Best Content Writing Tool for SEO You Need to Know

Content writing doesn’t just involve putting down words on blank computer pages, as most people believe. Each word must be optimized to rank high on search engines like Google and Bing, where your articles are seen!

But how can you tell when your contents are “optimized”?

That’s where supportive tools like Google Analytics and Siteliner come into play. Having the best content writing tool for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in your corner can be supremely helpful.

In this article, we’ll show you some good tools you can use to streamline your content writing job! Additionally, we’ll show you a few tricks and tips that you can use to check whether an AI bot has written an article or not. Don’t miss out on it!

The quality of your content can be significantly improved with these best content writing tool for SEO – Image source: Pexels

Best Content Writing Tool for Technical SEO Optimization?

Handling the technical side of SEO content writing (back-linking, keyword optimization, etc.) will be much easier with the following programs.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google itself provides all of the tools that you’re going to need to improve your ranking on its search engine. Google Webmaster Tools allows you to track the SEO performance of your website and know your website’s position on Google’s search results. It even allows you to see how many impressions and views your website has had!

The Webmaster Tools can also tell you what page on your website needs optimization and what target keyword you should target next to boost your ranking.

The Webmaster Tools is free to use.

Google Webmaster Tools is a complete toolkit to help you improve your page’s SEO ranking. – Image source: Google

Pros:

• Free
• Generally easy to use
• Highly compatible with Google’s search data

Cons:

• The user has to study to use certain features
• Some of the charts and graphs are hard to decipher

Google’s PageSpeed Insights

You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to see how fast the pages of your website load on people’s devices. Search engines like Google prioritize showing results for websites that load quickly and efficiently. 

If the scores are sub-optimal, well, there’s something that you can talk with your tech staff about!

PageSpeed Insights’ dashboard gives you an overview of your page’s loading performance. – Image source: Google

Similar to the Webmaster Tools, PageSpeed Insights is free.

Pros:

• Free
• Provide an overview of a website’s load speed extremely quickly

Cons:

• None

Google’s Mobile Friendly Testing Tool

The Mobile Friendly Testing Tool from Google will inspect your website and tell you how easily viewers can use your website on a mobile phone.

As 58.9% of global web traffic is from mobile users, you definitely don’t want to disappoint or turn away these people if you want your website to grow. Plus, search engines will display your website higher on search results if it works well with mobiles.

It’s a win-win!

Pros:

• Free
• Provide a detailed report of the webpage’s performance and compatibility on mobile

Cons:

• None

Google Analytics

Google Analytics tools are the definitive SEO toolkit for every website. As of 2019, it’s the most popular web analytics service, bar none.

Google Analytics can be used to track a variety of web-performance data, like session duration and pages per session. That way, you will know exactly how well your website is currently performing and how you can improve in the future.

But the best part is that Google Analytics is designed to be easy to use, thanks to its intuitive dashboard-centric design. So, even if you’re not a professional SEO specialist, you can still learn how to use it!

Google Analytics’ dashboard. – Image source: Google

Pros:

• Free
• Easy to set up
• Provide a detailed report of a website’s performance and structure
• Offer advanced data and metrics
• Track real-time traffic data

Cons:

• It can be difficult to use
• Lacks customer support

 Siteliner

Search engines don’t like sites with structural errors like duplicate content, broken links, and redirections. These sites will be considered “low-quality” and taken to lower ranks. If you use Google AdSense to display ads on your website, duplicate content may even result in a ban from the service. 

Viewers also don’t like these sites since they can be confusing and frustrating to navigate.

Siteliner is a tool that you can use to protect your site from this exact situation.

It is a free “crawler” service. When you type your website into the tool, it will scan your entire website to search for errors like duplicate content, broken links, redirections, and more. The tool will export the result into an easy-to-read report, and you can use it to fix and re-optimize your website.

Though the service has a premium, paid tier, the free tier allows the user to scan 250 pages a month. This is more than enough for small businesses and sites, so it should be free for most people.

Pros:

• Very fast result retrieval
• Generous freemium plan
• Contain various SEO analytic tools
• Allow you to download reports in many formats (PDFs, CSVs,…)

Cons:

• Very rudimentary user interface
• It only scans the metrics of your website and doesn’t provide intel on competitors
• Doesn’t provide actionable reports for the webpage’s speed and load times (use Google’s PageSpeed Insights for this)

Screaming Frog

Like Siteliner, the Screaming Frog SEO tool is also a website crawler. It seeks common SEO issues like broken links, duplicate content, and bad redirects on your website. But Screaming Frog has other extra features, like analyzing your page titles and metadata.

If Siteliner doesn’t suit your needs and you need a more comprehensive SEO crawler, Screaming Frog will do the trick!

Pros:

• Very fast result retrieval
• Has a decent free plan
• API access to the most frequently-used SEO tools
• Able to track and display many advanced data metrics

Cons:

• Difficult to set up and use
• The program is heavy and clunky
• Can take a long time to export data

DeepCrawl

DeepCrawl is yet another website crawler. Like Siteliner and Screaming Frog, it scans your website for structural and technical issues like broken links and duplicate content.

It provides other services, too. For example, the “Analytics Hub” tool of DeepCrawl can show you your website’s performance metrics, like visitations. Or the “Monitor Hub” allows you to track the site’s changes and traffic trends in real-time.

In other words, besides being a website crawler, DeepCrawl is a full-blown SEO toolkit!

DeepCrawl’s dashboard. – Image source: DeepCrawl

Pros:

• A comprehensive web crawler with all of the features you’d expect from one
• Good-looking, intuitive user interface
• Can be integrated with Google Search Console and Analytics
• Performance breakdowns for desktop, mobile, and tablet

Cons:

• Is only a web crawler with no extra SEO features (no keyword research, position monitoring features, etc.)

Majestic

Majestic is extremely useful if you’re running an affiliate or backlinking program for your website.

It uses different search engines to find and assess the quality and quantity of links leading back to your website from other pages on the Internet. These links are called backlinks.

Link building is an essential part of SEO. The more backlinks and affiliate links you have and the higher their quality, the better your website will rank on search engines.

Pros:

• Intuitive, easy-to-read graphs and charts
• Real-time performance tracking
• Has a competitor analysis feature

Cons:

• Must be paid
• You need to learn how to use advanced features
• Mediocre customer support

GTMetrix

GTMetrix functions sort of like Google’s PageSpeed Insights. It analyzes your website to see how fast your webpage loads on people’s devices. That way, you can optimize your website’s performance accordingly.

Pros:

• Free account provides a lot of basic features that should be enough for most users
• Simple and effective SEO toolkit
• Allows you to track the site’s performance in real-time

Cons:

• Occasionally change the data metric they use without notifying the user
• Data consistency can be bad: each scan will show different results

Searchmetrics

A big part of SEO work is finding keywords to optimize. That’s where Searchmetrics can come in and help. It crawls search engines to find the most popular target keywords relevant to your website’s content, giving you an idea of what terms to focus on to build your website’s ranking.

Besides this basic functionality, Searchmetrics also comes with other tools. The “Search Experience” tool, for example, can tell you the ranking of your webpage and who your competitors are. Or the “Content Experience” tab can tell you what the on-page user experience is for the tool.

Pros:

• Comes with many tools to improve the SEO quality of your website plus your content
• Powerful keyword research tool
• A comprehensive, deep data set

Cons:

• Free account is limited
• Data exports take a long time
• Some of the graphs and charts can be confusing to read

Best SEO Writing Assistants

Now that’s finished, let’s talk about tools that can help you with the most basic part of content writing: the actual writing process!

Topic Selection

Finding the right topics to write about to maximize views can be pretty headache-inducing. Fortunately, these content research tools will be able to help!

BuzzSumo, for example, is a content writing toolkit with everything you’ll need to succeed as a writer. It has a database with records of eight billion articles from 42 million popular websites. So, you’re never really short of good content ideas to try your hands at writing.

BuzzSumo has a rich database that can help you discover new topics to write about. – Image source: BuzzSumo

However, a notable disadvantage of BuzzSumo is that it is a paid service. If you don’t want to spend on a topic selection tool, then freemiums like Google Trends and Google Search Console will also do the trick! These content ideas discovery tools tap into Google’s search engine. They will give you charts and graphs showing popular search queries people are making.

The best part about Google Trends and Search Console is, like every other product from Google, it’s completely free to use.

Our last recommendation is Answer The Public. The tool’s name tells you outright what it does: giving you an overview of questions that the public is asking the most. Every day, 3 billion searches are done on Google, and 20% of these searches (600 million) are unique.

This tool taps into the auto-complete organic search data of popular search engines. Type in a keyword relevant to your article’s theme (coffee, for example.) Answer The Public will show you these unique searches revolving around your keyword (like “How to make cold-brew coffee).

Since these tools monitor content trends in real-time, they make it much easier for you to find topics that resonate with your readers.

Pros:

• Certain apps (Google Trends and Search Console) are free to use
• Massive reference databases allow for more diverse, unique topic suggestions
• Some apps like Google Search Console are full-fledged SEO toolkits with extra functionalities other than topic suggestions

Cons:

• Some apps have to be paid for (BuzzSumo)

Keyword Research

Some keywords can draw in a lot of viewers, while others push the ranking of your article down. These tools can help you analyze keywords’ strengths and help you focus on creating engaging and helpful content for your readers.

LowFruit and Keyword Chef are popular SERP (Search Engine Result Page) analysis tools. They comb through hundreds of search results from different search engines to look for good keywords. You will no longer have to manually flip through search result pages to look for easy keywords to target!

There are other features, too, like keyword clustering, word counting, and website type detection. In the hands of a good SEO specialist, these tools can become powerful rank-boosting tools for your writing.

But if you’re looking for more general SEO tools, Ahrefs and SEMrush aren’t shoddy options.

They aren’t specialized keyword research tools like LowFruit or Keyword Chef. Instead, they’re full-fledged SEO toolkits. They come with features to help you audit and manage your website, check your competitor’s performance, and more.

But the most important part about tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush is that they also can help you look for keywords that customers and readers are looking for!

Pros:

• Full-fledged SEO toolkits that come with more features other than just keyword research
• Can provide thousands of relevant, high-performing keywords in seconds

Cons:

• Free tiers for all of these apps are very limited

Outline

Outlining articles is something that many writers struggle with. Fortunately, there are tools like iThoughts to help you manage the outline of your new works better. It’s a project management tool that lets you create detailed lists and mind maps to draw out blog outlines for your next articles intuitively.

Pros:

• Easy to use
• Intuitive interface
• Very good visuals and mindmap templates for you to get started right away

Cons:

• Must be paid

Competitor Research

Researching your competitors will give you an idea of how and in what area your website and content can improve. In that case, tools like Mozbar, Frase, and MarketMuse will be of use to you.

Some of them (like Mozbar) are multi-purpose SEO tools that can help you do more than just research your competitors. You’re only looking for software that can help you analyze and keep track of your competitors’ performances … All three of these tools will do the job nicely.

They will tell you the Page Authority and Domain Authority of any website. They can also show you the ranking, traffic, and keywords your competitors use, then export everything into an easy-to-read competitor research note. Use it to get ahead!

Pros:

• Paid plans for these apps will come with more helpful features
• Are typically complete SEO toolkits with extra features (content optimization, keyword research, etc.) in addition to competitor research
• Can publish detailed reports of your content versus your competitors

Cons:

• Free plans are very bad and limited in all of these tools

Writing

Once you have collected all of the essential data, like the keywords to focus on, it’s time to get to writing!

What apps do you usually go to when you start the scribbling process? Google Docs? Microsoft Word?

Image source: Pexels

There are better alternatives out there that can help you generate content faster than Google Docs, such as Jarvis and Sudowrite. These apps come with artificial intelligence-powered content writing assistants that can help you write paragraphs in only a few minutes. All plagiarism-free!

Some SEO content creators may consider that cheating, but to some others, they are tools that can help quicken the content creation process.

Be mindful of the fact that these writing assistant tools aren’t 100% foolproof. Some of their sentences or phrasing can be a bit awkward.

That’s the reason why if you opt to use these tools in your writing process, spend some time editing the articles. Not just to fix any mistake the AI content writing assistants might have made but also to give them your own flairs.

Don’t just publish blindly!

Pros:

• AI-powered for higher-quality, more relevant content
• Can drastically reduce your writing speed and improve your publication speed

Cons:

• The AI still makes many grammar and vocabulary-use mistakes, so tight supervision is a must

Content Optimization

Content optimization involves making your content accessible to as many people in your target audience as possible. It can include tasks like adding a good meta description, ensuring relevant keywords are present in the article, and placing good links into your writing.

Most SEO tool kits will give you a variety of content optimization tools for you to play around with. Frase and MarketMuse are both good examples of such tool kits.

Frase, for example, is an AI writing software that can analyze your article and suggest ways to improve your article’s quality and SEO score.

Pros:

• Paid tiers are better and have more functionalities
• Are typically comprehensive SEO toolkits, so other than content optimization, you’ll have access to other SEO tools, as well
• Some apps (Frase) are AI-powered, so results are better

Cons:

• Doesn’t have free tiers

Keyword Density Tool

Keyword density refers to the number of times a certain keyword appears in an article. From the perspective of search engines, keyword density is how they’re going to decide whether the article is relevant to a topic or not.

For example, if an article repeats the word “Astronaut” twenty times, then search engines will automatically understand that the article may have something to do with space and science!

But you don’t need to repeat a keyword so many times to gain the good grace of search engines. The rule of thumb is having 1-2 keywords for every 100 words, which turns out to be 1-2% density.

While it may be tempting, don’t overload your content with keywords. This technique, called “keyword stuffing”, can decrease the quality of your article.

There are tools that can help you track keyword density, such as SEO Review Tools (Keyword Density) and CheckSerp – Keyword Density Checker!

Pros:

• Most are free to use
• Easy to use
• Can tell you almost instantly whether your keyword density is up to code
• Can be a good competitor analysis tool

Cons:

• None

Readability

Once you have the final draft in hand, the next step in the content creation process is to edit it for any unnecessarily complex sentences, spelling errors, grammar mistakes, and other issues. Grammarly Premium and Instatext are both great tools for this. Copy and paste your draft into these programs, and they will scan through the whole text, revealing errors and points you can revise, then give you a readability score.

These programs won’t be able to catch all grammar errors, and some of their suggestions may be a bit off-base. But they’re useful for polishing off your article before sending it off for publication.

Pros:

• Very easy to use—just copy and paste your content into the tool
• Can make powerful, relevant suggestions for your content
• Help make your content more readable

Cons:

• Free tiers are available and very limited in terms of functionality

Plagiarism Check

Needless to say, plagiarism is bad. If you’re a website owner and are creating your own content, plagiarism can sink the rank of your website on search engines. And if you’re a content writer, plagiarism may get you fired!

You can use tools like Hemingway Editor to ensure that your writing pieces are 100% original.

For such a useful tool, Hemingway is surprisingly free to use. – Image source: HemingwayApp

It will take your draft and compare it with hundreds (sometimes thousands) of articles online. Then, it will tell you how similar your draft is to other sources out there (or totally unique, which is ideal!)

Pros:

• Free to use on-site (if you want to download it, you need to pay a small fee)
• Extremely easy to use
• New suggestions are color-coded for easier visibility

Cons:

• Doesn’t have auto-saving feature

Rank Tracking

Ranking is one of the key metrics in SEO. The higher your website’s content rank is, the closer to the first page your article will be when people search for content that has your keywords in it. And the closer you are to the top, the more likely people will read your article and visit your site!

SEO content writers strive every day to boost their articles’ rankings on search engines. Fortunately, there are dozens of tools out there that can help you monitor your article or website’s rankings.

Seprobot, SEMrush, Serpstat, and Ahrefs are excellent SEO tool kits with rank-tracking features. They will immediately report to you whenever there’s a change in ranking so that you can quickly decide whether to celebrate or spend time editing and fixing your articles.

Pros:

• Can help you boost your site’s ranking
• Aid with fixing format and structure-related errors
• Usually available as a larger toolkit with more than just rank-tracking feature

Cons:

• Most are paid services

Publishing and Internal Linking

The last step of the article writing process is publication and internal linking. You can lead your readers through a full tour of your website by linking the article to others on your webpage. If they like what they see, they can decide to stick around for longer and maybe return in the future.

Link Whisper is one of the best publication and internal link-building tools. It can automate the internal linking process and quickly build all of the links without you having to spend time manually adding a link to every keyword.

Image Source: LinkWhisper

Pros:

• Simple and easy to use
• Instant and relevant link suggestions
• Provide detailed reports

Cons:

• Only handle internal linking. There’s currently no support for external linking

• Certain features can be hard to use

Conclusion

Did we forget our promise earlier of telling you how to check whether an article has been written by an AI or not? Well, you don’t need any tools to know since tools are also machines and codes, and they can easily make mistakes. The best tactic is to look at the tone, word choice, and use of expressions in the article. A piece of content that’s written by an AI will have a few glaring issues:

• Duplicated ideas
• Wordy sentences
• Redundant content that drags on and on

For example, here’s a phrase written by an AI tool.

In Summoners War, you will engage in role-playing game battles in a gorgeously rendered 3D setting. The goal is to collect monster characters and use their special properties and skills to defeat your enemies.

And here’s a phrase written by a human writer.

You will engage in role-playing game battles in a gorgeously rendered 3D setting. In Summoners War, you can defeat enemies by collecting monster characters and using their special properties and skills.

Even if the content itself is written by an AI and edited by a human to make it look more authentic and fluid, these issues will still exist if the editor isn’t skilled enough.

We hope this little trick has been of use to you! Writing SEO-compliant content is a lot of work and takes time. But with these supporting software and the best content writing tool for SEO in your corner, you’ll be able to quicken your publication speed and streamline the content-creating process.

Thanks for reading my article! If you want to have specially-written content written just for you by professional writers instead of AI tools, or if you’re simply looking to ascertain whether the piece of content you have was written by an AI or not, you can contact iWritin.