, high-potential keywords and questions. These keywords can be used to optimize website copywriting or inputted into blogs to optimize it.

For example, the phrase “fast fashion vs. sustainable fashion” can be added as a heading in the article to make it more optimized.

Writesonic Keyword Research Tool - AI for SEO
Writesonic Keyword Research Tool

Writesonic’s keyword research tool also goes beyond the seed keywords and suggests variations of keywords, including long-tail keywords, short-tail keywords, product keywords, competitor keywords and more. These are the secondary keywords.

2. Analyze Search Intent

Part of creating helpful content that ranks is understanding the search intent behind the keyword. In simple terms, this means identifying the goal of a user’s query and creating relevant content that meets that need. This could involve answering questions, buying a product, finding information, or reading up on a topic.

In SEO, search intent is categorized into four types: information, commercial,  transactional and navigational.

Once you have your list of keywords, AI tools like ChatGPT can help identify the search intent for each one. This saves you time from manually researching and analyzing SERP results to understand user intent.

I asked ChatGPT to give me a list of keywords for the term “electric cars” and the search intent.

ChatGPT - AI for SEO
ChatGPT

Here’s the output it displayed:

ChatGPT - AI for SEO
ChatGPT

Let’s do a quick test comparing ChatGPT results to SERP results for the keyword “Electric car reviews” to see if the intent is truly informational.

Google search results

The first three Google search results are blog posts, which tells me that people are looking for information about the search term.

Taking it further, I asked ChatGPT for a list of content types that would satisfy this intent. Consequently, this removes much of the guesswork and helps businesses targeting this keyword know what kind of content they should create to rank.

Google search results - AI for SEO
ChatGPT

3. Content Audit

Auditing existing content is challenging, especially if you have a large website with thousands of pages. Instead of scouring through each one to determine its performance, AI can reduce the hours of manual inventory.

It can analyze your site’s web pages and give back results on the number of pages, keywords, content assets, page URLs and internal links on each page. Platforms like Clearvoice and Marketmuse already incorporate AI to fast-track content optimization.

Source: MarketMuse - AI for SEO
Source: MarketMuse

A note of warning: while AI shortens the content audit process, it should not be left to fully handle it as AI is still subject to hallucination and bias. Often, this leads to AI generating data that sounds plausible, inaccurate or subject to prejudices.

4. Competitor Analysis

Much of SEO is understanding what the competition is doing and beating it. This includes researching the keywords they’re targeting, backlink profiles, and SEO strategies that keep them ranking at the top of the organic search results.

You could manually find the competition by searching multiple websites targeting the exact keywords, but that would take forever. This is where AI SEO tools like Semrush Copilot AI and Ahrefs come in.

Semrush Copilot AI, for example, gives you insight into your competitors’ content ideas and even generates recommendations based on traffic lost.

Source: Semrush Copilot AI - AI for SEO
Source: Semrush Copilot AI

5. Topic Cluster Analysis

Clustering keywords is an excellent way of connecting keywords and linking them. Each cluster is connected with internal links that link one page directly to the other. Typically, a cluster contains one pillar page and multiple related sub-pages, which shows a semantic relationship between the pages and topical authority.

Say you’re building out a topic cluster on digital marketing. Since this is a broad topic, you’ll need to create a pillar page and thousands of subpages on content marketing, SEO, social media marketing etc.

Before AI, SEOs built topic clusters using Google to find topical clusters related to a seed keyword, which is time-consuming and very limiting.

With AI tools like the Writesonic Topic Cluster Builder, it’s easier to build topic clusters in minutes. Here’s how:

Input the main keyword into Writesonic, and in seconds, it generates two types of topic clusters. Each contains a Pillar content keyword, which are the main keywords for the main page and a Cluster content keyword, which are the keywords for additional pages.

Writesonic's Topic Clustering Tool - AI for SEO
Writesonic’s Topic Clustering Tool

Writesonic provides an analysis of each keyword and groups keywords that are semantically related so they are correctly targeted. It also offers various subtopics related to your keyword and suggests article ideas for each secondary keyword.

Writesonic's Topic Clustering Tool - AI for SEO
Writesonic’s Topic Clustering Tool

6. Plan Content Outline

content outline is an overview of what an article would look like. This includes the H1 title, H2 and H3 subheadings, internal links and talking points, keywords, and desired word count. In essence, this is to guide and organize the writing process so that the final output is not far off from what is expected.

AI shortens the content outline process and cuts back on time spent looking through the SERP result, choosing the right angle, and finding the suitable headings, facts, or stats to include.

AI tools like Writesonic can generate detailed outlines to cut back on research time. It takes on the task of researching information relevant to your blog outline and brainstorming unique angles.

Enter a topic, country, reference content, primary keywords, secondary keywords and Writesonic generates a well-detailed outline that structures your content.

Writesonic's AI Article Writer - AI for SEO
Writesonic’s AI Article Writer

Alternatively, you can choose to individually select outline, add, remove, or re-arrange it to meet your taste.

Writesonic's AI Article Writer - AI for SEO
Writesonic’s AI Article Writer

7. Content Gap Analysis with AI (Explain Content Grader Steps)

Content gap is the process of finding untapped gaps in a content topic to improve its output and meet search intent. It’s defined as content with outdated information or lacking key information that users are searching for.

The content gap analyzer feature in Writesonic is a great tool for finding hidden SEO gems that your competition is currently milking to rank high on Google, and you’re missing out on. Just input your main keyword and select competitor links.

Then, the AI tool compares your existing content on a topic with the competitor’s and grades it on a 5-point scale.

Writesonic's AI Content Gap Analysis Tool - AI for SEO
Writesonic’s AI Content Gap Analysis Tool

Also, you get additional metrics on content performance (think word count, heading, images), performance (think domain rating, backlinks, URL, domains, traffic) and keywords (think top keywords, sub-keywords, volume). You get the whole deal.

Writesonic's AI Content Gap Analysis Tool - AI for SEO
Writesonic’s AI Content Gap Analysis Tool

A big plus of this tool is its suggestions for re-optimizing each section of the article. These suggestions are actionable and easy to implement. Here’s an example.

Writesonic's AI Content Gap Analysis Tool - AI for SEO
Writesonic’s AI Content Gap Analysis Tool

During Writing

When writing, AI tools are the best assistants for articulating the right words and cutting research time. Here’s how to use AI during writing.

1. Finding Relevant Research and Statistics

Adding relevant statistics to content can make the messaging more accurate and persuasive. It adds depth to the research and makes your argument plausible to the reader.

While adding stats to content can significantly improve its authority, finding relevant stats can be a chore. Unless you create original research, you’ll have to comb through hundreds of pages to find it and then try to make it fit into the context of the content. Or you could use an AI tool like Chatsonic to speed up the process and find original seconds on the internet in minutes.

Writesonic’s Chatsonic feature is a conversational AI bot that uses machine learning and NLP to engage in human-like conversations. Think of it as an advanced ChatGPT with built-in web search so that the information provided is accurate.

Here’s an example to find research on climate change and relevant papers we can link to.

Chatsonic - AI for SEO
Chatsonic

Chatsonic even gives you the author, title, publication year and a summary so you can decide if the link is relevant to the context of your research.

Chatsonic - AI for SEO
Chatsonic

Likewise, you can also ask Chatsonic questions to find answers scattered all over the internet faster. Here’s an example.

Chatsonic -
Chatsonic

Here’s the response.

Chatsonic - AI for SEO
Chatsonic

2. Brainstorm SEO-optimized titles and headers

Titles and headings play a huge role in SEO and user experience. For search crawlers, they provide semantic context and a hierarchical structure to understand relevance. For readers, they give a preview of what each section contains and aid its readability.

AI can analyze the headlines of top-ranked sites and generate variations of SEO-optimized titles and headers. Some tools, like Writesonic, have this added advantage over ChatGPT because they have access to the Internet to analyze the ranking headlines and provide recommendations.

Say you want to write an article about “building a personal brand.” Here, I ask ChatGPT to generate headline ideas on the topic and here’s the result.

ChatGPT for headlines - AI for SEO
ChatGPT for headlines

You can also use Writesonic to generate SEO-optimized headlines that you can use as is. Just input the topic and choose five references from competitor articles to help the AI understand the topic, including the keyword strategy, word length, heading distribution etc.

Writesonic's AI Article Writer - AI for SEO
Writesonic’s AI Article Writer

Next, choose the primary keyword you want to target. Writesonic shows you the volume and difficulty

Writesonic's AI Article Writer - AI for SEO
Writesonic’s AI Article Writer

After this, Writesonic generates a list of engaging blog titles. At first glance, the results are more optimized than ChatGPT’s results.

Writesonic's AI Article Writer - AI for SEO
Writesonic’s AI Article Writer

3. Generate First-draft Content

To rank high on SERPs, you must create good content people want to read. It’s that simple. Here’s where AI comes in.

AI tools are well-known for generating content for blog posts, but here’s the caveat: AI is still subject to hallucinations, and since it is trained on existing articles, it can struggle to produce truly creative and original content. In other words, AI content can be highly plagiarized.

However, do not entirely disregard using AI for SEO content. It can be a great writing assistant for providing the first draft. An AI writer is great for helping marketers overcome writer’s block and generate ideas to work with.

Tools like Writesonic’s “Article Writer” use natural language processing (NLP) to generate a well-written first draft which sounds human-like. This draft is detailed with stats, images and links to research references, which makes it more impressive than ChatGPT. Even better, you get access to multiple templates that you can work with to generate the first draft quickly.

Overall, Writesonic generates a first draft that you can work with, which is a great starting point for optimizing the content generation process. Here’s an article about a first draft from Writesonic.

Writesonic's AI Article Writer - AI for SEO
Writesonic’s AI Article Writer

After Writing

Even after writing, AI tools can supercharge the SEO process to ensure that you create optimized content.

1. Grammar and Plagiarism Checker

Once you’ve created your content, AI tools can help spot elusive mistakes and tighten sentences so they hit the right note and match your brand tone. It’ll check grammar errors, punctuation mistakes, writing tone, readability issues, plagiarism issues and more.

Grammarly is the go-to AI tool for many writers, and they recently added a Generative AI assistant that you can use to write based on a prompt, personalize your content tone, ideate and generate responses.

Here, I have my finished article ready to go. While reading it, it reads well, and there are no noticeable mistakes.

Grammar Check - AI for SEO
Grammar Check

But put it inside Grammarly, and it highlights noticeable mistakes that were missed.

Grammarly - AI for SEO
Grammarly

Grammarly also provides advanced performance reports showing the content’s engagement level, delivery, clarity, and correctness.

Grammarly - AI for SEO
Grammarly

2. SEO Content Optimization with AI

Beyond creating content, AI can help make your content more SEO-optimized, so it performs well on SERP. Content optimization is vital for refining content to become more engaging, but it’s not easy to achieve because it demands expertise in SEO.

AI tools like Writesonic SEO Checker and Optimizer can help with everything from keyword usage to on-page SEO to internal linking to UX. Everything. Here are a few examples.

Writesonic's On-page SEO checker - AI for SEO
Writesonic’s On-page SEO checker

3. Write metadata

Metadata are snippets of text that provide information about a web page’s content for users and search engines. Good metadata is unique, between optimal length and informative, and has a persuasive CTA that enables readers to take action.

AI tools can analyze a web page’s content and summarize it to create engaging meta tags within the correct character limit. This includes title tags, meta descriptions, and keywords. If you have to generate multiple metadata without wasting time, AI can help generate these tags in seconds.

I asked ChatGPT to write the metadata for this article, and here’s what it gave me.

ChatGPT for metadata - AI for SEO
ChatGPT for metadata

This is a good starting point. Just edit the results from ChatGPT to suit your content tone.

4. Content Accessibility

If you’re targeting customers in multiple countries, you must ensure that web content is accessible and usable for all readers, including those with disabilities. AI can help with content that meets this standard.

ChatGPT for translation - AI for SEO
ChatGPT for translation

Post-Publishing

After publishing an article, there’s still much work for the content to generate traffic and attract qualified leads. Without the right distribution strategy, even the best content would get no visitors and no engagement. Here’s how AI tools can help post-publishing.

1. Analyze data and Improve SEO Performance

Analytics gives insight into content performance and audience engagement, such as page views, bounce rates, conversion rates and more. This helps you understand how users interact with your website’s content so you can make informed decisions to improve your ranking and drive more organic traffic.

AI tools can automate the entire process with little human intervention. Use AI tools to collect data from various sources like social media, Google Analytics, and more. AI driven seo tools can analyze these data and identify trends that can be difficult to spot manually. It can also monitor search engine rankings, track changes, and provide insights through comprehensive reports.

2. Content Distribution and Repurposing

Once you’ve created your content, the next step is sharing and promoting it through multiple channels to maximize its reach. To achieve this, you need to create a variety of content for different channels, such as blogs, social media, email newsletters, and more.

AI tools can speed up the process and help brainstorm ideas for content promotion, unique angles and hashtags.

If you’re struggling to repurpose your existing content into engaging formats, Writesonic is an excellent AI tool to help. It has over 100+ templates specifically for transforming long-form content into different formats, such as social media content, email, and even video scripts. You can also use it to plan your content to have an entire content calendar and a consistent flow of engaging content.

Writesonic's Sonic Editor - AI for SEO
Writesonic’s Sonic Editor

With Photosonic, you can create visually stunning images that match your social content. The tool gives you different image types, including photorealistiic images, abstract art, or character design in different image sizes.

Simply input a text description, choose an image size and generate up to 5 Photosonic creates captivating images that complement your repurposed content.

I asked Photosnic to generate an image of sunset and here are the results.

Photosonic - AI for SEO
Photosonic

You can also use AI tools like Descript AI Video to generate and edit blog posts into tutorials that can be shared on YouTube.

3. Technical SEO

AI can help identify and fix technical issues that affect search engine crawling and indexing, such as broken links, duplicate content, and site speed optimization.

AI can help with website crawling and indexing to enhance your website’s visibility. It crawls websites to detect issues such as broken internal links, duplicate content, and missing meta descriptions that may prevent search engine crawlers from finding them.

AI powered seo tools like Screaming Frog and Deepcrawl can conduct a comprehensive site audit, finding and fixing issues that could impact indexing.

4. Generating schema markup

Generating schema code can be complex if you have no prior coding skills. Schema markup helps search engines understand the content of your web page better. Using AI tools, you can automate the process of generating a schema code to save yourself time manually doing it.

All we need to do is give the AI a prompt, and you will have it within seconds. Tools like Rank Math and MarketMuse use AI to generate schema code without coding from scratch. They can analyze your content and automatically recommend appropriate schema types, simplifying the process.

5. Automated testing and monitoring

Since SEO is a never-ending task, you need to deploy suitable assistants to handle it, and AI fits right in. SEO automation tools available 24/7 to continuously monitor website performance analytics, including technical errors, traffic patterns, user engagement metrics and search engine ranking, and alert on potential issues as soon as they arise. It can also detect unusual patterns in SEO data, such as traffic drops or unexpected changes in rankings.

AI tools like SE Ranking can also compile data from various sources and generate detailed data in an easy-to-understand format to track progress.

Use AI tools to complement SEO strategy

Using AI tools to complement your SEO strategy can provide many benefits—automation, scalability and cost-saving.

The sooner you adapt AI to your SEO strategy, the faster you’ll harness the power of AI for SEO to elevate your content strategy. But remember, AI tools are assistants. Hence, they should not replace your entire plan; they should only complement it.

With tools like Writesonic at your fingertips, you can automate your SEO strategy from keywords to content gap to content creation. So why wait? Sign up to try out Writesonic today.

FAQ

What are the benefits of using AI for SEO?

AI tools can process extensive SEO data sets to find opportunities and gaps. It also automates routine SEO tasks such as site audits and keyword research.

What is the future of AI in SEO?

The future of AI in SEO includes advanced personalization, producing user-specific content, local search and optimized voice search.

  1. How does AI help in improving search engine rankings?

A: AI can help improve search engine rankings by identifying relevant keywords and optimizing content

75% of users never scroll past the first page on Google.

If you are tired of seeing your website languish on the second or third page of search results, you’re at the right place. From keyword research tools to backlink analysis tools, this blog covers 60+ SEO tools that can help you transform your digital strategy and climb SERPs.

Ready to leverage the powerful SEO tools to boost your online visibility and drive more traffic to your website? Let’s get started.

Best Keyword Research Tools

Ranking higher on SERPs isn’t an easy task! But with the right keyword research tool, you can simplify the process. Here are a few of the best keyword research tools that can help you find relevant keywords, understand their search intent, and ultimately improve your website traffic.

1. Writesonic Keyword Research Tool

Designed specifically for marketers and SEO professionals, the Writesonic Keyword research tool helps to simplify the keyword research process by finding relevant and trending keywords for your content quickly.

Writesonic Keyword Research Tool - Best SEO Tools
Writesonic Keyword Research Tool

The advanced tool provides detailed insights into keyword difficulty, traffic potential, search volume, and more, helping you make an informed decision about which keyword to target. The user-friendly interface, cost-effectiveness, and integration capabilities make Writesonic’s keyword research a must-have tool.

Cost: Writesonic offers a free trial, with a paid plan starting at just $16/month.

Ready to give it a try?

2. Moz Keyword Explorer

Moz Keyword Explorer is a keyword research tool by Moz that helps to perform in-depth keyword and SERP analysis. The tool provides a comprehensive overview of keyword metrics, including CTR, KD, and search volume.

It also offers keyword suggestions, creates lists, and performs competitor analysis to find the right keywords and boost your SEO efforts. Moz Keyword Explorer leverages an extensive keyword index of over 1.25 billion keywords to help you discover traffic-driving keywords and enhance the site’s visibility.

Cost: Moz offers a 30-day free trial. The paid plan starts at $49/month.

3. Semrush Keyword Research

Next on the list of best SEO tools for keyword research comes the Semrush Keyword Research tools. It offers 6 powerful tools to meet all your keyword research needs – Keyword Overview, Keyword Magic Tool, Organic Research, Keyword Gap, Keyword Strategy Builder, and Organic Traffic Insights.

The advanced tool helps find the right keywords from the extensive database. It offers detailed keyword analysis, competitive research, and comprehensive content optimization features, making it a must-have for SEO professionals and marketers.

Cost: Semrush Keyword Research tool lets you analyze 10 keywords/day. The paid plan starts at just $139.95/month.

4. Ahrefs Keywords Explorer

Best known for its vast database and detailed metrics, Ahrefs Keywords Explorer provides detailed insights into keyword difficulty, search volume, and traffic potential, helping you decide which keywords to target. Moreover, it provides data on CTR, making it super easy for you to prioritize keywords that can drive maximum traffic.

From generating and analyzing keyword ideas to skillfully targeting them, Ahrefs Keywords Explorer can help you in your keyword research journey from start to finish.

Cost: Ahrefs paid plan starts at just $129/month.

5. Keywords Everywhere

Keywords Everywhere is a powerful SEO keyword research browser extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. It shows the data directly in the search engine results.

The tool provides insights into search volume, CPC, and competition levels. It can simplify the process of keyword research, content optimization, and competitor analysis by helping you uncover the high-value keywords that can help you climb SERPs.

Cost: Keywords Everywhere is free to use.

6. Ubersuggest

Developed by Neil Patel, Ubersuggest is a versatile tool that offers a wide range of features. Ubersuggest keyword research tool is a free Chrome extension that can help you gain insights related to a particular keyword query.

The tool provides keyword suggestions, search volume, CPC, and competition data. It’s a great tool for both beginners and seasoned SEO professionals.

Cost: Ubersuggest Keyword research tool is free to use.

7. KWFinder

Looking to find easy-to-rank keywords? KWFinder can help!

KWFinder by Mangools is another best SEO tool that helps to find long-tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. KWFinder can help find the right keywords, analyze competitors, find exact search volume and trends, or find location-specific keywords.

Cost: KWFinder offers a free trial where you get a limited number of searches. The paid plan starts at $14.95/month.

8. AlsoAsked

AlsoAsked is a unique and advanced keyword research tool that uses Google’s ‘People Also Ask’ data. It helps to find related queries, understand the search intent, and discover trending topics.

AlsoAsked can prove to be an invaluable tool for people looking to create content that addresses specific queries or improves their chances of appearing in the featured snippet.

Cost: AlsoAsked offers 3 free search credits/day. The paid plan starts at $12/month.

9. KeywordTool.io

If you are looking for the best long-tail keyword research tool, look no further than KeywordTool.io.

KeywordTool.io is a robust keyword research tool that uses Google Autocomplete to quickly come up with a plethora of relevant and long-tail keyword suggestions related to any topic. The tool understands what people are searching for across various platforms like YouTube, Google, and more. It provides insights into metrics like volume, trend data, CPC, etc.

Cost: KeywordTool.io is free to use, but the free trial offers limited data. If you’d like to see all teh data available, you can opt for a paid plan.

Best On-Page SEO Tools

Looking to rank higher and get more relevant traffic to the website? On-page SEO tools can help! Here’s a list of some of the best on-page SEO tools that can help you optimize your web page content and rank higher on search engines.

10. Writesonic’s On-Page SEO Checker

Writesonic’s On-Page SEO Checker is an innovative tool to analyze and optimize web pages and boost rankings. It conducts an on-page SEO audit to identify areas of improvement and provides in-depth analysis and insights regarding how to improve.

Writesonic On-Page SEO Checker - Best SEO Tools
Writesonic On-Page SEO Checker

The tool analyzes various on-page elements like headings, keyword usage, meta tags, etc. to ensure you not only create SEO-optimized content but also rank. And the best part? The on-page SEO checker also helps with real-time feedback to create and edit content pieces that can rank well.

Cost: Writesonic offers a free trial, with a paid plan starting at just $16/month.

Ready to give it a try?

11. SEO Checker

SEO Checker is an SEO audit tool that helps to analyze a website’s SEO performance and gives recommendations to improve your ranking and traffic.

From page load speed and title tag optimization to mobile friendliness and URL optimization, the tool analyzes various factors. Then, it generates a report that contains a summary of your website’s SEO health, points out where your site has issues, gives suggestions on how to improve, tells which issues to prioritize, and more.

Cost: SEO Checker offers a 10-day free trial. The paid plan starts at $24/month.

12. Semrush On-Page SEO Checker

Semrush On-Page SEO Checker is a robust tool that provides detailed recommendations to optimize your web pages.

By providing a list of actions to improve the landing page, Semrush On-Page SEO Checker makes it easy to improve the overall website’s SEO performance. It covers various aspects like keyword usage, content length, readability, and more, helping you enhance the page performance.

Cost: Semrush offers a free plan with limited features. The paid plan starts at just $139.95/month.

13. Surfer SEO

Surfer SEO is the best data-driven on-page SEO tool that provides actionable insights to improve your content. The tool analyzes the top-ranking pages based on your target keywords and offers recommendations regarding the content length, keyword usage, page speed, meta tags, NLP sentiment, and content structure.

Apart from the on-page optimization, Surfer SEO also offers various other mind-blowing features like SERP analyzer, content editor, etc., to create SEO-optimized content.

Cost: Surfer SEO offers a 7-day free trial. The paid plan starts at just $89/month.

14. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a powerful and advanced SEO site audit tool that crawls the website to identify on-page SEO issues quickly.

The tool helps to find broken links, analyze metadata, audit redirects, discover duplicate content, and more. Screaming Frog is also an important tool for technical SEO audits and ensures that all the on-page elements are optimized for better performance.

Cost: The free plan offers limited functionalities. If you want more, you can go for a paid plan starting at just $259/year.

15. Clearscope.io

Clearscope.io is a sophisticated content optimization tool that leverages the power of AI to come up with keywords and topic recommendations.

The tool checks the content in real time and provides a score based on the search metrics, keyword usage, readability, word count, and competitors. Clearscope.io helps to make sure the content is highly relevant and meets the search engine standards.

Cost: The paid plan starts at just $189/year.

16. Yoast SEO

Known as the best WordPress plugin for on-page SEO, Yoast SEO helps optimize the content and rank it higher.

Yoast SEO offers numerous features to make sure your content meets the highest SEO standards, like keyword optimization, meta tag management, XML sitemaps, etc., for proper content analysis and better search visibility.

Cost: Yoast SEO offers a free plan. However, for more functionalities, the paid plan starts at just $8.25/month when billed annually.

17. Content King

Want to monitor a website in real-time? Content King can help. The advanced platform helps with real-time SEO auditing and platform monitoring.

Content King crawls the website to provide instant alerts related to any issues that can impact the SEO performance. By offering detailed insights into metadata, internal links, headings, and more, the tool ensures that your website stays on the top.

Cost: Content King offers a free trial.

18. PageOptimizer Pro

PageOptimizer Pro is another on-page SEO tool that helps to optimize the content based on data-driven recommendations.

The tool provides detailed insights into keyword placement, content structure, and competitive analysis. Also, PageOptimizer Pro uses a US-patented ranking factor scoring system, which helps to discover the important things to optimize on the page to drive more traffic and boost the rankings.

Cost: PageOptimizer Pro’s plan starts at just $34/month.

19. Crazy Egg

If you’re looking to improve your site’s user experience, look no further than Crazy Egg.

Crazy Egg is another website optimization tool that provides insights regarding user behavior through visual analytics. It offers features like heatmaps, scrollmaps, and click reports that help to understand how visitors interact with your web page. These insights help to make the improvements backed by data and not some random outdated practices.

Cost: Crazy Egg offers a 30-day free trial. The paid plan starts at just $99/month.

Best Technical Analysis Tools

What if you could identify and resolve all the technical issues on your website and ensure that it complies with the guidelines and delivers a seamless experience? Technical analysis tools can help. From crawling and indexing to error detection and performance monitoring, these tools can help you maintain the efficiency and health of your website. Here are a few of the best technical SEO tools that you can try out.

20. DeepCrawl

DeepCrawl is a powerful cloud-based web crawling tool that helps to perform an in-depth technical audit of your website. It helps to monitor, identify, and optimize the website’s performance and SEO.

DeepCrawl helps to uncover and fix a wide range of potential technical SEO-related issues like backlinks, 404 errors, competitive analysis and more.

Cost: DeepCrawl plans start at just $89/month.

21. Ahrefs Site Audit

When talking about technical SEO tools, you cannot miss out on Ahrefs!

Ahrefs Site Audit is a comprehensive tool that helps identify technical issues on your website. It quickly crawls the website’s pages, identifies and flags all the technical SEO issues, provides recommendations on how to improve, visualizes data in chart format, and delivers an overall SEO score. The advanced tool scans for 170+ SEO issues.

Cost: Ahrefs paid plan starts at just $129/month.

22. GTmetrix

Looking to come up with a faster and more efficient website? Try GTmetrix!

GTmetrix is a web-based tool that helps to analyze page speed and performance. It generates a detailed report on various performance metrics and offers suggestions to improve the site’s speed and user experience.

Cost: GTmetrix offers a free trial. The paid plan starts at $5/month.

23. Semrush Site Audit

Semrush Site Audit is a robust tool that helps comprehensively analyze your website’s technical health.

The advanced tool analyzes the website and generates a technical report on crawlability, site performance, internal linking, HTTPS, and international SEO. It gives actionable insights that can improve your search engine rankings and overall site performance.

Cost: Semrush offers a free plan with limited features. The paid plan starts at just $139.95/month.

24. WebPageTest

WebPageTest is another popular free website performance and optimization test tool that can help monitor and improve your site’s page load speed.

The tool lets you do some super cool things like waterfall speed tests, competitor speed tests, competitor speed videos, identify how long it takes to load the website, and many more things.

Cost: WebPageTest is free to use.

25. Pingdom

Next on the list is Pingdom, a website performance monitoring tool that helps to track the uptime and loading speed of websites, servers, and online services. It helps to make sure that the website is accessible and operational for the end users.

The tool generates a detailed report on the performance metrics and provides recommendations on how to improve the website’s speed and user experience.

Cost: Pingdom offers a 30-day free trial. The paid plan starts at $10/month.

26. Moz Pro Site Crawl

Quickly find common technical SEO issues that are impacting your website’s ability to rank higher, achieve high-quality traffic, or get indexed by search engines with the help of Moz Pro Site Crawl.

Moz Pro Site Crawl is a powerful tool that helps identify and fix technical issues on your website. From broken redirects to missing title tags, it can help you with all. The tool provides detailed reports on various SEO factors and recommendations to improve your site’s health and performance.

Cost: Moz offers a 30-day free trial. The paid plan starts at $49/month.

27. Sitebulb

Want to make SEO audits easy, efficient, and more accurate? Sitebulb can help! Sitebulb is a great website crawler that can help you throughout the journey, from investigation to reporting.

Sitebulb conducts website audits and provides actionable insights and visual reports to aid in the optimization of the website’s performance.

Cost: Sitebulb offers a 14-day free trial. The paid plan starts at $13.50/month.

28. Barracuda Panguin Tool

Barracuda Panguin Tool is a tool designed to help website owners investigate the impact of Google’s algorithm update on the website’s organic traffic.

It connects with the Google Analytics profile and helps you visually correlate the changes in the search traffic with the specific updates. These insights help to understand the reason behind the change in search traffic, which in turn helps to make data-driven adjustments in the SEO strategy.

Cost: Barracuda Panguin Tool is free to use.

Best Local SEO tools

Local SEO tools are essential for businesses looking to increase their visibility in localized search results. From managing and optimizing the local listing to tracking search ranking, these tools make sure to improve your businesses’ visibility in the localized search results. Here are some of the best local SEO tools available:

29. Moz Local

Moz local is an advanced and powerful local SEO and reputation management tool that makes sure your business listings are accurate and consistent across the web.

The tool lets you manage and sync business listings, easily post new updates and offers, track performance, and create reports. By automating the process of managing local listings, the tool helps to boost your business’s online visibility.

Cost: Moz Local plan starts at just $14/month.

30. Brightlocal

Here’s the only tool you need for local SEO, from start to finish – Brightlocal.

Brightlocal is a web-based, all-in-one SEO tool for rank tracking, review management, and citation building. It helps to audit locations to find the opportunities to rank higher, track rankings, generate reports, scale review generation, and manage listings.

With Brightlocal, you can easily make improvements and grow your business.

Cost: Brightlocal offers a 14-day free trial. The paid plan starts at $39/month.

31. Whitespark

Want to get the most out of your local search? Try Whitespark!

Whitespark offers a suite of local SEO tools designed to improve your local search rankings. It helps to rank better and drive more conversions from Google.

The tool helps to manage Google Business profiles, track rank, monitor and find the best citations, and generate reports.

Cost: NA

32. GeoRanker

GeoRanker is a local SEO tool that helps businesses improve their local SEO strategy. It helps businesses identify link-building opportunities, find powerful competitors, generate traffic from local searches, and monitor link profile changes.

GeoRanker’s comprehensive reports help guide your local SEO optimizations and measure their impact over time.

Cost: GeoRanker offers a 7-day free trial. The paid plan starts at $99/month.

33. GMB Everywhere

GMB Everywhere is a free Chrome extension that lets you analyze GMB for better rankings. It can simplify the process of gathering data, conducting audits, and simplifying competitor profiles.

The extension also offers features like review analysis and performance metrics, helping you make data-driven decisions to enhance your local search presence. By streamlining the process of managing and optimizing GMB profiles, GMB Everywhere proves to be a must-have tool for anyone serious about local SEO.

Cost: GMB Everywhere offers a free trial. The paid plan starts at $15/month.

34. Localo

Localo is a comprehensive local SEO tool for GBP. The easy-to-use platform helps you focus on optimizing the GMB profiles, ensuring that your business’s information is accurate and complete.

Localo provides insights and recommendations for enhancing local listings, like managing customer reviews, optimizing business descriptions, and analyzing local search performance. This helps boost online visibility and attract more customers.

Cost: Localo offers a free trial. The paid plan starts at INR 2390/month.

35. Semrush Local

Businesses that rank higher get more clicks, views, and site visits; this is exactly where Semrush Local helps.

Semrush Local is a comprehensive tool designed to enhance your local SEO efforts. This powerful feature helps businesses manage their local listings across various directories, ensuring consistent and accurate information.

The tool lists and manages business information in the top 150+ directories, centralizes review monitoring and gives a 360-degree view of where you stand in Google Maps.

Cost: Semrush Local costs $20/month.

Best SEO tools from Google

Google offer a suite of powerful tools designed to help businesses, marketers, and web developers optimize their online presence, analyze performance, and make data-driven decisions. Here are some of the best tools from Google that can significantly enhance your digital strategy.

36. Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free tool by Google that helps to monitor and maintain the website’s presence in Google Search Results.

With features like performance reports, URL inspection, and mobile usability analysis, Google Search Console enables you to identify and fix issues that may affect your search rankings.

Cost: Free to use

37. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a comprehensive web analytics tool that provides various analytical tools to track and report website traffic. It offers detailed insights into user behavior, traffic sources, and conversation rates, which can in turn, help you make informed decisions to improve the overall ROI.

By integrating Google Analytics with other Google tools like Google Search Console, Google Ads, etc., you can get a holistic view of your digital marketing performance.

Cost: Free to use

38. Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is another powerful tool used by advertisers to find the right keywords for the campaign. Though it is a PPC tool, it is often used for SEO because it provides great keyword suggestions directly from Google. The tool uses Google Autocomplete to generate various long-tail keywords for any topic.

Google Keyword Planner offers crucial data like exact monthly search volume, historical search volumes from up to 2014, mobile search volume, keyword ideas based on your seed keyword, and more.

Cost: Google Keyword Planner is free to use.

If you are looking to find what’s trending on the internet, there’s no better tool than Google Trends.

Google Trends can help you find trending keywords and analyze the popularity of search queries over time. It helps to compare the relative volume of different keywords and also discover emerging trends.

The tool can help you stay ahead of the curve by finding keywords to create content that matches the current interests and demands of the audience.

Cost: Google Trends is free to use.

40. Google PageSpeed Insights

Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is a free tool that helps to analyze the performance of your web page on both mobile and desktop.

It helps to assess the page speed and user experience and provides a score between 0 and 100 (also known as Core Web Vitals), along with actionable recommendations to improve the load time and performance. Implementing the suggestions can enhance user satisfaction and boost your SERP rankings.

Cost: Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is free to use.

41. Google Data Studio

Google Data Studio is a powerful web-based data visualization tool that helps to build interactive, customizable, and easy-to-understand reports.

The tool integrates with various data sources like Google Analytics, Google Sheets, Google Ads, and more to visualize data in a meaningful way. It can help visualize trends, compare performance over time, and do a lot more things. The tool also allows you to share the insights with the team and other decision-makers, thereby improving the decision-making process.

42. Google My Business

If you run a business in a particular location or target customers in a specific area, Google My Business can help people find you easily.

Google My Business (GMB) is a tool that helps businesses manage their online presence across Google. It lets you manage how your local business shows up on Google Maps, Google Search, and more, which helps businesses stand out when customers search online.

The tools provide accurate and up-to-date information to potential customers, respond to reviews, and post updates. In short, the platform helps to improve the visibility of local searches.

Cost: Free to use.

43. Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager helps to simplify the process of managing and deploying the marketing tags on your website. It enables you to add and update tags without modifying the site’s code, reducing the reliance on developers.

Google Tag Manager can easily integrate with other tools like Google Ads, Google Analytics, and more, and allows you to track any kind of behavior like link clicks, button clicks, form submissions, conversions, etc.

Cost: Free to use.

44. Google Ads

Google Ads (previously known as Google AdWords) is an advertising platform by Google that lets businesses create and manage paid search campaigns. You can use Google ads to promote your business, raise awareness about your product or service, and increase traffic to your website.

Google Ads provides robust targeting options, detailed metrics, and integration with other Google tools, which helps to reach the right target audience and achieve marketing goals.

Cost: Pay-per-click (PPC) model

45. Google Lighthouse

Google Lighthouse is a free, open-source tool that helps to audit the performance, accessibility, SEO, and best practices of web pages. It generates detailed reports with actionable insights to improve the quality of your web pages.

Google Lighthouse can prove to be a great tool for developers and SEO professionals looking to learn more about the website’s performance and take steps to optimize it for better search engine rankings.

Cost: Pay-per-click (PPC) model

Link building is the most important component of any successful SEO strategy. Getting good hyperlinks from other websites can help you improve your website’s visibility and drive more traffic. Here are a few link-building tools that can help you streamline this process:

Ahrefs is one of the most popular comprehensive SEO tools in the market, and it is best known for its backlink analysis capabilities.

The powerful Ahrefs Backlink Checker helps to see the domain and page-level metrics, monitor the growth and decline of backlink profiles, get a breakdown of the target’s backlink profile, check most linked-to pages, and more.

The in-depth link analysis features include backlink anchor text, check follow and no-follow links, disavow link spam, export to PDF and CSV, and inbuilt features in the report.

Cost: Ahrefs Backlink Checker is free to use but offers limited features. The paid plan starts at just $129/month.

47. Majestic

Majestic is a dedicated link-building tool that is all about backlinks. It has the largest link database in the world.

Majestic offers many unique features you won’t find in any other SEO tool. Its proprietary metrics like Trust Flow, Citation Flow, and Topical Trust help to assess the quality of backlinks.

Cost: Majestic paid plan starts at $49.99/month.

Known as an all-in-one SEO tool, Semrush offers a link-building tool that can help you find link-building opportunities by analyzing your competitors’ backlink profiles.

The powerful tool helps enhance the backlink strategy and build links that can help improve the domain rating and SEO of your website. It helps to find the best fit for outreach, track the progress, and monitor the results.

Cost: Semrush offers a few free tools. The paid plan starts at just $139.95/month.

49. BuzzStream

BuzzStream is another well-known tool designed to help you build relationships with influencers and manage link-building projects.

The tool is ideal for managing large-scale outreach campaigns and helps to find contact information, send personalized emails, and track the progress of the outreach efforts.

Cost: Buzzstream’s paid plan starts at $24/month.

Looking to track backlink changes over time? Monitor backlinks can help!

The tool is designed to help you track backlink profiles and monitor the competitors’ backlinks. It generates alerts for new and lost backlinks, which helps you to stay ahead. Also, the tool generates a detailed report and insights that can help you optimize your SEO strategy.

Cost: Monitor Backlinks offers a 14-day free trial. The paid plan starts at $19/month.

Best Rank Tracking Tools

Rank tracking tools help SEO professionals or digital marketers who are looking to monitor the website’s performance on SERPs. Here are a few rank-tracking tools that you can try out:

51. SERPWatcher

SERPWatcher by Mangools is an advanced rank-tracking tool that can help you track where you rank on Google for specific keywords. The tool provides in-depth insights and has a user-friendly interface.

SERPWatcher lets you see ranking on a day-to-day basis, track rank in multiple locations, and share an interactive report that can keep you updated.

Cost: SERPWatcher offers a free trial. The paid plan starts at $14.95/month.

52. ProRankTracker

ProRankTracker is a comprehensive and powerful SEO tool that helps you with rank tracking. Known for its user-friendly interface and comprehensive features, ProRankTracker is a top choice for SEO professionals.

ProRankTracker helps with daily position tracking, competitor analysis, and detailed reporting. Also, it supports tracking across multiple search engines and locations.

Cost: ProRankTracker offers a free trial. The paid plan starts at $49/month.

53. AccuRanker

AccuRanker is one of the most popular rank trackers, best known for its speed and accuracy. It offers instant on-demand updates that help you get better control of your SEO strategy.

AccuRanker also gives you a brief idea about which SERP features are driving traffic to your website so that you can modify the strategy accordingly. The tool also provides customizable and automated reports, making it a great option for businesses of all sizes.

Cost: AccuRanker offers a 14-day free trial. The paid plan starts at $129/month.

54. Rank Ranger

Rank Ranger is an all-in-one SEO tool that offers a robust rank tracking tool. It lets you track, tag, and evaluate your website’s SERP performance.

Rank Ranger allows you to track rank on both mobile and desktop, on any search engine, and for any location. Also, it lets you do the same for your competitors, for you to understand where you stand.

Cost: Custom pricing based on needs.

55. AuthorityLabs

AuthorityLabs is a straightforward rank-tracking tool that offers daily updates and accurate rank tracking. It automates local and mobile rank tracking using daily reporting.

AuthorityLabs also offers a white-label option, making it suitable for agencies that need to provide branded reports to clients.

Cost: AuthorityLabs offers a 14-day free trial. The paid plan starts at $49/month.

Other SEO Tools

Apart from the above-listed best SEO tools, here are some notable tools that can help you improve your website’s SEO and overall performance.

56. Answer The People

Looking to create content that your audience is exactly interested in? Answer The People by Writesonic can help.

Writesonic Answer The People - Best SEO Tools
Writesonic Answer The People

The advanced tool helps you find the most searched topics and questions relevant to your audience instantly. It gives a comprehensive analysis including the keyword volume, CPC, keyword difficulty, search trends, and more.

Cost: Included in Writesonic’s plan. Writesonic offers a free trial, with a paid plan starting at just $16/month.

57. SEO PowerSuite

SEO PowerSuite is an all-in-one SEO tool that covers everything from keyword research to rank tracking tools. It includes Rank Tracker, WebSite Auditor, LinkAssistant, and SEO SpyGlass.

Cost: SEO PowerSuite offers a free plan. The paid plan starts at $299/year.

58. SpyFu

Looking to outsmart your competitors? Try SpyFu! The advanced competitive research tool provides insights into competitors’ SEO and PPC strategies and provides you with a robust set of tools to gain a competitive edge.

Cost: SpyFu’s paid plan starts at $39/month.

59. MarketMuse

MarketMuse is a content optimization tool that leverages the power of AI to analyze and improve content. From content quality to keyword usage, it provides insights that can help create high-quality content faster.

Cost: MarketMuse offers a 7-day free trial. The paid plan starts at $99/year.

60. Topic Cluster Generator

The key to creating a killer content strategy is to identify the top-ranking keyword clusters. And this is where Writesonic’s Topic Cluster Generator can help!

Writesonic Topic Cluster Generator - Best SEO Tools
Writesonic Topic Cluster Generator

The advanced tool helps to come up with high-quality and relevant pillar page topics along with the sub-topics that you can create content on.

Cost: Included in Writesonic’s plan. Writesonic offers a free trial, with a paid plan starting at just $16/month.

Get your hands on an all-in-one SEO tool – Writesonic

Woosh! That was a long list of the best SEO tools.

While there are numerous best SEO tools available, each search is for specific purposes, and Writesonic stands out as an all-in-one SEO solution.

From content generation to SEO optimization, the powerful tool can prove to be a great add-on to your SEO toolkit. Its user-friendly interface, coupled with advanced AI capabilities, makes it accessible for beginners while offering the depth that professionals are looking for.

By choosing Writesonic, you not only invest in a tool – you get a versatile partner that can help you automate the entire content creation and optimization process.

Whether you’re a small business owner, a marketing professional, or an SEO expert, Writesonic has the features to streamline your workflow, enhance your online visibility, and drive meaningful results.

Do you subconsciously equate the value of SEO tools with their price tags? You might think, “The more expensive the tool is, the better the results are.”

But expensive ≠ better.

Remember, high price tags don’t necessarily guarantee stellar results, and low-cost tools aren’t all about compromises.

There are various top-of-the-line, feature-rich, affordable SEO tools delivering results at par (or even better than them!) It’s all about finding a balance between affordability and efficiency.

This blog post covers the 10 best affordable SEO tools that deliver top-notch results without burning a hole in the pocket. Let’s get started!

10 Best Affordable SEO Tools in 2024

Tool NameUnique FeaturesPricing
WritesonicAI-powered content creation and comprehensive SEO toolkitFree plan available. Paid plan starts at $12/month.
SemrushKeyword research, competitor analysis, and site auditSemrush offers a 7-day free trial. The paid plan starts at $139.95/month.
AhrefsBacklink analysis, content explorer, rank trackerFree tools available. The paid plan starts at just $129/month.
Screaming FrogTechnical SEO auditsScreaming Frog is free to crawl up to 500 URLs. For access and advanced features, you can go for a paid plan starting at just £199.00/year.
KWFinderLong-tail keyword researchFree trial available. The paid plan starts at $24.50/month.
UbersuggestKeyword ideas, content ideasUbersuggest offers a 7-day free trial. The paid plan starts at just $12/month.
Google Search ConsolePerformance reports, indexing status, mobile usabilityCompletely free to use.
Answer The PublicQuestion-based keyword research, visual dataAnswer The Public offers a 7-day trial. The paid plan starts at $5/month.
SerpstatKeyword research, competitor analysis, site auditSerpstat offers a 7-day free trial. The paid plan starts at $59/month.
SpyFuCompetitor keyword research, backlink outreachSpyFu paid plan starts at $39/month.

1. Writesonic

Best suited for: Content marketers, SEO professionals, and businesses looking to boost their online presence.

About the tool:

Writesonic is an all-in-one content creation tool and optimization tool designed specifically for marketers, agencies, and enterprises. From creating high-quality content to optimizing it to rank on the top of SERPs, Writesonic can help you with all.

Writesonic leverages advanced AI models to create high-quality and contextually relevant content across diverse areas. Its robust features include a user-friendly interface, an extensive template library, and integration capabilities with other marketing tools.

Writesonic - Affordable SEO Tools
Writesonic

Have a look at the SEO tools offered by Writesonic:

AI Article Writer

Looking to generate SEO-optimized articles at lightning speed? Writesonic AI Article Writer can help!

The advanced tool can help you come up with factually accurate, high-quality, and SEO-optimized articles aligned with your brand voice in seconds.

Writesonic Article Writer - Affordable SEO Tools
Writesonic Article Writer

How to use: Say you want to write a blog post on “AI writing tools.” Simply add this topic, select keywords, and the AI Article Writer will create a comprehensive, SEO-friendly article that covers all the essential aspects, complete with headings, subheadings, and relevant information.

Use case: Perfect for crafting various forms of blog posts and articles like how-tos, listicles, and more that can rank well on search engines.

Interesting, isn’t it?

Generate an SEO-optimized article today!

Topic Cluster Generator

Build a killer content strategy using Writesonic’s Topic Cluster Generator. The tool can help you find pillar page topics and sub-topics that you can create content on.

Writesonic Topic Clusters - Affordable SEO Tools
Writesonic Topic Clusters

How to use: Go to Writesonic’s Topic Clusters and add the primary keyword in the input section. Let’s say you add ‘AI writing tools,’ the tool will provide a list of sub-topics like ‘best free AI writing tools,’ ‘SEO AI writing tools,’ and more to choose from.

Use case: Ideal for creating a content calendar and ensuring that you cover all the aspects of the topic to boost your topical authority.

Sounds like having a brainstorming session with an SEO expert, right?

Why not give it a try?

Start creating topic clusters!

Content Gap Analyzer

Stay ahead of your competitors with Writesonic’s Content Gap Analyzer tool. The powerful tool can help you find the content opportunities your competitors are capitalizing on, and you’re missing out on.

Writesonic AI Content Gap Analyzer - Affordable SEO Tools
Writesonic AI Content Gap Analyzer

How to use: Simply go to Writesonic’s Content Gap Analyzer, add the content, file, or link that you want to analyze, and hit the ‘Next’ button. Then, add the keywords you would like to rank for, select the top 4 competitors, and hit ‘Start Analysis.’ And ta-da! There you go!

Use case: Content Gap Analyzer is great for finding new content ideas and ensuring you don’t miss out on any important keywords.

Ready to analyze your content piece?

Go to Content Gap Analyzer!

On-Page SEO Checker

Ensure that your content is fully SEO-optimized before you hit the publish button with Writesonic’s On-Page SEO Checker. Get real-time SEO insights and improve your content accordingly to make it rank higher on SERPs.

Writesonic On-Page SEO Checker - Affordable SEO Tools
Writesonic On-Page SEO Checker

How to use: Go to Writesonic’s On-Page SEO Checker and add the content you want to optimize. Then, add the details and hit ‘Start Analysis.’ The tool will come up with a content score and a few recommendations on how to improve your content. You can also use the ‘Improve SEO’ feature to quickly optimize your content.

Use case: Use this tool to fine-tune your content (blog posts, articles, landing pages, and more) for better search engine rankings and to ensure you’re following SEO best practices.

Ready to optimize your content?

Try On-Page SEO Checker!

Answer The People

Discover the questions your audience is asking about your topic. Writesonic’s Answer The People tool helps you create content that directly addresses user queries, improving your chances of appearing in featured snippets and voice search results.

Writesonic Answer The People - Affordable SEO Tools
Writesonic Answer The People 

How to use: Simply go to Writesonic’s Answer The People tool, add the topic, and hit ‘Get Suggestions,’ and there you go. The tool will come up with comprehensive data related to your question/topic.

Use case: The tool can help you come up with FAQs section, blog post ideas, and long-tail keywords that your audience is interested in.

Generate question-based keywords related to your topic, address user queries, and improve your chances of appearing in the featured snippets.

Try Answer The People Tool!

Ratings:

G2: 4.7/5

Capterra: 4.8/5

Pricing:

Writesonic offers a free plan where you get 25 free credits. The paid plan starts at just $12/month.

2. Semrush

Best suited for: SEO professionals, digital marketers, and businesses.

About the tool:

Semrush is the powerhouse when it comes to SEO and digital marketing. From keyword research and on-page optimization to competitor analysis and site audit, the comprehensive SEO tool offers a wide range of features.

Semrush is a go-to tool for anyone looking to improve their online presence and drive traffic to their website. While some of its features are limited to paid plans and are on the pricier side of our “affordable” list, its robust capabilities make it worth considering for serious SEO enthusiasts.

Semrush - Affordable SEO Tools
Semrush

Pros:

Cons:

Why go for it:

Semrush is a powerhouse in the SEO world, and its free tier offers significant value. While the paid plans can be pricey, the features available in the free version make it a must-try for anyone serious about SEO.

Ratings:

G2: 4.5/5

Capterra: 4.7/5

Pricing:

Semrush offers a 7-day free trial. The paid plan starts at $139.95/month.

Now let’s move on to the next affordable gem of SEO tools…

3. Ahrefs

Best suited for: SEO professionals, digital marketers, and businesses looking for an all-in-one SEO toolkit.

About the tool:

Ahrefs is a comprehensive (and often pricey) SEO suite known for its powerful backlink analysis tools, but it also offers excellent keyword research and content exploration features. It’s a favorite among SEO professionals for its depth of data and user-friendly interface.

Ahrefs also offers a free version called Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. This tool is a godsend for those looking to dive into backlink analysis and site audits without spending a dime.

Ahrefs - Affordable SEO Tools
Ahrefs

Pros:

Cons:

Why go for it:

While it doesn’t offer the full power of the paid Ahrefs suite, the Webmaster Tools version is an excellent starting point for those on a tight budget. It’s particularly useful for understanding your backlink profile and identifying potential SEO issues on your site.

Ratings:

G2: 4.5/5

Capterra: 4.7/5

Pricing:

Ahrefs offers Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, where you get free limited access to a few features. The paid plan starts at just $129/month.

4. Screaming Frog

Best suited for: SEO specialists, website owners, and marketers looking for a powerful SEO tool for technical website audits.

About the tool:

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a must-have tool for technical SEO audits.

The powerful desktop-based website crawler helps to crawl websites efficiently and analyze results in real time. It can quickly find broken links, audit redirects, analyze page titles and meta titles, discover duplicate content, and do much more.

Screaming Frog offers a free version that allows users to crawl up to 500 URLs, making it an excellent option for small websites or those just starting with technical SEO.

Screaming Frog - Affordable SEO Tools
Screaming Frog

Pros:

Cons:

Why go for it:

While it can be a bit overwhelming for new users, Screaming Frog is a great tool for technical SEO audits. Moreover, the free version offers significant value, making it a must-have for any SEO toolkit.

Ratings:

G2: 4.7/5

Capterra: 4.9/5

Pricing:

Screaming Frog is free to crawl up to 500 URLs. For access and advanced features, you can go for a paid plan starting at just £199.00/year.

5. KWFinder

Best suited for: Content creators, SEO specialists, and marketers looking for an easy-to-use long-tail keyword research tool.

About the tool:

KWFinder by Mangools is a powerful tool designed to help users find long-tail keywords with low competition.

KWFinder is an excellent tool for those looking to target niche markets or find untapped keyword opportunities to improve their rankings without getting overwhelmed by the complex data.

KWFinder - Affordable SEO Tools
KWFinder

Pros:

Cons:

Why go for it:

KWFinder is an excellent choice for people looking to simplify their keyword research process. The easy-to-use interface makes it an ideal tool for beginners and small businesses. If you are looking for long-tail keywords with low competition without investing much, you can go for a free trial.

Ratings:

G2: 4.4/5

Capterra: 4.7/5

Pricing:

KWFinder offers a free version where you get 5 lookups per 24 hours, with 15 related and 5 competitors keywords. The paid plan starts at $24.50/month.

6. Ubersuggest

Best suited for: Content creators, SEO specialists, and marketers looking for an affordable keyword research tool.

About the tool:

Ubersuggest is a tool developed by Neil Patel to simplify the keyword research process. Known for its simplicity and affordability, Ubersuggest offers a wide range of tools, including keyword suggestions, content ideas, and site audits.

Ubersuggest offers a free version with limited features, making it easier for anyone to start their SEO journey.

Ubersuggest

Pros:

Cons:

Why go for it:

Ubersuggest is an excellent choice for those looking for a keyword research tool with a limited budget. It’s a straightforward approach to keyword research and SEO insights making it a go-to tool for beginners looking to optimize their website without getting overwhelmed.

Ratings:

G2: 4.2/5

Capterra: 4.4/5

Pricing:

Ubersuggest offers a 7-day free trial. The paid plan starts at just $12/month.

7. Google Search Console

Best suited for: Website owners, SEO experts, and businesses looking to get insights from Google about their website’s performance.

About the tool:

Google Search Console is a free tool offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results.

It helps to understand how Google views your website and improve the website’s SEO performance.

Google Search Console

Pros:

Cons:

Why go for it:

GSC is one of the most important tools for anyone looking to improve their website’s SEO. It provides data from Google helping you quickly understand how your website performs in search results and identify areas of improvement.

Ratings:

G2: 4.7/5

Capterra: 4.8/5

Pricing:

Google Search Console is completely free to use.

8. Answer The Public

Best suited for: Content creators, SEO experts, marketers, and businesses looking to understand what users are searching for and generate content ideas.

About the tool:

Answer The Public is a search listening tool that helps to get insights into what people are searching for. It’s an excellent tool for content ideation and understanding user intent.

Answer The Public tool presents the data in a visually appealing format, making it extremely easy to identify the search trends and patterns in behavior.

Answer The Public

Pros:

Cons:

Why go for it:

Answer The Public is a fantastic tool to understand what your audience is asking. While it’s not a comprehensive SEO tool, it can prove to be an invaluable tool for content planning and addressing user intent in your SEO strategy.

Ratings:

G2: 4.5/5

Capterra: 4.6/5

Pricing:

Answer The Public offers a 7-day trial. The paid plan starts at $5/month.

9. Serpstat

Best suited for: SEO experts, marketers, and businesses looking for an affordable all-in-one SEO toolkit.

About the tool:

Serpstat is a growing player in the SEO market, offering a comprehensive suite of tools like keyword research, content generation, competitor analysis, and site auditing. It helps to optimize websites, improve rankings, and gain insights into competitors’ strategies.

Serpstat is a great tool known for its affordable pricing and user-friendly interface.

Serpstat

Pros:

Cons:

Why go for it:

Serpstat is an excellent choice for people looking for a comprehensive SEO tool at a cheaper price. The wide range of features makes it a great tool for optimizing websites and climbing SERPs.

Ratings:

G2: 4.6/5

Capterra: 4.7/5

Pricing:

Serpstat offers a 7-day free trial. The paid plan starts at $59/month.

10. SpyFu

Best suited for: Digital marketers, SEO professionals, and businesses looking to gain competitive insights and improve marketing strategies.

SpyFu is a competitor research and keyword analysis tool that helps users see the competitors’ most profitable keywords and ads. It’s a great tool for those looking to gain an edge in your niche.

SpyFu provides comprehensive data on competitors’ keywords, ad copy, and search rankings, helping users uncover valuable insights and opportunities.

SpyFu

Pros:

Cons:

Why go for it:

SpyFu is a great choice for marketers and businesses looking to gain a competitive edge in their marketing efforts. Its focus on actionable insights and competitor analysis makes it a valuable tool for those who are looking to outsmart competitors without breaking the bank.

Ratings:

G2: 4.6/5

Capterra: 4.5/5

Pricing:

SpyFu paid plan starts at $39/month.

Expensive vs. Cheap SEO tools: What’s the real difference?

Now that we’ve explored some affordable SEO tools, you might be wondering: “What am I missing out on by not investing in the most expensive tools?” Let’s break it down:

FeaturesExpensive ToolsAffordable Tools
Data comprehensivenessOften offer more comprehensive data.May have smaller databases but are often sufficient for most small to medium-sized businesses.
Update frequencyTypically offers real-time or very frequent data updates.It may update less frequently but still provide valuable, actionable data.
Advanced featuresOften include AI-powered insights, predictive analytics, and advanced reporting.Focus on core SEO functionalities that cover most users’ needs.
Customer supportUsually offers dedicated account managers and 24/7 support.May have limited support options but often compensate with robust community forums and knowledge bases.
Integration capabilitiesOften offer extensive API access and integrate with a wide range of other tools.It may have limited integrations but usually covers the most essential connections.
Scalability Designed to handle enterprise-level data and user loads.Perfect for individuals and SMBs, but may struggle with very large websites or agencies managing multiple high-traffic clients.

The bottom line? Expensive doesn’t always mean better.

While expensive tools might offer some advantages, affordable SEO tools have come a long way. For most businesses, they offer the perfect balance of functionality and value.

The key is to choose tools that align with your specific needs and budget.

Common pitfalls to avoid when selecting affordable SEO tools

Here are a few things you should not be ignoring when selecting an affordable SEO tool:

Invest in the best and most affordable SEO tool – Writesonic

And, there you go!

There are plenty of affordable SEO tools that can help you level up your digital marketing efforts without burning a hole in your pocket. From Writesonic to Google Search Console, there are tools out there for each use case.

Remember, SEO success isn’t about having the most expensive software in your toolkit but about using it effectively.

If you are looking for SEO tools at cheap price, there’s no better option than Writesonic. By combining these affordable SEO software and smart SEO strategies, you can compete with the big players and climb the SERP rankings quickly.

So, what are you waiting for?

Sign up for Writesonic!

The global marketing automation market size is expected to reach USD 13.71 billion by 2030. Impressive, right?

However, when talking about marketing automation, you cannot sideline the power of content automation.

Automating your content saves time and enhances efficiency, helping you to focus on what truly matters, like growing your business or engaging with your audience.

But here’s the million-dollar question: How do you leverage this booming trend to elevate your content strategy for 2024? What essential steps should you be taking, and which tools can help you gain an edge?

Well, this blog covers everything you need to know about content automation strategy. Let’s get started.

What is content automation?

Content automation refers to leveraging technology to perform various content-related tasks that would otherwise require manual intervention. It involves various processes like content creation, distribution, and management.

Content automation is important because of its ability to enhance efficiency, reduce errors, and streamline workflows. By automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks, content teams can save time and boost productivity.

In short, content automation isn’t to replace human writers or marketers but to 10x their efficiency. The process helps businesses publish high-quality and personalized content at scale while the content team focuses on more strategic tasks that require a human touch.

To sum up, content automation is all about working smarter, not harder.

How can businesses benefit from content automation?

Content automation offers a wide range of advantages to businesses. Here’s a look at some of the most impactful benefits:

Steps to Implement a Content Automation Strategy

Implementing a content automation strategy can be a transformative decision for your business. Here are the key steps to guide you through the process:

1. Define clear objectives and KPIs: Start by identifying content goals, whether it’s increasing brand awareness, boosting engagement, or driving more conversions and sales. Set proper KPIs and measure the success of your content efforts.

2. Develop a content strategy: Build a compelling content strategy as per your target audience and business goals. It should include all types of content, channels of distribution, post frequency, and more.

3. Select the right tools: Based on your objectives and strategy, check out and choose the best automation tools to meet your specific needs. This could include tools for content creation, scheduling, distribution, SEO, and analysis.

4. Ensure data accuracy & quality: High-quality content is the foundation of all the automated content processes. Make sure to get the correct data to make the most of your automation tools.

5. Monitor performance: Track your content’s performance based on the KPIs you’ve set. Automated analytics tools can provide valuable insights into viewer engagement, content reach, and conversion rates.

6. Iterate and optimize: Finally, use the performance data to refine and improve your content strategy continuously. Regularly review your KPIs, adjust your content based on feedback, and keep optimizing for better results.

By following these steps, you can implement a successful content automation strategy that drives efficiency, enhances content quality, and contributes significantly to your business goals in 2024.

How to automate the content marketing process?

From brainstorming and idea generation to content creation and distribution, every aspect can be easily automated. Let’s break down the process.

Keyword Research

Every successful content strategy starts with Keyword Research.

Keyword research is about finding the right words or phrases that your target audience uses when searching for your products or services online. By identifying and selecting the right keywords, you can create targeted content and gain an edge.

The traditional process involves brainstorming possible search queries, running them through different tools, understanding the search intent behind those queries, and finally analyzing the competition. This manual process consumes a lot of time and resources.

However, content automation tools have made this process faster and easier. Here’s how you can automate the keyword research process.

Let’s say you run an online store that sells eco-friendly home products.

Identify the broader topics that align with your business, such as ‘eco-friendly products,’ ‘sustainable living,’ etc.

Select any of these topics that you want to rank for, let’s say, ‘eco-friendly products’, add it to Writesonic’s Keyword Research tool, and hit ‘Identify Keywords.’

Writesonic’s Keyword Research Tool

The tool will provide comprehensive data, including keyword difficulty, search volume, and traffic potential, to help you make an informed decision.

Writesonic’s Keyword Research Tool

Finally, you can create a list of relevant keywords for which you would like to create content.

This quick, precise, and streamlined approach can help you make sure that your content is always aligned with what your audience is looking for.

Ready to automate the keyword research process?

Also, if you are looking to discover the most searched topics or questions relevant to your audience, here’s another interesting tool that you can check out – Answer The People.

Simply add the topic and hit ‘Get Suggestions,’ and there you go.

Writesonic's Answer The Public Tool - Content automation
Writesonic’s Answer The Public Tool

The tool offers comprehensive data, including search volume, CPC, search difficulty, search trends, questions, comparison, and a lot more related to your topic/question.

Writesonic's Answer The Public Tool - Content automation
Writesonic’s Answer The Public Tool

Simple, right? Why not give it a try?

Here are the top 13 free keyword research tools that you can try out.

Now that we are done with keyword research let’s move on to the next step.

Idea generation or topic clustering

Once your keywords are in place, next comes ‘Idea Generation and Topic Clustering.’

First, let’s talk about generating content ideas that can keep the audience hooked.

Finding content ideas involves intensive brainstorming sessions, extensive research, competitor analysis, checking past data, and more. The entire process is time-consuming and labor-intensive.

But what if you can automate this entire process and generate ideas in seconds? With Writesonic’s Free AI content idea generator, you can.

Simply add the niche and topic of interest and hit ‘Generate’ and there you go.

Writesonic's Free AI Content Idea Generator Tool - Content automation
Writesonic’s Free AI Content Idea Generator Tool

The tool generates multiple content ideas that you can choose from.

Writesonic's Free AI Content Idea Generator Tool - Content automation
Writesonic’s Free AI Content Idea Generator Tool

2 hours of work in merely 2 seconds. Interesting, right?

Next, let’s move to topic clustering.

When going with the manual process, topic clustering involves identifying ‘pillar’ topics, brainstorming narrow ‘cluster’ topics that fall under each pillar theme, and then linking these clusters back to the pillar page.

Immense organization and planning, isn’t it?

Now, let’s automate this process.

Go to Writesonic’s Topic Clusters add the keyword, let’s say ‘AI writing tools,’ and hit ‘Create Clusters.’

Writesonic's Topic Clusters Tool - Content automation
Writesonic’s Topic Clusters Tool

And there you go! The tool generates sub-topics that you can create content on, and link back to the pillar pages.

Writesonic's Topic Clusters Tool - Content automation
Writesonic’s Topic Clusters Tool

Also, here’s the best part: Simply, click on ‘Write’ to generate an article on the particular topic or keyword.

Writesonic's Topic Clusters Tool - Content automation
Writesonic’s Topic Clusters Tool

Add a title and select the keywords you want to target. And ta-da! The tool generates a high-quality and engaging article in seconds.

Writesonic's Topic Clusters Tool - Content automation
Writesonic’s Topic Clusters Tool

Amazing, right? With Writesonic, you can easily automate idea generation and topic clustering and save time.

Content generation

Next comes the most important step: Content Generation

Creating high-quality and unique content is the most crucial part that often consumes a lot of time and resources. After all, crafting social media content, blog posts, email copy, product descriptions, and more, requires a blend of creativity, domain knowledge, and a deep understanding of the target audience.

But what if there was a way to automate this process as well?

Well, there is! With Writesonic you can significantly cut down time and come up with well-written, high-quality content in a fraction of a second.

Looking to generate an article? Try Article Writer 6.0!

Simply, go to Writesonic’s dashboard and select Article Writer.

Writesonic's Article Writer - Content automation
Writesonic’s Article Writer

Then, add all the details like topic, references, keywords, and more related to the article you would like to create and hit the ‘Generate’ button.

Writesonic's Article Writer - Content automation
Writesonic’s Article Writer

The Article Writer will quickly come up with a factually accurate, high-quality, and SEO-optimized article aligned with your brand voice in seconds.

Simple, right?

Give it a try and create an article that can rank well and drive organic traffic to your website.

So, article generation is easy with Writesonic, but what about other forms of content?

Well, Writesonic offers 100+ content templates that can help you automate the content creation process. From landing pages and social media content to email copy and product description, Writesonic has got you covered.

Go to Sonic Editor (just like Notion AI) and start creating content.

Writesonic's Sonic Editor - Content automation
Writesonic’s Sonic Editor

Let’s say you are launching a new feature and you want to create a product update email. Just click on the ‘Product Update Email’ option.

Writesonic's Email Copy Generator - Content automation
Writesonic’s Email Copy Generator

Add all the details and hit the ‘Generate’ button.

And ta-da! There you go. The tool generates a well-crafted email copy that you can edit if needed and use.

Writesonic's Email Copy Generator - Content automation
Writesonic’s Email Copy Generator

Saves tons of hours, isn’t it? Try out these 100+ AI templates and level up your content generation process.

Editing and proofreading

Creating content isn’t just writing but also refining and polishing it to ensure clarity and accuracy. And here comes: editing and proofreading.

However, manually going through each and every sentence, checking the grammatical errors, correcting punctuations, and refining sentences take a lot of time.

But no worries! Even this process can be automated easily. First, let’s talk about the easiest way to edit your content.

Go to Chatsonic – an advanced AI chatbot, and ask it to edit your piece of content.

Chatsonic - Content automation
Chatsonic

And voila! There you go!

Now let’s say you want to rewrite sentences. Simply, go to Sentence rewriter (and it’s a free tool!🤫), add the sentences you want to rewrite and tone of voice, and hit the ‘Generate’ button. Watch how quickly the tool rewrites sentences.

Writesonic's Free AI Sentence Rewriter Tool - Content automation
Writesonic’s Free AI Sentence Rewriter Tool 

Similarly, you can use the paraphrasing tool to rewrite anything, from a full-fledged article to paragraphs.

Interesting, right? Give it a try!

Now, to make sure your content is error-free, you can try Writesonic’s free Grammar Checker. Also, use a plagiarism checker to ensure that the content is 100% unique.

Writesonic's Plagiarism Checker - Content automation
Writesonic’s Plagiarism Checker

No more tedious and time-consuming methods. Writesonic’s AI tools can help you improve the quality of content while saving time.

Content optimization

Once your content is polished to perfection, the next step comes: Content optimization.

After all, there is no point in a well-crafted piece if it does not get the visibility it deserves. To make sure your content ranks well on the search engine page results, you need to optimize it by incorporating proper keywords, crafting meta descriptions, adding title tags, structuring URLs, and much more.

Such a time-consuming process. But here’s an easier way: On-Page SEO Checker.

Writesonic’s On-Page SEO Checker helps you optimize the content piece strategically so that it can rank well on SERPs. Here’s how to use it:

Go to Writesonic’s On-Page SEO Checker and add the content piece you want to optimize. Then, add the details and hit ‘Start Analysis.’

Writesonic’s On-Page SEO Checker - Content automation
Writesonic’s On-Page SEO Checker

And, there you go! The tool will provide you a ‘Content SEO Score’ and you can manually make the improvements that are suggested.

Writesonic’s On-Page SEO Checker - Content automation
Writesonic’s On-Page SEO Checker

If you are looking to automate even this process, click on ‘Improve SEO’ and ta-da; the tool will optimize the entire piece of content for you in seconds.

Looking for more? Here are the 10 best SEO automation tools to try in 2024.

With Writesonic by your side, you can save a lot of time and money. Ready to give it a try?

Content distribution

Now that your content is well-optimized, it’s time for Content Distribution.

Content distribution is the process of getting your content to as many people as possible across various platforms.

However, manually tailoring, scheduling, and posting content on multiple platforms is a very tedious process. From adapting to each platform’s specific requirements to peak activity times, it can consume a lot of time.

What if you can automate this part as well? With Writesonic, you can.

Now, let’s say you wrote a blog post, and you want to reach the right audience at the right time with the right piece of content. Here, all you have to do is use the ‘Highlights’ feature.

Go to tools and click on ‘Highlights.’

Writesonic’s Sonic Editor - Content automation
Writesonic’s Sonic Editor

Then, choose the type of supporting copy you need and hit ‘Generate.’

Writesonic’s Sonic Editor - Content automation
Writesonic’s Sonic Editor

And, there you go!

Writesonic’s Sonic Editor - Content automation
Writesonic’s Sonic Editor

The tool will generate a copy based on your needs.

You can then use a social media tool to schedule the content for multiple platforms at once.

Sounds easy right?

By using these automatically ‘generate highlights’ options, you maintain consistency in conveying your content’s essence across all platforms.

Content Analysis

Finally comes the last and the most important stage: Content Analysis.

It’s about measuring the performance of your content, understanding what worked and what didn’t, and using those insights to fine-tune your content strategy.

To automate this you can use Writesonic’s integration with Google Search Console. Simply, go to the dashboard and click on ‘Connect your Google Search Console.’

Writesonic’s Google Search Console Integration - Content automation
Writesonic’s Google Search Console Integration

And once you’re done, you can check out the analytics dashboard and keep track.

Writesonic’s Google Search Console Integration - Content automation
Writesonic’s Google Search Console Integration

With Writesonic, you can save a lot of time and resources and 10x your efficiency. What are you waiting for? Sign up and start automating your content creation process.

Go to Writesonic!

Top 3 content automation tools to use in 2024

1. Writesonic: An all-in-one content creation tool that can help you simplify and automate content creation process. From keyword research to content generation, Writesonic can help you with all.

2. ChatGPT: Struggling to find content inspiration? ChatGPT can help! It can help you come up with new content ideas and human-like text, making it a go-to tool for brainstorming ideas.

3. Semrush: If you want to improve your online visibility and content performance, Semrush is the tool for you. From finding keywords to tracking rankings, Semrush can help you automate various content management tasks.

Use cases of content automation

Content automation is transforming various sectors, streamlining processes and enhancing efficiency.

Let’s explore some key use cases:

Automate your content creation process with Writesonic

Now that you know how to automate content marketing tasks and how Writesonic can help, what’s stopping you from leveraging the power of content automation?

From keyword research to creating content, Writesonic is an all-in-one content automation tool that can help you improve your efficiency and productivity.

So why wait? Start automating your content process today!

Have you ever wondered why some websites always rank in the top search results when searching for something online?

We know the answer! It’s the power of SEO content writing.

If you’re running a website or planning to launch one, learning how to write SEO content is non-negotiable for ranking higher in Google search results.

This is because if a search engine can’t find and crawl your content, even the most helpful content will not show up in the top search results, and will not bring organic visitors to your website.

On the other hand, when you create content with SEO in mind, you’re making it easier for search engines to understand and rank your website. This means more people can find your content when they search for topics related to your site.

In this article, we have shared some advanced & highly effective SEO content writing tips you can utilize to boost your website’s visibility and attract more visitors.

What is SEO writing?

So, what is SEO writing? It is the process of writing and structuring content that helps to attain higher rankings in search engines, such as Google, and attract relevant traffic to your website.

Writing  SEO-friendly content with target keywords can help search engines like Google understand and index your content. This, in turn, can help you achieve higher rankings in search results and bring in more organic visitors.

Even if you write an in-depth and engaging piece of unoptimized content bound to amaze readers, your post might not reach them without effective SEO strategies. Your content should be such that it provides value to your audience, not just catching the robots’ attention.

In a nutshell, SEO content writing is about creating a balance between satisfying humans and robots.

Why is SEO writing important?

Writing SEO content is important as it helps rank the content higher, increase organic traffic to your website, and reach your target audience.

SEO works as a bridge that helps search engine users reach your content. This is an excellent marketing technique that drives results for your website.

You can use numerous SEO content optimization tools to help you find high-search volume keywords with high click-through rates, improve readability, and identify & correct grammatical errors as well as style inconsistencies to rank your content better.

Tips for creating SEO-Optimized content

Want to know how you can infuse SEO magic into your writing? Let’s dive in and learn some of the best SEO tips that are loved by search engine algorithms.

1. Find Keywords

Finding the right keywords is the first part of your SEO content strategy. Once you know the topic you are writing about, you will need to identify appropriate high-volume search terms.

You can search for the keywords using any keyword research tool. You just need to mention the topic name, and the tool will provide you with various metrics, such as keyword difficulty, search volume, average CTR (click-through rate), and organic traffic potential.

Remember, the less difficult the keyword, the better the chances of ranking. Keyword difficulty ranges from 0 to 100. It is recommended to opt for a keyword on a scale of 0 to 14 as these provide the opportunity to start ranking on Google quickly with the least amount of effort.

The search volume provides insights into how many times users search for a particular keyword per month, which can be an important factor in choosing the primary or secondary keyword.

Writesonic, for example, is a powerful keyword research tool that is remarkably easy to use. You just need to enter the topic name, and it will provide you with the relevant primary and secondary keywords.

Writesonic’s Keyword Research Tool

2. Keyword Placement

Using keywords strategically in your content can help you attract the right audience and grow your organic traffic. The best part is you can get the relevant keywords as per your blog topic in just a single click without extra effort with Writesonic’s Keyword Research Tool.

Keyword Research Tool

Once you have the keywords, the next important thing is their placement. You should always use keywords in your H2 or H3 headings, meta descriptions, the first 100 words of your content, the main body, and the conclusion.

Using keywords thoughtfully and organically improves the chances that your content will appear in the search engine when a user searches for that related term or phrase.

Another crucial thing to remember is that you should prefer using long-tail keywords as they focus on a larger audience. Plus, the competition is also, compared to short-tail keywords.

Also, do not opt for short-tail keywords that are highly competitive. It is because everyone tries to target them due to their high traffic potential. So, your chances of ranking on the search engine decrease.

However, if you have a very high-authority website or have already built brand credibility to a great extent, you might rank on the first page of Google targeting these keywords.

3. Search Intent

For SEO content to do its job, it is important to first understand your user’s search intent. Search intent is the primary objective of a website visitor when typing a query into a search engine.

It tells what the user is trying to achieve through their search, whether they want to make a purchase, look for a particular website, find an answer to a query, etc.  

For example, if your customers search for ‘how to assemble a steam iron,’ this means that they are not looking to buy a new product or navigate a particular page. Instead, they are looking for basic information.

Therefore, you can use this knowledge to target this keyword better.  

The content you create should satisfy your customers and solve their problems or queries, as search intent is depicted by what type of keywords your prospects are using. Search intent is the major reason why users search for your keywords.

4. Create a blog post outline

Creating the blog post outline and keeping SEO content tips in mind can be quite stressful, isn’t it? A blog post outline helps organize your ideas before you start writing a blog.

Creating a blog post outline ensures that you do not miss any important points, helps you arrange your thoughts and ideas in a logical sequence, makes it easier to incorporate your targeted keywords effectively, lets you stay focused on the core message, and prevents you from being off-topic.

All these things, incorporated together, set an SEO foundation for your content.

Well, I made my work easy by using the AI article outline generator. All I had to do was write the topic name and primary keyword, and it provided me with the SEO-optimized blog post outline. What else can you ask for?

AI Outline Generator

While creating the outline of your blog, here are a few things that you should keep in mind:

Clear and concise headings and subheadings can help Google better understand the primary topic of longer articles or blog posts.

5. Quality Content

Quality content refers to content that is accurate, reliable, useful, engaging, and relevant to the potential audience. It is basically how well a piece of content achieves its goals. Writing quality content demands a lot of time and effort. But your content must be fact-checked, accurate, valuable and unique to rank high.

If you do not want to spend a lot of time and money on writing long-form blogs or other content, you can use an AI Article Writer.

AI Article Writer

It will do everything for you, from finding the topic to doing keyword research and even allowing you to select subheadings. I highly recommend this tool; the content writing process is seamless and faster than ever before.

The key to robust SEO content writing is using relevant, keyword-rich phrases in your headlines as well as throughout your content to let both your readers and the search engines know what your post is about.

Another element that improves your content quality is by inserting visually appealing content. Use images and other attractive visuals to make your content intriguing, which can help with better readability and ranking. You can also create image using any AI image generator, to create images quickly and easily.

Also, ensure that you write clear subheadings, which means that the visitor should, at one glance, understand whether the content is likely to answer their queries. So once you are done writing the content, it is always better to ask yourself-

By creating quality content, you will build trust with your audience and establish yourself as an expert in your niche.

6. Long-form content

After watching short reels and films, many people think that shorter blogs are better at gaining the audience’s attention. But you will be amazed to know that it is different when it comes to blogs.

Thus, always aim for scannable and detailed posts that cover everything your users might want to know.

Search engines prefer long-form blogs and rank them better. The reason behind this is that the more content you post, the more clues search engines will have to figure out what the content is about. Although there is no ideal blog length, depending on the topic, it is recommended that the blog length be at least 2000 words.

To make the content engaging, you should break down your content into headings and subheadings, which makes it easy for readers to digest.

Don’t forget to use bullet points to break down information into digestible chunks. I used a paragraph writer to make the content SEO-optimized and presentable, which helped me grab my audience’s attention and make it easy for mobile users to consume the content.

Paragraph Writer

7. Internal linking to helpful resources

If you wish to create SEO contentremember that adding internal and external links is of the utmost importance. Let us understand both individually.

When using external links in your blog, strike a balance between providing valuable & authoritative sources and avoiding linking overload. These high-value external links provide readers with additional information they can read and help search engines understand your website’s authority and credibility.

The best approach is to put facts or data on your website, backed by any influential website. Stats or facts build authority and make your argument more convincing, which helps you gain more trust from your readers.

So, by adding external links to authority sites, you’re making your content more SEO-friendly.

Now, let’s talk about how internal linking is beneficial when writing content for SEO optimization. Linking to other posts on your website helps the search engines create an accurate sitemap. Other than that, it helps to:

Remember, you should never force-feed links; instead, include links that organically connect with the subject matter.

This is one of the best SEO content writing tips, as it plays an important role in improving your website’s ranking. Wondering, what are featured snippets?

Featured snippets appear at the top of the search engine results page, even before the first-ranking article. They help you gain maximum exposure to your content and let users easily discover what they are seeking.

Optimize Content for Featured Snippets

To get your blog featured, you will have to follow some crucial steps, such as –

Google chooses featured snippets from content in its index that it thinks best meet users’ search intent for that particular query.

Thus, whenever you write on any topic, ensure you define it well. For example, if it is an ‘SEO Best Practices’ blog, explain what SEO is concisely. Keep in mind that the answer should not exceed 58 words.

According to Search Engine Land, a Featured Snippet gets approximately 8.6% of all clicks. Therefore, by featuring it at the top of the first page, and luckily, if Google picks up the featured snippet from your blog, you can drive more traffic to your website.

9. Leverage social media

When it comes to SEO writing tips, you must recognize the power of social media. Social media plays a major role in content optimization by directing the traffic from social media platforms to your company’s website, where your audience can find more information.

You can use various social media platforms to increase your visibility in web search engines, especially Google Search. However, make sure you select the platform that best suits your target audience and create the post accordingly.

Using these platforms can be quite helpful for businesses as they can reach a wider audience and enable you to find people interested in your products or services. This can also increase brand awareness, which will ultimately help you achieve a better ranking in SERP.  

With more eyes on your content, you increase the chances of someone linking to it, and you know backlinks are a huge part of SEO. You can also use Writesonic’s Social Media Content Generator to generate content for different platforms.

To do this, you need to write the objective and select the platform, and it will prepare the post for you within seconds, making your work quick and easy.

Social Media Generator

This tool will give your customers a personal touch, improving engagement and relationships. This social media content generator can also increase your page’s authority, helping it get higher rankings.

10. Create Optimized Title Tag and Meta Description

Creating optimized title tags and meta descriptions is important for SEO as they show visitors at a glance how relevant that site is for those keywords, helping sites with the right keywords in the right places stand out.

Meta Description Generator

So, let’s first understand what is a title tag and meta description.

A title tag is an HTML code tag that enables you to give a web page a title. You can find this title in the browser title bar and the SERPs. Adding descriptive and concise website’s title tags is important as they improve organic ranking and enable search engines to understand what the page is all about.

On the contrary, the meta description is a short and relevant summary of what a particular page is about. In a short description, it tells visitors what is in there for them.

Keep in mind that every meta description should include the primary keyword. Although it might not affect the SEO directly, it will encourage people to click on your page.

Also, be mindful while writing a meta description that it should provide readers a reason to click your content through the search results. Mention the primary motive behind your blog post and how this information can benefit them.

Furthermore, you should try to use active voice, as it addresses users directly, and action verbs such as read, learn, find out, etc., as they create excitement among users to click and read the article.

11. Add Alt text for images

Adding alt text is an integral part of SEO content strategy. Alt text should be added to the images below because it provides better image descriptions to search engine crawlers, which helps them index and rank the image properly in image searches. It also helps Google understand why that image is in your post.

Another reason to use alt text in the blog is that if the image fails to upload, this written copy can explain the image and help screen-reading tools describe images to visually impaired readers.

Pro tip: Use secondary keywords in image alt-texts to strengthen your SEO optimization.

Your description should align with your blog post and be easy to understand. Also, ensure that the image size is adjusted correctly so all images load and are fully visible.

12. Make your content easy to read

SEO content writing is about improving user experience, which is only possible when your content is simple and reader-friendly. While writing the content, you should ensure your audience can easily understand and relate to your message.

If they find your content full of jargon or difficult to read, they might lose interest and bounce off your page. This might indicate to Google that the content is of poor quality, and your ranking might drop.

Readability is vital as you only have a limited time to capture visitors’ attention. To make your content engaging and digestible, use these few tips:

Write content for real people as it can immensely improve the reader’s time on the site. You can do this by writing organically and naturally, in a conversational tone.

Bottom Line

To stand out in a crowded digital marketplace, you cannot overlook the importance of optimizing your content with SEO.

Implementing SEO strategies that create high-quality, unique, and informative content and cater to your audience’s needs can help you rank at the top of search engines like Google. This will enhance your online visibility and drive traffic.  

Now that you know, SEO content writing is one of the most potent ways that allows you to build authority, increase brand awareness, and gain a competitive advantage over your competitors. What’s next? I mean, how do you make your research and SEO implementation easy in your content?

Writesonic’s SEO Tools streamline this process by providing numerous products and solutions, such as a Keyword Research Tool, SEO Checker and optimization, AI Content Gap Analyzer, and much more. You can do all this within minutes, and the best thing is that it will help you save time and money, which you can invest in other productive things.

Having a hard time ranking your content on the first page of SERPs? You’re not alone—only 5.7% of pages rank in the top 10 search results for at least 1 keyword within a year of publishing.

However, creating SEO content that ranks well on SERP does not have to be intimidating. Having said that, you need the right set of SEO content writing tools to streamline workflow and improve the quality of your writing. Only then can it rank at the top of SERPs.

From keyword research tools to advanced content optimization platforms, there are different solutions designed to help you at every stage of the content creation process.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the best SEO content writing software available. You can use these tools for thorough keyword research, to draft compelling and optimized content, as well as to track content performance to ensure continuous improvement.

Whether you’re a seasoned SEO content writer or just starting out, these tools can help you create high-quality, SEO-optimized content efficiently.

Let’s check them out.

Best SEO Content Writing Software in 2024

1. Writesonic – overall best SEO writing tool

Best suited forG2 ratingsTrustpilot ratingsPricing
SEO & marketing content creation4.74.8Chatsonic: $12/month, Individual: $16/month, Standard: $79/month Enterprise: Starts at $9999/ year pricing

Writesonic offers a wide range of AI-powered SEO content marketing applications. And, of course, it tops our list as the overall best content writing tool for SEO. From keyword research to planning content strategy and execution and creating content drafts, Writesonic comes as one unified solution for content writers and marketers.

Writesonic

Key features

1. Chatsonic for content research and planning:

At Writesonic, Chatsonic works as a great starting point for us when creating SEO content. The ChatGPT alternative tool helps with research and brainstorming. It also suggests ideas for covering different angles on the same topic.

Ask Chatsonic for ideas that will make your blogs and articles more engaging and visually appealing. You can ask the chatbot different questions about the blog topic to gather insights and create an initial framework for your SEO blog or articles.

2. Comprehensive keyword research:

Writesonic offers specialized tools for creating the best keyword strategy. The keyword research tool shows the volume, difficulty, and total traffic that the specific keyword generates.

You can also use Topic Clusters to find keyword clusters that build topical authority.

Also, Writesonic has the Answer The People feature. The tool lists the questions people are asking for a specific topic, helping you find long-tail keywords.

3. AI Article Writer 6.0:

One of the standout features of Writesonic is its AI Article Writer 6.0. Internally, we use the tool to create the first draft of our articles. Also, we find the tool useful for creating guest posts and highly informative articles.

It conducts thorough research on the topic and analyzes the already ranking content on SERP to come up with articles that are SEO-optimized, 100% plagiarism-free, and free of AI hallucinations.

Also, you get complete control over the length and the outline of your article. Apart from that, the SEO writing assistant lets you select your choice of primary and secondary keywords and maintains your unique brand voice and style across the blog.

4. SEO checker and optimizer:

We use the Writesonic SEO Checker and Optimizer tool to check and improve our content SEO score. The tool analyzes content against SEO best practices and available keyword data.

Then, it offers suggestions for including different secondary and LSI keywords as well as enterprise terms in the blogs and articles to improve SEO scores and rank in better positions.

Learn more about how to use Writesonic SEO checker and optimizer.

5. AI content gap analyzer:

With the AI content gap analyzer, you can compare your blogs and articles with other content ranking on the SERP for the same keyword.

The tool helps you identify gaps and suggest new perspectives that you can include in your content to make it better than the competitors.

Best tools for SEO content research and planning

2. BuzzSumo

Best suited forG2 ratingsTrustpilot ratingsPricing
Content Research and Analysis4.53.7Pro: $199/month, Plus: $299/month, Large: $499/month, Enterprise: $999/month

With its intuitive features, BuzzSumo is a great tool for finding new content ideas and conducting content research. The platform helps us discover trending topics and analyze content performance. You can also use the tool to find popular influencers in your niche.

Key features:

1. Content discovery:

BuzzSumo’s content discovery feature is incredibly powerful. It lets you find the most shared and trending content across social media platforms. By entering a keyword or topic, you can quickly see what content resonates with audiences, which helps generate ideas for your own content.

2. Content research and analysis:

BuzzSumo offers detailed content performance analytics for different marketing channels. As you can see a complete breakdown of metrics such as the number of shares, comments, and likes for your posts on each social media platform it becomes much easier for you to figure out what types of content perform well on which platform and why.

3. Question analyzer

While creating SEO content on trending topics, I also found BuzzSumo’s question analyzer feature pretty useful. The tool crawls hundreds of forums and sites like Quora and Reddit to check what questions people are asking on a certain topic.

Once you identify the questions, it’s pretty easy to address them as a solution through your blogs or articles, making your content much more relevant to your audience. Apart from that, you can also use the feature to identify new long-tail keyword ideas.

Pros:

Cons:

3. AnswerThePublic

Best suited forG2 ratingsTrustpilot ratingsPricing
Content Ideation and Planning4.54.3For $5/month, Pro: $49/month, and Expert: $99/month annually

AnswerThePublic is one of the most crucial tools for SEO content writing. The platform can help you gain a proper understanding of what your audience is searching for.

You can use the AnswerThePublic tool to uncover questions and phrases people are actively searching for on specific keywords. The tool can be a great help for finding content ideas that resonate with your audience.

Key features:

1. Visual representations of data:

I’ve found the visual representation very appealing. AnswerThePublic represents keyword search data in formats such as mind maps and search clouds. You can just enter the keyword and get a comprehensive visualization of questions, prepositions, comparisons, and related searches that people are using. This allows you to easily correlate different topic queries and cover them in a broader sense in your blogs and articles.

2. Questions and topic discovery:

AnswerThePublic gathers data from different search engines and shows the questions people have about a specific keyword. While creating an SEO content outline for a particular keyword, you can directly use these questions related to the topic as subheadings in your content.

3. Trend monitoring:

The platform is also useful for trend monitoring. You can set up alerts for the entry of new questions and topics related to your keywords. As you stay updated with the current trends, you can quickly talk about them in your blogs and articles while keeping your content fresh and relevant to your audience.

Pros:

Cons:

4. Exploding Topics

Best suited forG2 ratingsTrustpilot ratingsPricing
Trend IdentificationNone3.7Entrepreneur: $39/month, Investor: $99/month, Business: $249/month

Exploding Topics is another tool you can try for research and planning your SEO content writing task. The SEO content writing software lets you identify emerging trends before they actually become mainstream. You can try Exploding Topics to get fresh content ideas and stay ahead of your competitors.

Key features:

1. Trend identification:

The platform uses smart machine learning algorithms, NLP, and techniques for analyzing time series. It tracks emerging trends by studying search data, mentions on social media, and online conversations. Then, it makes a list of topics that are becoming popular.

2. Category filtering:

While searching for trends in a specific industry the tool lets you filter the data from categories such as technology, health, or finance. Thus, you can easily find niche specific trends.

3. Growth score:

Each trend comes with a growth score that indicates how quickly it is gaining popularity. This number helps to prioritize trends for content creation.

4. Weekly reports:

Exploding Topics sends weekly reports that spotlight the newest trends in the categories you choose. You can use these reports to stay informed about what’s new and upcoming, so you never overlook a crucial trend.

Pros

Cons

Best tools for keyword research and strategy

5. Google Keyword Planner

Best suited forG2 ratingsTrustpilot ratingsPricing
Free Keyword ResearchNot availableNot availableFree with Google Ads account

Google Ads account users can access Google Keyword Planner for free. If you are an individual SEO content writer or a small business owner on a budget, you will definitely find this tool very useful.

The SEO content writing software provides keyword search volume, competition, and CPC data. You can use these critical keyword metrics to build a keyword strategy that enhances SEO content.

Key features:

1. Keyword research:

With Google Keyword Planner, you can find new keywords relevant to your business and understand the searches they attract and the cost of targeting them. Input a basic keyword to receive a list of related keywords with their search volume and competition level.

2. Useful CPC Data for better conversion:

Even though it’s for Google Ads, the CPC data from Keyword Planner also helps with SEO. Keywords with higher CPC show strong commercial intent. You can use these to create content that attracts more valuable traffic. This lets you focus on keywords that not only bring in visitors but traffic that are more likely to convert.

3. Identifying long-tail keywords

The tool is very useful for finding long-tail keywords. These longer, detailed phrases have less competition and are more precise, perfect for niche topics. By targeting long-tail keywords, you can attract more focused and interested visitors to your website and boost your SEO results.

The tool offers views into how searches for certain keywords shift across seasons. You can follow changes from one year to the next and note seasonal patterns. This helps in planning content strategy that matches times when most searches happen. Thus, you can capitalize on seasonal trends and make sure your content fits the right timeline.

Pros

Cons

6. Semrush

Best suited forG2 ratingsTrustpilot ratingsPricing
Creating SEO Content Strategy4.54.0Pro: $129.95/month, Guru: $249.95/month, Business: $499.95/month

Semrush has an SEO Writing Assistant that works as a smart writing editor. It helps you optimize your copy for better engagement and SEO.

Apart from the SEO writing assistant, Semrush also works as one of the best SEO automation tools and offers a range of features that can streamline your content creation process.
The SEO Writing Assistant can provide guidance on optimizing content for SEO. But obviously, you shouldn’t follow the suggestions that ruin the natural flow of your writing and make the content sound like AI written.

Hence, be careful while implementing all the changes suggested by the tool, as it could potentially reduce the quality and usefulness of the content for readers.

Key features

1. Real-time SEO optimization

You can get quick tips on related keywords to include in your content and how to optimize your images, tags, and links.

2. Readability improvements

The readability improvement feature helps to assess the content readability and identify words, sentences, and paragraphs that need to be rewritten.

3. Tone of voice consistency

For creating branded content, it’s utterly important to maintain a consistent tone of voice. It gives your content the required authority to rank higher. Semrush lets you determine whether your tone of voice is consistent and relevant to your audience and adjust your choice of words where necessary.

4. AI-powered tools

Use the Rephraser, Compose with AI, and Ask AI features to save time when composing and rewriting text.

Pros

Cons

7. Keywords Everywhere

Best suited forG2 ratingsTrustpilot ratingsPricing
Keyword ResearchNoneNoneCredit-based, $10 for 100,000 credits

Keywords Everywhere is one of my go-to choices for keyword research. The tool is quite affordable and available as a browser add-on for both Chrome and Firefox, which makes it easy to access.

It shows search volume, CPC, and keyword difficulty metrics directly within the search result. The extension also offers a separate section with questions people are asking and a related keywords section within the same interface, making keyword research a breeze.

Key features:

1. Seamless integration

It fits right into your browser, showing keyword data when you surf Google, YouTube, Amazon, and more. The tool shows you the search volume, cost-per-click (CPC), and competition data right away without having to switch among different tools or pages.

2. People Also Search For

I like the “People Also Search For” and “Related Keywords” features. The tool offers keyword ideas based on what people usually search for, which helps in developing keyword plans and finding hidden long-tail keywords.

Keywords Everywhere uses Google Trends to show past search volumes. I can track how the popularity of keywords has shifted, which is very important for noticing seasonal trends and setting up strategies for long-term content.

4. Competitor Analysis

The extension has a Page Analyzer tool that shows the keywords that the competitors are targeting. It can help you spot keyword opportunities, get a better understanding of the competition, and tweak your SEO strategy accordingly.

Pros:

Cons:

Writing and optimization

8. Google Docs

Best suited forG2 ratingsTrustpilot ratingsPricing
Content Creation and CollaborationNot availableNot availableFree, Google Workspace: $6/month per user

Google Docs offers SEO content writers a clean, distraction-free interface for writing. Whether you are a veteran or just starting your career, you are definitely going to find Google Docs one of your go-to applications for drafting your content and collaborating with your team.

With specialized add-ons and collaborative features, Google Docs is more than a simple word processor; it is a versatile application for drafting SEO-optimized content.

Key Features:

1. Real-time collaboration

Google Docs’ impressive feature is its real-time collaboration. This is helpful when a team works together on content strategies. Many people can work on a document at the same time, which makes it simple to brainstorm, draft, and improve content as a group. The feature that lets you make comments and give suggestions helps everyone keep track of changes both in actual text and in understanding.

2. SEO enhancements

Google Docs includes many add-ons designed to boost SEO content creation. For example, the Semrush SEO Writing Assistant connects with Google Docs and gives you immediate advice on how to use keywords, how readable your content is, and your overall SEO score.

3. Formatting and templates

Google Docs provides several templates and formatting options that assist in making well-organized, SEO-friendly material. Employing headings, subheadings, bullet points, and various formatting aids, you can optimize your content for users and search engines.

4. Integration with other Google tools

It works with other Google tools like Drive, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console. This integration lets you access data, work together on cloud-stored documents, and apply insights from Google Analytics to plan your content strategy.

Pros:

Cons:

9. Grammarly

Best suited forG2 ratingsTrustpilot ratingsPricing
Grammar and Style Checking4.74.5Free, Premium: $12/month annually, Business: $12.50/user/month annually

Grammarly is one of the most used writing tools. The platform offers several features for creating high-quality, SEO-friendly content. Grammarly uses sophisticated algorithms to analyze and point out various issues in your writing, including grammar, spelling, punctuation, style, and tone.

Grammarly

Key features

1. Advanced grammar and spell check

Grammarly finds and resolves spelling and grammar mistakes in real-time. This keeps your work clean and error-free, which is very important for maintaining trust and making it easy to read.

2. Readability and style improvements

Grammarly offers advice on how to make your content easier to read and better in style. It analyzes how you structure sentences, the words you choose, and how brief you are and offers suggestions to improve all the aspects of your writing. This makes your content straightforward and simple, which gives readers a better experience. A good user experience can help your SEO rankings go up.

3. Tone detection and making changes

Grammarly’s tone detection tool helps to maintain a consistent writing tone that matches your audience and situation. If you need a professional tone for a business document or a casual tone for a blog, it suggests changes for adjusting your style.

Pros

Cons

While Grammarly’s pricing may be on the higher end compared to other tools, its accurate optimization capabilities and ease of use make it a valuable investment for individuals and businesses looking to create competitive content.

10. Hemingway App Editor

Best suited forG2 ratingsTrustpilot ratingsPricing
Improving Readability4.4Not availableFree online, Desktop: $19.99 one-time fee

The Hemingway App editor helps with editing long-form content and making it more readable. Writers and marketers can use the SEO content writing tool to create blogs and articles with clear and concise sentences.

It highlights hard-to-read or very hard-to-read sentences in your content so that you can edit and make it easier to understand.

Hemingway App Editor highlights lengthy, complex sentences and common errors, suggesting ways to improve your writing style.

Hemingway Editor

Key features

1. Readability improvement

The Hemingway App highlights complex sentences and common errors in your content pieces. It shows ways to simplify your writing, making your content easy to read and improving user engagement.

As users tend to spend more time on your content, it reduces bounce rates and increases dwell time.

2. Clarity and conciseness

The app detects when you use passive voice, adverbs, and complex phrases and pushes you to write direct and concise sentences. Clear and concise writing is vital for SEO, as search engines understand your content better, and it also enhances users’ experience.

3. Focus mode and editing

The app’s focus mode lets you write without distractions, and its editing mode assists in polishing your content. This two-way method ensures that you can craft high-quality, SEO-friendly content.

Pros

Cons

11. Yoast

Best suited forG2 ratingsTrustpilot ratingsPricing
WordPress SEO Optimization4.64.6Free, Premium: $99/year per site

Offering a comprehensive suite of SEO tools to optimize your website for search engines, Yoast SEO is both very popular and handy. Over the years, this WordPress plugin has become a staple in my SEO toolkit.

You can use it to streamline both on-page and technical SEO tasks. Here’s why Yoast SEO stands out and how it can enhance your website’s search engine performance.

Key features

1. On-Page SEO optimization

Yoast SEO is great for finding and resolving on-page SEO issues. You can pick a focus keyword for each page, and then Yoast will provide real-time feedback on how well your content is optimized for that keyword. It offers suggestions for optimizing keyword density, meta titles, and descriptions, headings, etc.

2. Readability analysis:

The plugin comes with a tool to check the readability score of your content. It looks at how long your sentences and paragraphs are and checks whether you are using the right transition words that help the writing flow. I find this feature very useful for making my writing more interesting and easy to understand for more people.

3. XML sitemap creation:

Yoast SEO makes an XML sitemap for your site by itself. This lets search engines find your pages more easily. It’s an important tool for making your website easier to find on search engines without another extra plugin.

4. Schema markup:

Yoast SEO incorporates Schema.org integration, helping search engines understand the structure of your content. It enhances how your content appears in search results, potentially leading to rich snippets and higher click-through rates.

Pros:

Cons:

SEO analysis and on-page optimization

12. Clearscope

Best suited forG2 ratingsTrustpilot ratingsPricing
Content Optimization4.9Not availableEssentials: $170/month, Business: $1,200/month, Enterprise: Custom pricing

Clearscope is an AI-powered SEO content optimization platform for creating content that ranks well. This is the best content writing tool for SEO who want to focus more on competitor analysis.

The platform analyzes the top 30 articles for a specific keyword and provides suggestions on readability semantic integration of LSI keywords, themes, and sub-themes to optimize your content.

Clearscope

Key features

1. AI-powered content reports

Create reports for specific keywords and store them in the reports dashboard. You can check out previous reports, open new ones, or send them to colleagues for evaluation.

2. Content Optimization

Clearscope has a content grading scale to measure the quality of writing. By optimizing your writing for a better score, you can make it more relevant, comprehensive, and aligned with the top-ranking pages for your target keywords.

3. Keyword Search Tab

Get a list of relevant keywords with monthly searches, competition, and CPC figures for your target keyword.

4. Competitors Tab:

Analyze readability, word count, and content grade for the top competitors’ articles for a given keyword.

Pros

Cons

13. SurferSEO

Best suited forG2 ratingsTrustpilot ratingsPricing
On-Page SEO Optimization4.84.3Essential: $89/month, Scale: $129/month, Scale AI: $219/month, Enterprise: Custom pricing

Surfer SEO is one of the best data-driven SEO writing tools. The tool helps you find keyword ideas and improve your content ranking. It analyzes and compares your pages against those that currently rank on the SERPs, offering a data-driven analysis of exactly what’s missing from your page, site, content plan, and more.

For all queries, SERPs, and pages that you want to analyze, Surfer SEO studies the top page rankings. It looks at on-page SEO metrics like main and sub-keyword usage, LSI/NLP/TF-IDF keywords, meta tags, media elements, incoming backlinks, word count, outgoing external and internal links, headline structure, and more. With these metrics, Surfer SEO can build a useful model of what search engines want to see on a specific query.

SurferSEO

Key features

1. Content editor

Surfer SEO’s best tool for SEO writing is its content editor. The platform can be a great choice for on-page optimization.

The main Content Editor’s interface provides a limited rich text editor and in-depth suggestions on the right. It includes a content score that assesses how Google-friendly your content is compared to the other entries on the SERP.

It also gives recommendations for formatting, like how many words you should write and how many images you should use.

2. Unique keyword recommendations

Below that, you’ll find Surfer’s unique keyword recommendations, which tell you what keywords to use in your article and how many times they should appear. Once you use the right keyword enough times, they will turn yellow and then green to let you know you’ve used them enough in the document.

3. SERP analyzer

Besides the Content Editor, Surfer SEO also offers a SERP Analyzer that provides a graph of word count in relation to average position over time and insights on the popular words to use in your articles.

The tool offers a breakdown of each page and its content score, as well as a new feature that shows you common backlinks for the SERP you’re looking at.

4. Content audit

The Content Audit feature analyzes your URL and the SERP of its main keyword and gives you a lot of suggestions for improvement based on that. The Content Planner gives you suggestions on content clusters based on your main topic.

Pros

Cons

Plagiarism checker

14. Copyleaks

Best suited forG2 ratingsTrustpilot ratingsPricing
Plagiarism Detection4.73.4Starts at $10.99/month for 100 pages

Without having professionally trained LLMs for specific writing tasks tools like ChatGPT generate tons of thin content. Also, content thoroughly generated with ChatGPT has a very low information gain score resulting in poor SEO and degrading your website’s authority.

That’s where Copyleaks comes in handy. It uses trained LLMs to find and mark sentences that read like AI written.

Therefore, you can easily identify which portions of your content piece do not read well and might need some changes. Also, you can use Copyleaks to check for plagiarism in your content and ensure there is no duplicate issue.

Copyleaks

Key features

1. Comprehensive plagiarism detection

Copyleaks uses advanced AI and machine learning algorithms to scan documents for plagiarized, paraphrased, and manipulated content. It checks against an extensive database of web pages, academic papers, and published works, ensuring thorough detection of unoriginal content.

2. AI Content Detection

One of the most impressive features is its ability to detect AI-generated content. This is particularly useful in the current digital age, where AI-written text is becoming more common. Copyleaks ensures that all forms of generated content are identified and flagged appropriately.

3. Multi-language support

Copyleaks supports over 100 languages, making it a versatile tool for global users. This capability allows for comprehensive scans across various languages, ensuring that content is original regardless of the language used.

4. Text Compare and cheat detection

The Text Compare feature allows users to upload and compare two documents, highlighting similarities and differences. Additionally, the Cheat Detection feature can identify hidden or special characters that some might use to bypass plagiarism checks, ensuring thorough verification.

5. Integration and API

Copyleaks integrates seamlessly with popular platforms such as Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Moodle, Canvas, Blackboard, and Brightspace. It also offers full API integration, making it easy to incorporate into various workflows and systems.

Pros:

Cons:

Performance tracking content update

15. Ahrefs

Best suited forG2 ratingsTrustpilot ratingsPricing
SEO Analysis and Backlink Research4.5Not relevantLite: $99/month, Standard: $179/month, Advanced: $399/month, Agency: $999/month

Not as a writing tool but Ahrefs has a huge role to play in creating SEO content strategy for your website. The enterprise SEO platform offers a complete list of tools to optimize and track performance of your content.

From keyword research, backlink analysis to site audits Ahrefs has the right set of tools that cover all the aspects of SEO.

Key features:

1. Site Explorer:

This is the core feature where you’ll likely spend most of your time. Site Explorer offers detailed insights into any website’s performance, including its top content, backlink profile, and organic traffic metrics. It’s particularly useful for analyzing competitors and understanding their strategies.

2. Keywords Explorer:

Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer tool is incredibly user-friendly and powerful. It provides detailed data on search volumes, keyword difficulty, and potential traffic, helping you identify high-potential keywords to target. It also offers keyword suggestions and SERP overviews, making it easier to find and optimize for the right keywords.

Ahrefs excels in backlink analysis with one of the most extensive link databases available. It allows you to analyze your own backlink profile and those of your competitors, providing valuable metrics such as domain authority, referring domains, and anchor text distribution. This is crucial for developing effective link-building strategies.

4. Site Audit:

The Site Audit tool helps you identify and fix technical SEO issues on your website. It uncovers problems like broken links, duplicate content, and slow-loading pages, offering actionable insights to enhance your site’s overall performance and user experience.

5. Rank Tracker:

Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker lets you monitor your keyword rankings over time. You can set specific countries and keywords to track, and the tool provides metrics such as visibility, average position, traffic, and SERP features, helping you understand how your keywords are performing and adjust your strategies accordingly.

Pros:

Cons:

16. Google Search console

Best suited forG2 ratingsTrustpilot ratingsPricing
Website Performance Monitoring4.7Not availableFree

Google Search Console is an absolutely essential tool for keeping track of and optimizing your website’s performance. The platform offers different insights and functionalities that we can use to monitor and maintain the site’s presence across Google Search results.

Google search console 

Key features:

1. Performance reports

GSC offers detailed performance reports that provide insights into how your site is performing in Google Search. You can track metrics such as clicks, impressions, click-through rate (CTR), and average position for your pages and queries. This data helps you understand which keywords and pages are driving traffic to your site and identify opportunities for optimization.

2. URL inspection tool

The URL Inspection Tool allows you to check the indexing status of individual pages. You can see if a page is indexed when it was last crawled, and any issues that might prevent it from being indexed. This tool is invaluable for troubleshooting indexing issues and ensuring that all your important content is visible in search results.

3. Coverage reports

Coverage reports give you details on the indexing status of all your site’s pages. They highlight errors, warnings, and valid pages so that you can identify and resolve problems that could affect your site’s search performance. For example, you can quickly see which pages are returning 404 errors or have been excluded from indexing due to no index tags.

4. Sitemaps

GSC allows you to submit your sitemaps directly to Google, ensuring that all your site’s pages are crawled and indexed efficiently. The Sitemaps report shows the status of your submitted sitemaps and alerts you to any issues that need to be addressed.

5. Mobile usability

With the increasing importance of mobile-friendly websites, GSC’s Mobile Usability report is a crucial feature. It identifies usability issues on mobile devices, such as clickable elements being too close together or content wider than the screen, helping you ensure a good user experience for mobile visitors.

Pros:

Cons:

Conclusion

You can fast-forward your content creation process using the right SEO article writing tools. The tools can also make your writing clear and concise, improving content performance and driving more organic traffic to your website. While each tool we reviewed has its unique strengths, Writesonic emerges as the top choice for its all-in-one solution.

Whether you’re a seasoned SEO professional or a content writer, integrating Writesonic into your toolkit will empower you to create compelling, SEO-optimized content that resonates with your audience and ranks well on search engines. Start your journey with Writesonic today and experience the difference it can make in your SEO content creation efforts.

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when crafting a winning SEO strategy?

Keyword research?

Competitor analysis?

Back-linking?

Two tools, Semrush and Ahrefs, often come to the forefront when executing these crucial SEO tasks. But with both offering a vast array of features, deciding which best complements your SEO workflow can be challenging.

In this blog, we’re about to crack open the age-old debate: Semrush vs. Ahrefs.

This in-depth comparison will focus on Semrush and Ahrefs, analyzing their strengths and weaknesses to help you make an informed decision.

We’ll cover everything from keyword research capabilities to competitive insights, ensuring you pick the perfect tool for your workflow.

Let’s dive right in! 🧑‍⚖️

A head-to-head comparison: Semrush vs Ahrefs

FeaturesSemrushAhrefs
Keyword Research
Competitor Analysis
Content Creation
On-page Optimization
Backlink Analysis
Technical SEO
Rank Tracking
SupportLive chat, email, and phoneChat and email
Free Trial❌ (offers a bunch of features for free)

Let’s compare the difference between Semrush and Ahrefs to understand better what each tool offers.

Semrush

Semrush is a powerful, all-in-one marketing solution offering a comprehensive tool suite to empower businesses.

Semrush equips you with the necessary resources to conduct in-depth keyword research, gain unparalleled competitive intelligence, and track and analyze website performance—all essential components of a winning SEO strategy.

However, Semrush’s capabilities extend beyond SEO.

Semrush functions as a centralized marketing command center, offering functionalities for:

This helps businesses gain a competitive edge, achieve online marketing objectives, and drive sustainable growth.

Ahrefs

While Semrush is a total marketing package, Ahrefs offers a powerful toolkit for search engine optimization specialists.

Ahrefs prioritizes in-depth backlink analysis, allowing users to dissect competitor strategies and identify opportunities to build their robust backlink profile.

Ahrefs’ keyword research goes beyond the usual (Google, Bing, etc.) and ventures into various other search engines like YouTube and Amazon, providing a broader scope for content optimization.

Ahrefs caters primarily to SEO professionals, providing detailed insights and diverse keyword options that empower them to craft highly targeted and effective SEO campaigns that drive organic traffic and website visibility.

How do you choose between Semrush and Ahrefs?

There are many differences between Semrush and Ahrefs, and deciding between them is potentially overwhelming.

Here are some key points you might consider when making your decision between Semrush or Ahrefs: 👇

What it does best

Your budget

Daily report needs

Functionality needs

User interface and ease of use

Customer support

Additional considerations

Ahrefs vs Semrush: Detailed breakdown of the features

FeaturesSemrushAhrefs
ToolkitsSEOContent marketingSocial mediaPaid advertisingSEO
Keyword ResearchKeyword metricsKeyword listsKeyword gapsCustom keyword metricsKeyword metricsKeyword listsKeyword gapsCustom keyword metrics
Competitor AnalysisBacklinksPaid keywordsChanges over timeTrafficKeywordsCompetitor listsBacklinksPaid keywordsChanges over timeTrafficKeywords
Content CreationTopic researchSocial media content ideationSEO writing assistantContentShake AIContent explorerFree AI writing tool
On-page OptimizationSEO strategyBacklink ideasTechnical SEO ideasSemantic keywordsContent ideasUX ideasSERP featuresSEO strategyBacklink ideasTechnical SEO ideasSemantic keywordsContent ideasSERP features
Backlink AnalysisBacklink typesBacklink gapLink attributesAuthority scoreLocation distributionHistorical dataExternal linksBacklink typesLink attributesDomain rating (DR)URL rating (UR)Historical dataExternal links
Technical SEOSite auditOn-page SEO checkerLog file analyzerSite auditOn-page SEO checker
Rank TrackingKeyword tagsCompetitor comparisonFeatured snippet trackingAlgorithm update position trackingKeyword tagsCompetitor comparisonGSC integration
SupportLive chat, email, and phoneLive chat and email
Unique FeaturesSearch intentAdvertising researchToolkit for outreachSEO WordPress pluginA lot of new features like Local SEO, always-on auditAhrefs web analytics, etc., coming soon!

From backlink analysis to technical SEO and rank tracking, we’ll compare Ahrefs and Semrush feature by feature, highlighting their strengths and potential limitations.

So, which is better: Ahrefs vs Semrush? Let’s go. 👇

1. Keyword research

You spend hours crafting killer content, but nobody finds it.

Not ideal, right?

Keyword research helps you find high-volumelow-competition keywords that drive organic traffic.

Semrush study shows that 3-3.5 pages are visited per session when a user lands from a search. So, having a comprehensive keyword research tool is crucial for organic growth.

Let’s now look at Semrush vs Ahrefs for keyword research:

Ahrefs

Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer acts like a user-friendly GPS. Its keyword difficulty score helps you size up the competition for your target terms.

It gives you a visual cue: green for low-ranking difficulty, yellow for medium, and red for the toughest.

Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer dashboard 
Features
Limitations

Semrush

Semrush, on the other hand, gives you a lot to work with. You get search volume estimateskeyword variations, and related keywords.

Semrush’s keyword research tool is called the ‘Keyword Magic Tool.’ It offers a user-friendly experience with a wealth of data and unique features.

Semrush’s Keyword Overview dashboard
Features
Limitations

🧑‍⚖️ Verdict

Semrush wins the first round. ✌️

Both Ahrefs and Semrush offer powerful keyword research tools, but Semrush wins it by a small margin because of the range and depth of its data (SEO and PPC).

Also read: How to Find Your Competitors’ Keywords: Top 9 Strategies

2. Competitor analysis

Understanding your competitors’ SEO strategies is crucial for staying ahead in the search engine game.

Ahrefs and Semrush offer robust competitor analysis features but have some key differences.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs competitor analysis helps you uncover the keywords your competitors rank for (organic and paid search).

Ahrefs’ Site Explorer dashboard

Features

Semrush

Semrush’s competitor insights help you analyze your competitors’ organic traffic sources, top keywords, and estimated traffic share.

Semrush’s Competitors’ dashboard
Features

🧑‍⚖️ Verdict

Semrush wins again. ✌️

Both are almost feature-for-feature in this category, but Semrush offers advertising research and a social media tracker to analyze your competitors’ social media activity.

So, Semrush is the better overall tool for competitor analysis.

3. Content creation

While both Ahrefs and Semrush are great at SEO, content creation remains a separate battleground.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs helps you discover top-ranking content and generate content ideas but has limited functionality.

Ahrefs’ Content Explorer dashboard
Features
Limitations

Semrush

Semrush has a Content Marketing feature that lets you research a topic and generate many ideas for creating content around it.

Semrush’s Topic Research dashboard

Features

Limitations

🧑‍⚖️ Verdict

Semrush wins. ✌️

When it comes to content creation features, Semrush offers a more comprehensive and user-friendly experience. It streamlines the workflow with features like topic research, content briefs, and on-page SEO suggestions.

Semrush wins this round comfortably.

4. On-page optimization

Optimizing your website’s on-page elements is crucial for ranking higher in search results.

Ahrefs and Semrush offer on-page optimization tools that cater to different needs.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs helps you crawl your website to identify on-page and technical SEO issues, such as broken links, missing alt tags for images, and slow loading times.

Ahrefs’ Page Explorer report
Features
Limitations

Semrush

Semrush has a dedicated on-page SEO checker to help you analyze individual pages for on-page SEO factors like title tags, meta descriptions, content length, and internal linking opportunities.

Semrush’s On-Page SEO Checker dashboard
Features

Limitations

🧑‍⚖️ Verdict

Semrush wins. ✌️

Semrush again takes a point here with its dedicated on-page optimization tool, which offers a wide range of optimization suggestions and features.

Backlinks are like digital gold stars—the more high-quality links pointing to your site, the higher your website’s authority in the eyes of search engines.

Both Ahrefs and Semrush have X-ray vision when it comes to backlinks.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs lets you see who’s linking to you, the quality of those links (gold vs. fool’s gold), and how your backlink profile compares to competitors.

Ahrefs gives you a crystal-clear picture of your website’s reputation online.

Ahrefs Site Explorer dashboard
Features
Limitations

Semrush

Semrush boasts a larger backlink index, exceeding 40 trillion backlinks, giving you a more panoramic view of your website’s authority. It offers a wider search radius for links.

Semrush’s Backlink Audit dashboard
Features
Limitations

🧑‍⚖️ Verdict

It’s a tie. 🤝

Both Ahrefs and Semrush offer formidable backlink analysis features, so this round ends in a tie.

Also read: Mastering the Art of Link Building: A Complete Guide

6. Technical SEO

Technical SEO ensures search engines can easily crawl and understand your website.

Ahrefs and Semrush inspect your website, identifying crawl errors, broken links, and other technical roadblocks that can tank your rankings.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs helps you crawl your website, prioritize a list of actionable fixes, and optimize it for search engines and visitors.

Ahrefs’ Site Audit dashboard
Features
Limitations

Semrush

Semrush’s technical SEO audit is particularly thorough. It provides a detailed report with actionable fixes and helps optimize your website’s technical health.

Semrush’s Site Audit dashboard

Features

🧑‍⚖️Verdict

Semrush wins this round as well. ✌️

Both Ahrefs and Semrush are strong contenders in technical SEO, but Semrush clinches the win again due to its robust site audit and its presentation of solutions to fix the issues.

7. Rank tracking

Both Ahrefs and Semrush offer rank tracking tools, which let you see your website’s ranking progress over time and how you compare to competitors.

Around 99,000 searches happen on Google every second, so you wouldn’t want to miss the opportunity to appear in the search results and earn more profit.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs’ rank tracking is known for its pinpoint accuracy and user-friendly interface. It helps you track keywords’ positioning on SERPs.

Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker dashboard
Features

Semrush

Semrush, however, offers more granular data, including ranking distributions and historical ranking trends.

Semrush’s Position Tracking dashboard
Features

🧑‍⚖️Verdict

Semrush wins. ✌️

Both Ahrefs and Semrush share many rank-tracking functionalities, but Semrush refreshes its ranking data more often than Ahrefs, so it again takes this round by a slim margin.

8. Support

Ahrefs and Semrush offer the same resources and help options. Both tools offer chat, email, and knowledge-base articles.

The only difference is that Semrush lets you connect with a live representative for a more immediate solution.

🧑‍⚖️Verdict

Semrush wins again. ✌️

Both tools provide fantastic support to their users, but Semrush has an edge with its live chat feature.

9. Unique features

Semrush has considerably more features than Ahrefs.

Semrush has an SEO checker and optimizer. This tool lets you paste your content into it and run a quick SEO check. It suggests ways to optimize your content for better keyword intent and can help you audit content at scale.

Semrush’s AI assistant ‘Semrush Copilot’

Also, Semrush has its own AI assistant within its platform named Semrush Copilot. It analyzes data from Semrush tools to provide personalized recommendations for improving your website’s SEO.

Copilot helps you save time, prioritize tasks, and stay informed about critical SEO issues, making it a valuable tool for SEOs, website managers, and content creators using Semrush.

🧑‍⚖️Verdict

Semrush rules the reigns here.

Which tool is superior overall?

While both Ahrefs and Semrush are exceptional SEO tools, diving deeper reveals Semrush’s potential edge.

The focus on features and usefulness makes Semrush a compelling choice for SEO professionals.

Up your content creation and SEO efforts with Writesonic

Content creation still remains a constant challenge for many.

Writesonic helps you streamline your content workflow and take your SEO efforts to the next level.

Here’s how Writesonic helps you with content creation:

Writesonic’s AI Article Writer
Writesonic’s On-Page SEO Checker

Writesonic connects your SEO strategy and content creation efforts. It takes valuable data and insights from Ahrefs or Semrush and translates them into actionable content that ranks higher in search results and attracts your target audience.

By combining the power of these tools with Writesonic’s content creation magic, you’ll be well on your way to dominating the SEO content creation.

Even with a great product and top-notch customer service, getting your small business noticed online is a real challenge without a small business SEO strategy in place.

Here’s the truth.

Contrary to popular belief, search engine optimization (SEO) is still a powerful tactic for gaining visibility. By optimizing your website with the right keywordscreating high-quality content, and improving site structure, you can climb search engine rankings and attract more visitors.

More than that, staying current with effective small business SEO trends helps you stand out in search results and shows potential customers that you’re relevant.

Investing in a well-planned small business SEO strategy can improve your online presence and attract organic traffic without spending a fortune.

In this article, we will share some actionable, effective tips to build that strategy. ✅

Let’s get started.

But first, why do small businesses need SEO?

For small businesses, the perks of doing SEO go way beyond snagging a top spot in search results.

Let’s dive into some of the benefits of SEO for small business website success. 👇

1. SEO improves your brand’s visibility and traffic

SEO helps small businesses like yours gain visibility on search engines by optimizing your website with relevant keywords, improving site structure, and creating quality content.

This makes it easier for search engines to find and rank your site higher, giving your business a greater chance of attracting local customers searching for your products or services in your area.

2. SEO Is a cost-effective way to market your business

Unlike paid advertising, SEO is a cost-effective marketing tactic that delivers lasting results.

According to HubSpot, 61% of marketers put more money and effort into SEO over tactics like PPC to grow their businesses.

If you’re running a small business with a tight budget for SEO marketing for small business, choosing SEO over PPC can fuel sustainable growth without the ongoing costs of pay-per-click campaigns.

3. SEO builds credibility and trust

A survey by Search Engine Journal found that 70-80% of users ignore paid ads and focus on organic results. This preference suggests that appearing on the first page of search results makes your company look more trustworthy and credible to customers.

Is small business SEO the same as local SEO?

Small business SEO and local SEO have some similarities and often overlap.

Still, they each have distinct focuses and strategies to enhance online visibility and connect with your ideal customers.

Here’s a quick table showing how they differ: 👇

AspectSmall Business SEOLocal SEO
FocusBoosting website visibility globally or nationally for relevant keywordsEnhancing visibility for local searches within specific geographic areas
Target AudienceCustomers searching for products or services on a broader scalePotential customers looking for local businesses or services, often relying on local proximity
ScopeTargets broader audiences and markets across regionsFocuses on specific local markets and optimizing for local search queries
ImportanceCritical for businesses aiming to reach a wide audience beyond their local areaEssential for businesses relying on local foot traffic or serving specific geographic markets
StrategiesKeyword optimization, content creation for broader appeal, backlink buildingLocal keyword optimization, Google My Business optimization, local citations, local content

In short, small business SEO focuses on boosting your website’s visibility in search results for relevant keywords, targeting customers searching for your products or services nationally or globally.

Local SEO, on the other hand, is about getting noticed by potential customers in your area. It fine-tunes your online presence to attract local searches, making it essential for businesses relying on foot traffic or serving specific local markets

💡 Think of it this way: Small business SEO casts a wide net to attract customers interested in your offerings. Local SEO strategically fishes in a specific pond to target customers in your immediate area.

10 SEO tips for small business owners

Here are our best SEO tips for small businesses to help you make the most of your SEO efforts:

Tip #1: Lay the groundwork for SEO

If you’re diving into SEO for your small business, Google Analytics and Google Search Console are your go-to tools. Google Analytics reveals who’s visiting your site, how they found you, and what they’re up to once they’re there.

Google Search Console is your direct line to Google. It shows you how your site appears to the search engine and flags any technical issues that could hinder your performance.

These tools are especially suited for small businesses, as they require no upfront investment and have a smooth learning curve.

Set these up early to gather data from the start and optimize your website for search engines.

Check out these tutorials to learn more: 👇

Google Analytics
Google Search Console

Tip #2: Set up your Google Business profile

Your Google Business Profile acts as your digital storefront, showcasing your business to customers searching online.

Make sure your info is spot-on—your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) should match your website and all online listings.

Also, pick categories that truly describe your business. This helps Google understand your products and services and match you with the right searches.

Sprinkle your profile with high-quality images and videos that position your offerings in an attractive light, setting a great first impression.

That’s not all. Customer reviews play a big role in SEO. Be sure to engage with all reviews—positive and negative—to show you value customer feedback.

Regional credibility also goes a long way toward establishing your small business as a trusted name. To build local credibility, ask fellow local businesses, directories, and organizations to link to your website.

Create dedicated landing pages for specific services or products for local keyword targeting.

Check out this video tutorial to get started: 👇

Google Business Profile

Tip #3: Research your keywords

Kick off your keyword research by jotting down topics and terms your customers are likely searching for. These keywords will be relevant to the niche of your small business. For instance, if your small business is concerned with upcycled menswear, keywords will be something like “upcycled menswear,” “sustainable men’s fashion,” or “upcycled denim.”

Next, check out your competitors—see what keywords they’re ranking for. This will uncover opportunities to target similar keywords and gain an edge.

Most people miss out on the power of long-tail keywords. These longer, more specific phrases may have less competition, but they attract highly targeted traffic.

To simplify your keyword research, use tools like Writesonic or Google Keyword Planner to expand your list, analyze search volume, and assess keyword difficulty.

Writesonic Keyword Research Tool

Writesonic’s Keyword research tool is free and handy. It finds all relevant and trending keywords for a particular query and provides detailed data on keyword difficulty, volume, and traffic.

To use this tool, simply jot down a list of terms or words you think people will use when searching for a business similar to yours. Then, insert these terms in the Keyword Research tool and click ‘Identify Keywords.’

For instance, for the query ‘thrift store los angeles’, the tool shows the following results:

Writesonic Keyword Research Tool

Next, expand your keyword list with any relevant terms or phrases, and use this list as a guide when creating content, designing your website’s structure, and implementing other optimizations.

Alternatively, you can use Google Keyword Planner, a free tool within Google Ads.

Google Keyword Planner

Note that Google Keyword Planner’s competition metric reflects paid advertising efforts, not organic search competition, but it’s still useful for assessing which keywords to target.

Tip #4: Perform a competitive analysis

Your SERP rivals are aiming for the same online visibility as you.

Analyzing your competitors on search engine results pages (SERPs) helps you uncover additional keywords and understand the type of content that resonates with users.

By observing which keywords your competitors are ranking for and examining the content they have optimized, you gain insights into what topics and approaches are effective in your industry.

Use this analysis to refine your SEO strategy. Incorporate successful keywords and create content that addresses the needs and interests of your target audience. This will improve your search engine visibility and boost user engagement.

Start by examining how they use keywords and structure their websites (💡tip: look at their menus, headers, and footers), as well as the type of content they publish.

Take this intel to improve your website.

Pay attention to the pages your competitors use to rank for relevant keywords (homepage vs. dedicated pages) and identify their target audience.

Writesonic’s on-page SEO optimizer

Uncover competitors’ keyword rankings, monthly traffic, and top-performing keywords with Writesonic’s SEO Research and Optimizer and find potential keywords you should target.

For example, suppose a competitor gets a lot of traffic from a specific keyword. In that case, it’s a sign you should also start using that keyword in your SEO strategies for small businesses.

Tip #5: Conduct keyword mapping

Keyword mapping assigns relevant keywords to specific pages, giving each a clear focus and purpose. This helps users and search engines understand your content better, making your pages more likely to rank for relevant searches.

Effective keyword mapping hinges on understanding search intent.

Ask yourself: Why are people searching for this keyword?

Are they seeking information, buying something, or finding a local service?

Aligning your content with their intent boosts your chances of attracting the right audience.

Keyword clustering takes it further by grouping related keywords. This way, you can cover more search queries and increase your chances of ranking for multiple terms.

Writesonic Keyword Clustering Tool

Writesonic’s AI Topic Clustering tool automatically creates keyword clusters, grouping keywords related by topic or theme.

To use this tool, enter your primary keywords and select a country. You’ll then receive pillar content keywords and a list of cluster content keywords.

For instance, ‘thrift store los angeles’ from our previous query returns the following results:

Writesonic Keyword Clustering Tool

Tip #6: Plan your site structure

A well-structured site creates a win-win: improving visitor experience and boosting organic traffic.

Clear navigation and logical organization make it easy for users to find what they need, leading to longer visits, higher conversions, and lower bounce rates.

Plus, search engines can better grasp your content’s hierarchy and importance.

Here’s how you can plan your site effectively for SEO:

Define your goals for your website

Begin by clearly defining your business goals and target audience. Consider what actions you want visitors to take and what information they seek.

Then, prioritize your content and design a structure that prioritizes the user.

Create a visual sitemap

A visual sitemap is a hierarchical diagram that outlines your website’s structure.

It helps you see how pages are connected and logically organize your site. Tools such as FlowMapp or Slickplan are great for creating detailed sitemaps.

Flowmapp

In addition, use a hierarchical structure where the homepage links to main category pages, which in turn link to subcategory pages. This top-down approach is intuitive for users and search engines.

For example, an e-commerce site might have a structure like this:

Optimize URL structure

Your URLs should mirror the structure of your website, making it easy for users and search engines to understand the organization of your content.

Keep them straightforward and descriptive, and incorporate relevant keywords to indicate what each page is about. This helps improve usability, enhances SEO by signaling content relevance, and improves overall user experience.

For instance, a URL for a product page might look like this: www.example.com/products/electronics/mobile-phones

Implement internal linking

Internal links serve two important purposes, they:

By strategically linking from high-authority pages to newer or less prominent ones, you spread page authority throughout your site, which enhances the visibility and ranking potential of all your pages.

Use breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are navigation aids that show users exactly where they are within your site’s hierarchy. They improve user experience and help search engines understand the structure of your site.

Avoid very complex site structures. Keep your site shallow by ensuring important content is no more than three clicks away from the homepage.

Tip #7: Create a well-thought content strategy

A well-structured content strategy maintains your brand’s online visibility.

Create a content calendar that outlines the blogs or articles you have set aside for publication, their publication dates, and who is responsible for each piece.

Mix up your content to cater to various preferences and learning styles. Offer a mix of content, from informative blog posts and detailed articles to engaging videos, cool infographics, and fun interactive quizzes!

The goal is to keep your audience hooked and eager to come back for more. Don’t forget to include seasonal or trending topics to keep your content fresh and timely.

Use Writesonic’s Unified AI Content Creation platform to plan and execute your content creation and publishing strategy. And, if you need help generating factually accurate articles with real-time data, take the help of Writesonic’s AI Article Writer.

Writesonic’s AI Article Writer

Writesonic relies on thorough competitor analysis and in-depth web research with internal linking and citations to deliver high-ranking, SEO-optimized articles.

Plus, you can upload your documents to Writesonic and transform them into engaging, E-E-A-T satisfying articles.

Check out this video to dive deeper into Writesonic’s AI Article Writer: 👇

AI Article Writer & Article Generator | Writesonic.com

Tip #8: Prioritize on-page optimization alongside content creation

On-page optimization is the technical side of the equation, where you fine-tune your content for search engines.

On-page optimization involves:

On-page optimizations help search engines understand your content better, improving your chances of ranking higher.

Writesonic’s on-page SEO checker

Writesonic’s On-page SEO Checker and Optimizer make it easy to check your SEO content’s quality instantly. It includes real-time Google data integration and automated SEO for small business SEO optimization.

Plus, it supports multiple languages to cater to diverse audiences.

Tip #9: Do not ignore Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO builds your reputation and authority beyond your website.

Start from the basics—ensure your business information is accurate and consistent across online directories like Yelp, Yellow Pages, and any industry-specific platforms.

Next, form relationships with local organizations, businesses, and influencers. Local partnerships often lead to valuable backlinks to your website and signal to search engines that you’re a trusted and relevant resource.

Consider guest posting on reputable websites or blogs in your niche. Sharing your expertise and insights can help you gain exposure and earn valuable backlinks.

Lastly, don’t underestimate the power of public relations. Seek opportunities for media coverage, press releases, or mentions in online publications as they massively influence your brand’s reach.

Tip #10: Regularly monitor SEO performance

Check your Google Analytics and Search Console dashboards frequently to track website traffic, keyword rankings, and user behavior. Then, use that data to improve your online presence.

Here’s how to track your SEO performance with these tools:

Tools like Writesonic provide comprehensive backlink analysis at your fingertips, including the number of referring domains and the quality of backlinks.

SEO is an ongoing process. You can make smart decisions that boost your website’s performance and keep traffic flowing by leveraging data.

Don’t let your competitors write you out. Use Writesonic

Success in SEO isn’t a sprint; it’s a marathon.

With consistent effort, a sprinkle of creativity, and a capable tool like Writesonic by your side, you’ll be the one crossing the finish line with a gold medal (and a fatter wallet!).

Ready to optimize your website?

FAQs

Does SEO work for small businesses?

Yes, it does. SEO is not just for big brands anymore—It’s arguably more crucial for small businesses to stand out in a crowded market.

With the right strategy, even a small budget can bring tangible results in increased website traffic and revenue.

How to improve SEO for small businesses?

You can improve SEO for your small business by first mastering the basics:

What are the common SEO issues small business owners make when using SEO?

Here are some of the most common SEO mistakes we’ve seen business owners make that can be avoided by using the tips in this article:

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