Few things are more discouraging than crafting an excellent piece of content, only to find that hardly anyone has seen it. In today’s competitive digital landscape, it simply isn’t enough to create incredible content– you have to go out of your way to ensure it is optimized for search engines.
When you invest in creating content that will be valuable for your target audience, the last thing you want is for it to fall into the black hole that is the internet. Luckily, to help make sure that you are able to bring as much traffic to your site as possible, there are tons of different content optimization tools on the market.
Of course, sometimes, having so many options can be overwhelming in itself. For this reason, we’ve compiled the ultimate list of SEO tools for content optimization, with selections that run the full gamut in terms of features and price points.
Content optimization is the practice of ensuring that your content has the highest likelihood of achieving the goal you have in mind. Whether you want to transform leads into conversions or drive more traffic to your site by high rankings in search engine results, content optimization is the process that helps you meet those ends.
You can use various methods to optimize your content, some of which are more technical while others are editorial or marketing strategies. Content optimization is important because it makes sure that all of your hard work producing high-quality content isn’t lost in the ever-growing abyss of the internet. In order to make sure that people are able to view and benefit from your content, optimization is key to make sure that search engines can find it and direct your intended audience toward it.
Content optimization is a multi-faceted pursuit, but some of the elements include:
Luckily, you don’t have to start from scratch when optimizing your content. There are tons of different tools out there that can help ensure that your content helps you achieve your goals– in fact, there are so many that it can be easy to feel overwhelmed by the options. Let’s look at fifteen of the best SEO tools for content optimization to ensure that your content gets in front of as many of the right eyes as possible.
SEMRush is marketed as an all-in-one tool suite that site owners and marketers can use to help discover market insights and boost online visibility. If you already pay for SEMRush, you’ll want to know about their content optimization tool, which will grade your content for SEO friendliness.
Access to the Content Marketing Platform is only available through the pricing tiers of Business and Guru through SEMRush. Guru is the cheaper of the two options at $229.95 per month, while the Business plan will run you $449.95 per month.
Another all-in-one SEO solution you can use to ensure that your site brings in as much high-quality traffic as possible has long been a favorite amongst digital marketers. You can use Moz for all sorts of essential tasks, including keyword research, backlink analysis, site audits, rank traffic, and more.
Offering four different plans, you can save 20% by paying in a lump sum every year. The Standard plan is $99 per month, the Medium plan is $179 per month, the Large plan is $299 per month, and the Premium plan costs $599 per month.
SurferSEO is a tool that you can use to research, write, optimize, and audit your content. Very popular and incredibly easy to use, even for beginners, you can use SurferSEO to find ideas for content, research keywords that will help you rank highly on search results, and more.
There are three plans available for SurferSEO, depending on what your needs are. The first is the Basic plan at $59 per month, the second is the Pro plan at $99 per month, and the third is the Business plan at $199 per month.
If you’re on a campaign to ensure your site ranks as highly as possible in search engines, check out our post about the best tools to test your page speed.
If you operate a WordPress site and want to ensure that all of your content is SEO-friendly and very easy to read, you might consider using this widely used WordPress plugin.
You can use this tool to view your content’s success, and it will even give you real-time updates when editing your content. If improvements can be made to your content, they’ll give you a list of suggestions to ensure that your content is as SEO-friendly as possible.
One of the nice things about Yoast is that they have a free plan you can use when you’re first starting out. You can purchase their affordable premium plan at $89 per year per site for more features.
If you’re looking to utilize the power of AI to optimize your content, check out MarketMuse. They will provide you with personalized recommendations for keywords you can target based on your existing content. Using this feature of the tool, you can have a fairly quick turnaround on your content rankings, a feature not offered by many other SEO tools.
MarketMuse will also help you create a first draft for your content using natural language generation, which can ultimately save you a bundle of time creating content.
There are four pricing plans for MarketMuse– Optimize, Plus, Pro, and Premium. Respectively, they cost $79, $179, $499, and $1,499 per month.
Are you looking for a highly useful free tool to ensure that your content is readable? Check out the Hemingway Editor.
A simple tool you can use to identify your content’s reading level, Hemingway lets you paste your content into their editor and gives you feedback on the reading difficulty of your content. Beyond telling you which sections should be simplified to be easily read by as many people as possible, they’ll also suggest simple alternatives to words and indicate when too many instances of passive voice are used.
Another WordPress plugin, RankMath is a very easy-to-use SEO tool that can help you save tons of time. Beyond that, it will help you avoid the need to guess and check your content, as it will give you direct feedback about what needs to be done to your posts to optimize them.
Compared to Yoast, there are a number of marketers that prefer RankMath thanks to its performance, speed, and additional features. On top of that, you can use this plugin on a number of sites at once without paying any extra.
There is a free plan you can use when you’re first starting out and two premium plans that start at $59 per month you can pay for if you’re looking to benefit from their additional features.
SImilarContent can help you optimize your content specifically for Google. This tool can help you understand which keywords you should add (or take away) to help boost your content relevance score.
The starting price point is $9.99 per month, which is pretty affordable when you compare it to some of the other tools on our list.
Are you wondering how content marketing fits into your investor relations strategies? Make sure you check out our recent post on the topic.
If you’re feeling a little overwhelmed by the price points for some of these tools, turn your attention to Small SEO Tools.
They offer a wide selection of little tools you can use free of charge, including backlink analysis, meta tag analysis, keyword research, plagiarism checkers, and more.
Even though Frase is a newer content optimization tool compared to some of the other ones on our list, they’ve grown in popularity quickly. If you’re looking to increase your conversion rate and boost your organic traffic, this can be a very useful AI-based tool.
There are two plans available for Frase– Basic and Team, which cost $44.99 and $114.99 per month, respectively.
Another newer face on the content optimization tool scene, GrowthBar can help you create content that ranks well in search engines and has all the bells and whistles for on-page optimization.
The three primary plans offered by GrowthBar are the Standard, Pro, and Agency Plans. They cost $29, $79, and $129 per month, respectively.
ClearScope is a tool that will analyze your competitors’ content and offer you all of the info you need to outrank them. A great tool for professional bloggers and businesses that want to make sure they are the authority in their niche, this is also one of the more expensive content optimization tools on the market.
The cheapest pricing point– the Essentials plan– starts at $170 per month, and the Professional plan will run you $350 per month. For businesses that require the Enterprise plan, they offer companies quotes based on their specific needs.
If you’re looking to save time on creating content briefs, Topic might just be the tool for you. To use Topic, you enter a keyword, and they will give feedback on absolutely everything you’ll want to cover in your content. This includes the topics you should be covering, the questions you should answer for your audience, and the headings you’ll want to use.
The three available plans over at Topic are the Starter plan, the Plus plan, and the Premium plan. They cost $99, $199, and $299, respectively.
This online content optimization platform can help you ensure that your content is easier to read and more in-depth than the content offered by your competitors. You can enter a keyword into the software, and they’ll deliver a report back to you with all the info you need to ensure you beat out your competition.
The cheaper plan is the Hobby plan at $29 per month, while the Professional plan will run you $199 per month.
While there are a lot of truly impressive SEO tools on this list, many of them are pretty pricey. If you’re just starting out, investing in a subscription-based service (or several) can be difficult if you only have a small budget for your site. For this reason, we’ve made a point to include a number of lower-cost yet highly useful tools on this list.
Copyscape is one of these. It isn’t a full-service content optimization tool by any means, but it is a relatively low-cost tool that performs an essential task– making sure that your content is 100% original to your site.
If you or your content writers put plagiarized material on your site, it will mean that your site is seriously penalized. Even if you don’t have a lot of money to invest in AI-based tools or other more complex content optimization tools, putting a small amount of your budget towards ensuring you are only putting out original content is well worth it.
Investing in optimizing your content can mean you receive more traffic, generate more leads, and ultimately run a more successful business. However, it can be a lot to take on this task on your own. Content optimization isn’t just about ticking off technical SEO boxes, after all– it also has to do with the content’s quality, structure, and formatting.
If you want to help your site grow without dedicating endless hours and lots of money toward dealing with your own content optimization, you’ll definitely want to think about hiring an experienced SEO company to take on the task for you. If you’re searching for a one-stop shop for all of your digital marketing and SEO needs, contact Blue Pig Media today to get started, and if you have any questions, please feel free to let us know! We’ll gladly help you out however we can.
