Having vetted SEO content writing tools in your back pocket can help you streamline your processes and consistently create excellent pieces that readers enjoy — and that rank well on Google.
To help you find the best SEO content tools for your org, I’ve compiled a list of nine great tools for you to test out. As you go through them, keep your content goals in mind so you can find the ones that will help you level up.
1. Surfer SEO
Imagine you’re working on a new piece of content, but you’ve hit a brick wall with the right keywords to use. Enter Surfer SEO. This tool will swoop in and lend a hand, making sure your content is optimized with semantically-related terms.
Pros
- Keyword Suggestions: No more guesswork — Surfer SEO will point you in the right direction with semantic keywords and related phrases that show up in top-ranking posts.
- Word Count: Surfer SEO will also help you nail the ideal word count so you don’t end up with a piece that’s too long or short. While this isn’t a ranking factor, it can help you determine how comprehensive the top-ranking pages are.
- Content Optimization: Features like Content Editor and SERP Analyzer make optimizing your content a breeze. Analyzer helps you dissect the top-ranking pages in your niche and Content Editor provides real-time optimization suggestions as you write.
- AI integration: Want an AI assist, depending on your plan, you can pay to have an article generated for you or integrate Surfer with Jasper for more AI power.
Cons
- Imperfect Data: While Surfer SEO is a fantastic tool, it’s not perfect. It can suggest keywords that don’t make sense for your content, like a competitor’s name. Keyword volume data also differs fom other popular tools.
Pricing
Surfer SEO has four pricing tiers.
Essential – $69/month
- 180 Content Editor articles a year
- 100 Keyword Research requests daily
- 2 Organization seats
- Plagarism checker
- Sharaeble links
- WordPress intregration
Advanced – $149/month
- 540 Content Editor articles a year
- 100 Keyword Research requests daily
- 5 Organization seats
- Plagarism checker
- Sharaeble links
- WordPress intregration
Max – $249/month
- 1080 Content Editor articles a year
- 100 Keyword Research requests daily
- 10 Organization seats
- 100 SERP Analyzers a day
- Plagarism checker
- Sharaeble links
- WordPress intregration
- API
Enterprise – Custom cost based on needs
- Custom number of Content Editor articles a year
- Custom number of Keyword Research requests daily
- Custom number of SERP Analyzers daily
- Unlimited organization seats
- Plagarism checker
- Sharaeble links
- WordPress intregration
- Dedicated Customer Success Manager
- API
2. Grammarly
Grammarly will help you with editing, checking plagiarism, and creating style guides. Let’s dive into the details.
Pros
- Grammar Help: Say goodbye to pesky errors that make your content look sloppy. With Grammarly, you can catch misspelled words and incorrect verb tenses, and fix them in a single click.
- Readability: Grammarly also helps you make sure your content is easy to read. It’ll give suggestions to break up those long-winded sentences and eliminate passive voice, so your readers won’t doze off mid-paragraph.
- Plagiarism Checker: Grammarly’s plagiarism checker helps you ensure your content is original and not “borrowed” from someone else. This way, you can avoid any accusations and maintain a good reputation online.
- Style Guides: With Grammarly, you can create your own style guide to ensure consistency in your writing. Set preferences for things like punctuation, capitalization, industry terms, and slang.
- AI Suggestions: Grammarly has dipped its toes into generative AI. When you have the plugin, you can highlight text for AI suggestions.
Cons
- Imperfect Suggestions: Grammarly might flag phrases as errors when they’re actually just fine, or suggest changes that make the text sound too formal. It’s important to use your best judgment and decide what works for you.
- Internet Required: You need to have an internet connection to use it, which is sometimes inconvenient.
Pricing
Free Version
- Spell check
- Basic grammar check
- Limited punctuation suggestions
Premium – $12/month
- Everything in the free version
- Advanced grammar and punctuation suggestions
- Vocabulary enhancement
- Readability recommendations
- Plagiarism checker
Business – $15/month
- Everything in the premium version
- Account roles and permissions
- Analytics dashboard
- Custom style guides
- Brand tone
Grammarly helps polish your words and keep your content in tip-top shape. Overall, it’s a fantastic tool for writers who want to up their game.
3. ChatGPT
The latest and greatest when it comes to content creation, ChatGPT is a big deal for content ideation, improving existing content, and outlining. Let’s break it down.
Pros
- Ideation: Staring at a blank screen? Not to worry! ChatGPT can help you brainstorm brilliant ideas for your content. No more writer’s block, no more wasted time. Just pure, unadulterated creativity.
- Outlining: Using ChatGPT, you can structure your ideas into a coherent outline, making the writing process much smoother. You simply feed it a prompt, and it will spit out an outline that will keep you on track throughout the writing process.
- Content Creation: ChatGPT isn’t just great for ideation and outlining. It can generate content too! Though human writers and editors are a must to ensure you’re creating high-quality content, ChatGPT can serve as a great assistant for the content creation process.
- Refining Content: Finally, you can also improve existing content, making it snappier, more engaging, and generally better for readers. It’s like having an editor in your pocket.
Cons
- Repetitive Content: While ChatGPT is a powerful tool, it’s not perfect. It sometimes generates content that’s a bit repetitive or maybe just doesn’t quite hit the mark. Remember, this is new technology and it’s in constant development.
- Limited Usage: The tool has limited usage during high-traffic hours unless you pay for an account.
Pricing
Free Version
- Limited usage
- Basic content generation
Plus Subscription – $20/month
- Priority access, even during peak times
- Faster response times
- Access to GPT4 (trained on a bigger dataset)
Remember, ChatGPT is a tool, not a replacement for human creativity and judgment. Use it wisely.
4. Hemingway App
The Hemingway App is all about style — it’s designed to help you write content that’s easier to digest. If you fall prey to the passive tense or tend toward long sentences, the Hemingway App can help you wrangle your sentences so they’re more enjoyable to read.
Pros
- Clarity: Hemingway App has one mission: to make your content clean, clear, and concise. It highlights complex sentences and suggests simpler alternatives. It’s like having a stern English teacher hovering over your shoulder, making sure you’re on point.
- Eliminates Fluff: Hemingway himself wasn’t a big fan of adverbs, and this app shares his disdain. It’ll point out when you’re getting a bit too adverb-happy, helping you tighten up your prose.
- Readability: This tool also gives your content a readability grade. The lower the grade, the easier it is to understand. No need for overblown language when you can say it simply, right?
Cons
- Flags Complex Sentences: If you love your writing to be as flowery as a botanical garden in full bloom, this app might not be your cup of tea. It’s all about simplicity and clarity, so it’s going to highlight those metaphor-laden descriptions and suggest getting rid of complex sentences.
- No Plagiarism Checker: Unlike Grammarly, this app won’t help you out with checking for plagiarism. You’ll need to rely on other tools for that.
- No Autosave: The web version doesn’t have an autosave feature, which can lead to some pretty frustrating situations if you forget to save your work.
Pricing
The web version of Hemingway is completely free. You can use it anytime, anywhere, as long as you’ve got an internet connection.
For those who like working offline, there’s also a desktop version, which is available for a one-time fee of $19.99. It comes with a few extra perks, too, like the ability to directly publish to WordPress or Medium and save your work.
Web Version
- Free
- Requires an internet connection
Desktop Version
- One-time payment of $19.99
- Works offline
- Direct publishing to WordPress and Medium
- Save your work
If you’re looking to write clear, concise, and powerful content, the Hemingway App is a great tool to use. Just remember to always trust your instinct and write in a way that feels authentic to you.
5. Yoast
When it comes to optimizing your content, Yoast is an indispensable tool in your toolkit. This WordPress plugin serves as a lighthouse, guiding your content to reach its full potential. With Yoast, you’ll gain insights into the SEO-readiness of your content and identify areas for improvement.
Pros
- SEO: Yoast gives you pointers on how to make your content more visible to search engines. It checks your primary keyword usage, making sure you strike a balance between barely using your keyword and going overboard. Yoast also makes it easy to input your page title, meta description, and URL slug.
- Readability: Yoast also has a readability check that gives you key information on sentence length and other information that impacts how easily your audience will understand what you’re saying.
- The Green Light System: Yoast has a color-coded system, kind of like traffic lights. Green means you’re good to go, amber means there’s room for improvement, and red means you need to make some changes. It’s a super handy visual guide to help you improve your content optimization.
- Preview: Ever want to preview how your content will look on Google before you hit publish? With Yoast, you can do just that. It’s got a snippet preview that shows you how your content will appear in search results. You can use the preview to tweak your SEO title, meta description, and URL slug to make them look more enticing.
- Internal linking: Yoast Premium will suggest articles to link to, making internal linking a breeze.
Cons
- Over-Reliance Risk: Yoast can be a lifesaver, but sometimes people get a little too dependent on seeing that green light. Just because you’ve hit the green doesn’t mean your content is perfect. It’s important to remember that Yoast’s advice is based on general SEO principles, and it might not apply to every single piece of content you write.
Pricing
Free Version
- SEO and readability checks
- Snippet preview
- No customer support
Premium Subscription – $99/year
- Everything in the free version
- Premium support
- Content insights
- Redirect manager
- Internal linking suggestions
Yoast has a bunch of great features that can help you create better content, but remember not to chase the green light at the expense of your unique voice and style.
6. Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC) helps you diagnose indexing issues, keep an eye on your Core Web Vitals, and track your most clicked pages. It can even help you better optimize your existing content.
Pros
- Site Performance: Want to know how your website’s doing on Google Search? Google Search Console gives you insights into how often your site shows up in Google Search, which search queries you’re ranking for, how many people click through for those queries, and more.
- Get Alerts for Issues: GSC keeps an eye out for any problems that might mess with your website’s visibility on Google. For example, if your video structured data isn’t correct, GSC will let you know.
- Sitemap Submission: With Google Search Console, you can submit sitemaps and individual URLs for crawling. You’re basically providing a guide for Google’s bots to better understand your site structure. You’re saying, “Hey, Google, here’s the lay of the land. Feel free to have a look around.” It expedites the process of Google discovering and indexing your new or updated web pages, which means they can appear in search results more quickly.
- Mobile Usability: In this day and age, if your site isn’t mobile friendly, you’re going to lose a lot of visitors. GSC helps you out by reporting any mobile issues, so you can make sure your site looks great on all devices.
Cons
- Data Delays: While Search Console has a lot of perks, it can sometimes take days for new data to appear in the tool.
- Limited Historical Data: GSC only stores data for the last 16 months. So if you’re hoping to take a trip down memory lane and see how your site was performing a few years back, you’re going to be disappointed.
- Limited to Google Search: GSC only shows you data from Google search results. If you want to find out about direct traffic, Bing traffic, or referral traffic, use Google Analytics.
- Doesn’t Show All Keywords: Many users have complained about limited data, specifically when it comes to keywords.
Pricing
Google Search Console is free — you can enjoy all these features, and it won’t cost you anything. But it is complex, so be prepared to spend some time learning the ins and outs.
7. Ahrefs
Ahrefs: the Swiss army knife of SEO tools. This is hands-down one of the best tools for SEO. We’re talking data on keywords, search volume, keyword difficulty, SERP features, and current rankings. It’s great for identifying keywords for your content and can help you determine which pieces are worth writing, and which arent.
Pros
- Keyword Research: Do you ever wonder which magic words are going to get people to click? Well, Ahrefs is a master at finding them. Its powerful keyword research tool can provide you with tons of keyword suggestions for your niche. And it doesn’t stop there. It also tells you how tough it would be to rank for them (keyword difficulty or KD). If you’re just starting out, avoid high KD keywords.
- Search Volume: Ahrefs can also show you how many people are searching for a specific keyword over a certain period of time.
- SERP Features and Current Rankings: Ahrefs will show you where you’re ranking for certain keywords and even what your SERP features look like. It’s like a report card for your SEO efforts.
- Content Gap Analysis: Want to find out what your competitors are ranking for that you aren’t? With Ahrefs Content Gap tool, you can simply paste in their URLs and Ahrefs will check their rankings against yours.
Cons
- Pricey: Ahrefs is a premium tool, and it has the price tag to match. For some small businesses or freelancers, this might not be the best choice.
- Learning Curve: For those new to the platform, it may take some time to figure out how to use it. Ahrefs is packed full of features, which can be overwhelming for SEO newbies. Thankfully, they also have plenty of resources to help you learn more.
- Data Overload: Sometimes using Ahrefs is like trying to drink from a firehose. The amount of data it provides can be a bit much, and it’s easy to get lost in it all. Knowing what you need when you start can help you wade through the excess.
Pricing
Lite Plan
- One user
- Access to most features
- Limited data
- $99/month
Standard Plan
- Everything in the Lite Plan
- 6 months of history
- Site explorer
- SERP updates
- $179/month
Advanced and Agency Plans
- Even more data
- Even more features
- Starts at $399/month and goes up to $999/month
Ahrefs is a beast of a tool that can give you a huge advantage in SEO. If you’re serious about SEO and have the budget and know-how, it can be a game-changer.
8. Semrush
Semrush is an all-encompassing SEO tool. It aids you in identifying the most sought-after keywords, enabling you to target them in your content.
But what sets Semrush apart isn’t just the keyword intel; it’s the deeper comprehension of user intent, letting you peek into your audience’s mind. You’re not only privy to the “what” but also the “why” of their searches.
Pros
- One-Stop Shop: From keyword research to tracking rankings, it’s got all the SEO tools you need under one roof.
- Detailed Reports: Semrush provides in-depth reports, giving you the details on all things SEO.
- User-Friendly: Despite its robust features, Semrush is surprisingly easy to use. It has a clean, intuitive interface that makes navigation a breeze.
- Content Templates: Let Semrush create content templates for you based on your keywords. Semrush will highlight semantically related terms, provide you with a suggested word count, and even tell you what sites you should try to get backlinks from.
Cons
- Pricey: Semrush is a powerful tool, but it comes with a hefty price tag.
- Too Much Info: With great power comes…a lot of data. Semrush provides a ton of info, which can feel overwhelming if you’re new to SEO. Get acquainted with the tool and follow their guides to reduce overwhelm.
Pricing
Pro Plan
- 10,000 results per report
- 3,000 reports per day
- 5 projects
- 500 keywords to track
- $119.95/month
Guru Plan
- 30,000 results per report
- 5,000 reports per day
- 15 projects
- 1,500 keywords to track
- $229.95/month
Business Plan
- 50,000 results per report
- 10,000 reports per day
- 40 projects
- 5,000 keywords to track
- $449.95/month
Semrush is a powerhouse of a tool that can give your SEO game a serious boost. Commit to testing out all of its features to see which will best support your goals.
9. Buzzsumo
Ever find yourself in a content rut, scratching your head about what to write next? We’ve all been down that road. Thankfully, Buzzsumo can help.
With Buzzsumo, you can find popular pieces of content in your niche and use them as inspiration. Get ready to bring your own unique take to topics and share what sets you apart from the rest.
Buzzsumo Pros
- User-friendly: Even if you aren’t a tech whiz, you’ll find Buzzsumo easy to navigate. It offers a clean interface and easy-to-understand reports.
- Flexible Search Options: You can search for content by keyword, domain, author, and more. This flexibility lets you dig deep and find exactly what you’re looking for.
- Insights: Buzzsumo provides a wealth of insights, from social shares to backlinks, giving you a clear picture of how content is performing.
Buzzsumo Cons
- Limited Free Access: The free version of Buzzsumo is pretty limited, and to get the full benefits, you’ll need to upgrade.
- Pricey: The cost might be prohibitive for small businesses.
Pricing
Free Version
- Limited searches and results
- Basic insights
Paid Plans
- Pro: $99/month
- Plus: $179/month
- Large: $299/month
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
- Each plan offers more searches, alerts, history, and other features.
Get the Most Out of Content Creation
If you’re looking for more ways to make your content creation process smoother, check out our downloadable blog post template and our complete SEO checklist. And if you need a partner to help take your content strategy to the next level, you’ve come to the right place. Our SEO agency can help you with the entire process, from keyword research to content creation and optimization. Reach out for a free SEO consultation to learn more.
