The best content ever written means absolutely nothing if it’s never seen. SEO-tools are designed to ensure your hard work gets seen your target audience in the most efficient manner possible.
Each of the tools we looked at occupies a different niche and could be right for you depending on what you need in an SEO tool. We will also cover tools that fall somewhat short, and explain why they may not be ideal for content marketing and production use cases.
There’s a wide array of tools out there for blog and marketing content optimization. Some offer simple optimization guides and keyword suggestions and checking, while others can generate content for you. Understanding exactly what you are looking for, your budget, and what your limitations are are key for choosing the right tool.
GrowthBar SEO: Strong Optimization for Lower Budgets
GrowthBar SEO is a very competitively priced tool for organizations looking to produce content quickly, but don’t need more advanced SEO tools.
This software is a browser-based tool that has its biggest strengths in the speed at which content briefs can be produced. The keyword search function is easy to use if a bit basic compared to some of the more expensive competition. It does a strong job once your topic has been decided. The system moves into the “Create Content” stage.
From here, the tool will use existing content to generate the start of a post. GrowthBar uses natural language tools to try and write the first components of the piece for you. The tool suggests a length and outlines keyword difficulty, like most tools on this list. Interestingly GrowthBar suggests a number of images for the piece. It will also measure suggested backlinks based on other successful web pages.
Users can then use the drag and drop tool to pull in suggested headings to create outlines at a pace that threatens the land speed record. This early stage is where the tool shines. The user experience is extremely easy and requires little technical SEO experience to get good results. The keyword checker is not nearly as strong as others on this list. There is a chrome plugin that will track SEO performance over time, which would be useful for measuring the performance of your content.
Frase: Comprehensive SEO Features at a Fair Price
Frase is slightly more expensive than GrowthBar SEO, and offers more SEO tools to back up the bigger price tag. With strong keyword scoring, great brief creation, and an AI writer tool, this is a strong competitor for SEO analysis and content creation tools.
The UI of Frase is a little less basic than GrowthBar SEO, and may require a little more training for your team members to get used to. The first step is very similar, with specific keywords informing the creation of a content brief. Frase gives you a word count, number of headers, and suggested image number like most other tools.
The content brief system starts life as something similar to a table, with heading titles on the left and bullet points of potential information on the right. Users can click on the subheadings of competing articles to move these topics directly into the fledgling brief.
Once you have given Frase this rough outline, you can use the AI tool to write sections for you, one at a time. These will likely not be perfect, but are a great way to fight writer’s block, generate ideas, or simply lighten the load for your writers. If you are unhappy, you can make the system try again by asking it to rewrite. The tool will expand on what you have already written into the brief and is a really interesting insight into the state of AI writers. While this is not going to replace your writers, it can help them out.
Unlike GrowthBar SEO, Frase grades your content based on its keywords. The tool uses a percentage system, where many others use a letter grade one. The system grades your competition and allows you to see what keywords they may be missing with a topic heatmap. Related keywords are based on search engine results to ensure content ideas are as targeted as possible.
Content Harmony: Intent Grading and Strong Optimization Tools
This tool offers many of the same features to Clearscope, which is its closest equivalent on this list. There are a few key differences and benefits to each which warrant its separate discussion and inclusion.
The first major difference between this and Clearscope is its return to focus on content briefs and its inclusion of search intent. The tool divides its features into a Keyword report, Content Brief, and Grader section.
The keyword search function offers many of the same functions as the other tools on this list, with one notable exception. The tool allows users to see what classification of user intent that those looking at their keywords have. These include qualifications like Research, Video, Fresh/News, and Local. If a term sees strong intent in news, it may not rank for long durations of time. This is a fantastic tool that is not seen in many of its competitors. Content departments can use this to plan their writing schedules and inform the content they write.
From here, the tool offers keyword discovery and common questions in much the same way Clearscope does. Content harmony has a brief layout system that prefills fields with suggestions. The brief is more of a form than the others, with fields such as “what is this content about,” allowing the creator to create something of an assignment document. This would be fantastic for those with freelancers and would offer more comprehensive guidance than anything else on this list.
