A good SEO toolkit is absolutely essential for succeeding with search engine optimization. Without the right tools to analyze your website’s performance, track rankings, research competitors, and optimize pages, you’re essentially flying blind.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is crucial for getting a website found online. As an experienced SEO specialist, I always get asked – what are the best SEO tools to boost website traffic and rankings?
That’s what we’ll cover in this comprehensive guide. I’ll be sharing both free SEO tools for those with limited budgets, along with paid yet affordable options that deliver excellent bang for your buck. Advanced paid tools used by SEO agencies will also be included.
Whether you’re new to SEO or want to step up your efforts, using the right tools is key for maximizing your search presence. With the proper SEO toolkit, you can track website performance, research competitors, optimize on-page elements, generate targeted content, monitor your progress, and make the most out of your SEO strategy.
The Most Important Free SEO Tools
As a leading digital marketing agency, our SEO team relies on both free and paid tools every day. The free options are just as vital for gathering actionable website insights.
Below, we’ll share our favorite must-have free SEO tools that are essential to making smart SEO decisions.
1. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is the free platform that allows you to see critical data about how Google views and interacts with your website. I recommend making it the very first SEO tool you use because of the invaluable insights it provides.
By connecting Search Console with your website, you can track important details like:
- Index Coverage – See how much of your site Google has included in its index for searching. Any pages not indexed won’t be searchable.
- Crawl Stats – Check how often Google crawls your site, and discover any crawl errors blocking pages from being indexed. Fixing crawl errors should be a top priority.
- Links to Your Site – See all links from external sites that Google has discovered pointing to your pages. This helps guide link building efforts.
- Performance Reports – Identify your top pages by Google search impressions, clicks and position. See queries driving traffic to optimize targeting.
- Manual Actions – Be alerted of any penalties from Google for spammy practices so you can correct them.
Regularly monitoring Search Console provides the insights needed to debug indexing and crawling challenges, unlock greater visibility, and align optimization efforts with how Google actually interacts with your site. It’s the single most important free tool for understanding your search presence.
2. Google Analytics
Google Analytics should be the starting point for any look at your website’s performance. It provides incredibly detailed insights on your traffic and visitor behavior that directly inform SEO strategy.
Some of the valuable data Analytics surfaces includes:
- Traffic Sources – See the specific keywords, social posts, referring sites and other sources sending traffic to your site. Identify opportunities to improve.
- Landing Pages – Find out which pages on your site convert visitors best. Optimize these priority landing pages for higher rankings.
- Bounce Rate – High bounce rates indicate content missing the mark. Improve or remove pages not engaging visitors to improve SEO.
- Top Content – Discover your best-performing pages that are resonating with your audience for ideas on new content.
- Conversion Tracking – Understand how well your site meets business goals like signups or purchases. Focus SEO on high-value pages and keywords.
- Location Data – See where your visitors come from. You can tailor content for priority regions.
Having all this intelligence through Google Analytics reporting allows for an SEO strategy tightly aligned with real visitor behavior data. There are few other free tools that provide the level of actionable insights.
3. Google PageSpeed Insights
Page speed has become a critical ranking factor, which is why Google PageSpeed Insights is such an invaluable free tool. It provides comprehensive reporting on your site’s loading performance and actionable tips to optimize it.
Specifically, PageSpeed Insights looks at vital metrics like:
- Page load time – The time it takes for full page content to load. Faster is better for SEO and UX.
- Time to first byte – How quickly the first content loads. Optimizing server response time improves this.
- Image compression – Overly large images slow sites down. PageSpeed finds images to optimize.
- Minification – Removing whitespace and compacting CSS/JavaScript improves performance.
- Caching – Cached static content loads faster. The tool identifies caching opportunities.
- Mobile-friendliness – Pages should load fast on mobile too. PageSpeed identifies mobile issues.
After analyzing these factors and more, it generates an overall speed score and a list of ways to improve performance. Optimizing these elements directly improves site speed metrics that Google values for higher rankings. No other free tool evaluates overall site speed and optimization advice in one place like PageSpeed Insights.
4. Google Keyword Planner
One of the foundations of an effective SEO strategy is identifying the right keyword terms and topics to target. Google Keyword Planner provides invaluable search volume data to help with this research for free.
Some of the helpful data Keyword Planner provides includes:
- Monthly Searches – See estimated search volumes for keywords to find high-opportunity terms.
- Competition – Gauges how difficult it will be to rank for keywords based on existing results.
- Trends – Analyze search popularity over time to identify rising trends.
- Related Terms – Discover other relevant keywords your content could potentially rank for.
- AdWords Data – If you run Google Ads, easily optimize for your high-performing paid keywords.
Keyword Planner neatly organizes this data into keyword lists that can be exported for further analysis. It also seamlessly integrates with Google Analytics to pull in your site’s existing organic traffic keywords.
Having search volume and competition data is mandatory for prioritizing the terms that will drive the most relevant organic traffic to your site. No other free tool makes this type of research easier than Keyword Planner.
5. Yoast SEO Plugin
Optimizing your content for on-page SEO is crucial for rankings, and Yoast SEO makes this simple right within your WordPress site. Some key ways it helps include:
- SEO Title & Meta Description – Yoast analyzes these critical elements and gives real-time feedback to optimize them for keywords and search intent.
- Readability Analysis – The plugin provides a readable content score and suggestions to improve it such as transition words and paragraph length.
- XML Sitemap – Automatically generates a sitemap to improve indexing and includes extensions for video and news content.
- Focus Keywords – Assign focus keywords so you can structure content around them for better optimization.
- Snippets Preview – See how your pages will look in search results and tweak them to optimize click-through-rate.
- Schema Support – Provides schema markup to optimize your pages for rich results and featured snippets.
Having an all-in-one on-page optimization tool like Yoast SEO is invaluable for bloggers and companies running WordPress sites. The real-time feedback and guidance it provides allows you to create SEO-friendly content easier than ever before.
6. Schema.org
Schema.org is an open source, collaborative project that provides a collection of schemas that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search engines like Google and Bing.
Schema markup enhances how search engines understand and display your content in results. It’s implemented by adding snippet of code called “microdata” to your site’s HTML.
Some of the key ways schema.org helps with SEO include:
- Rich Snippets – Schema enables search engines to showcase your content in eye-catching formats like images, reviews, recipes etc directly in results.
- Featured Snippets – Marking up FAQ, How-To, and Q&A content with schema can help get your site featured in the prime featured snippet spot.
- Better Indexing – Structured data helps search bots better crawl and categorize your pages for improved relevance.
- Voice Search – Schema optimizes sites for better presentation in voice assistant results like Alexa and Siri.
Schema.org provides an ontology of schemas covering topics, products, events, people, and more for site owners to implement. With over a million sites now using schema markup, it’s a simple yet highly effective free SEO tool.
The Best Affordable Paid SEO Tools
While free tools form a strong SEO foundation, paid tools take your efforts to the next level with more robust data and capabilities. These provide tremendous value for reasonably affordable monthly costs. Here are my top reasonably priced paid tools:
7. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is jam-packed full of features you can use to help boost the success of your SEO and marketing campaigns.
With all these resources at your disposal, you can conduct insightful market research, explore different content opportunities, compare your SEO ranking with other websites, and analyze the potential strategies for obtaining backlinks.
With that in mind, let’s take a more specific look at some of the features AHREFs has to offer:
- Site Explorer: Here, you can analyze your site’s backlinks profile (as well as your competitor’s backlink profiles).
- Content Explorer: This enables you to find highly shared content on any topic
- Keywords Explorer: Use this tool to identify relevant keyword ideas and traffic estimations.
- Rank Tracker: Track where your web pages rank for both mobile and desktop searches for any location (and get regular reports to help monitor your progress).
- Site Audit Tool: Analyze your website for common SEO issues, identify them, and then make the necessary improvements.
Just to name a few.
Using Ahrefs for Backlinks Audits
One of Ahrefs’ biggest strengths is revealing a website’s complete backlink profile and referral sources. The detailed backlink data it provides is invaluable for both link building and researching competitors.
Ahrefs’ backlink checker reveals all the domains linking to a site along with:
- Anchor text – See the exact anchor text links use pointing to your pages. This helps inform natural internal link anchor text.
- Link strength – Assess linking domain authority to prioritize the strongest referrals to build upon.
- Link context – View pages where you’re mentioned to assess if it’s a relevant, natural fit.
- Link growth – Easily spot new links to pursue more relationships like them.
These insights allow you to connect with relevant sites to build authentic backlinks at scale. Strategic outreach is vastly more effective knowing this data.
For competitors, Ahrefs highlights their most powerful referring domains and anchor text ratios to reverse engineer what’s working for them. I can model their successful link building tactics to gain an edge.
Their website crawler also uncovers the top gaining pages across the web to find new link opportunities. Ahrefs crawls over 5 billion pages, providing unmatched data to execute smarter link building campaigns.
Analyze the High Traffic Pages of Your Competitors to Find the Low-Hanging Fruit
Ahrefs is hands down one of the best SEO tools for scouting out your competition, their most successful posts, and their most popular web pages. This, in turn, can inspire your own content. You may glean ideas you might otherwise never have thought of!
Simply use the Ahrefs Site Explorer by entering your competitor’s domain name to get a better feel for their content strategy.
If you’re unsure who your competition actually is, run a ‘competing domains’ report. This should populate a whole list of similar sites, alongside their most popular pages and the keywords they’re ranking for.
This tool works wonders for getting a better understanding of the kinds of content that work best in your niche, and more importantly, the sorts of posts that don’t perform as well.
With this info to hand, you won’t have to bother with topics and content formats that don’t convert.
Instead, skip ahead of the game by focusing on the pre-established ‘low hanging fruit.’ By this, of course, we mean the content opportunities where you can easily out-perform your competitors.
Use AHREFs’ Content Explorer to Find Valuable Keywords and Guest Blogging Opportunities
Plug a topic into the Content Explorer and find similar blogs that haven’t yet covered your area of expertise. This info makes it much easier to approach the site about potential guest blogging opportunities, which, of course, will link back to your page.
You can also use the same explorer to find keywords to optimize your content for, more specifically, ones with low competition and high search rankings.
Find New Keyword Opportunities
SEMRush enables you to search for keywords and compare them. The tool will automatically suggest other keywords it thinks are relevant to the term, alongside their monthly search volumes.
Having all of this info in one place makes it easy to compare keywords and pick the most relevant one for your web page.
8. SEMRush
Similar to AHREFs, SEMrush is another SEO tool you can use for keyword research. This tool also enables you to track your competitor’s keyword strategies, look for backlinking opportunities, and run SEO audits on your site and blog.
The tool has a database of over 46 million domains and 120 million keywords, which is why this software can accurately determine the organic position of a domain on Google’s search engine.
Let’s take a closer look at a few of the ways you can use SEMRush to your advantage:
Comparative Competitive Intelligence
SEMRush helps you research your competition and take inspiration from market-leading sites in your industry. It lists your organic competitors and indicates how much of a competition they are to you.
SEMRush can also send you a monthly PDF highlighting your own SEO performance and search engine rankings, which comes in handy for monitoring the progress of your SEO campaign.
Last but not least, SEMRush helps you to identify keywords your competitors are using as well as their most successful content. From there, you can quickly develop content to target these search terms.
Technical SEO Audits
SEMrush is my go-to tool for complete site audits revealing technical and on-page optimization opportunities. Their automated audit checker surfaces issues to fix like:
- Crawl errors – Identifies indexing errors for broken pages or links.
- Slow load times – Flags pages that need speed optimizations.
- Broken backlinks – Shows 404 links that should be removed or redirected.
- Thin content – Checks for pages with little content that need beefing up.
- Optimization issues – Provides specific on-page factor recommendations like adding alt text.
After the audit, I can prioritize the errors and factors that will provide the biggest improvements. This prevents wasted time on non-critical issues.
Beyond audits, SEMrush tracks keyword rankings across Google, Bing and YouTube. I can quickly see downward trends to address or new terms we’ve gained visibility for to build upon. Their related keywords and SEO content templates also help discover new profitable keywords.
SEMrush provides the technical diagnostics and keyword intel that I would otherwise spend hours manually gathering and analyzing. Their automation and prioritization makes site optimization and ranking analysis much more efficient.
9. Spyfu
Spyfu is another useful tool for competitor and keyword research. So, here’s how you can use Spyfu to grow your traffic:
Identify Content Gaps with Kombat
Kombat is Spyfu’s tool for comparing your content with that of your competitors. Just enter your own domain name as well as two competing domains you want to compare yourself with, and you’re good to go!
The dashboard will then inform you of any weaknesses in your own content, or keywords that have been tackled by all three competing sites. This makes it easy to identify content that’s worth pursuing.
Shift Your Keyword Focus onto Existing Content
Keywords can lose popularity over time, which sometimes leads to outdated content. Luckily, Spyfu has tools to help with this.
Spyfu can identify articles that have ranked for unexpected keywords, or those that have fallen behind.
That way, you’ll know which of your existing content to focus on.
10. Moz Pro
Moz Pro grants access to Mozscape, their robust link index. Having accurate, comprehensive backlink data is vital for effective SEO. Mozscape excels at providing trusted link intelligence I can act on.
Specific ways SEOs rely on Mozscape include:
- Link Research – View all external links pointing to a domain along with metrics like authority and trust for each.
- Link Growth – Easily monitor new links over time to identify impactful link building wins.
- Link Context – Assess the relevancy of linking pages to pursue high value placement opportunities.
- Link Intersections – Compare links between domains to see shared anchor text and placement sources.
- Toxic Link Detection – Uncover low quality links that should be disavowed to avoid penalties.
In addition, Moz Pro includes their exceptional site crawler for diagnosing technical problems. It detects issues like crawl errors, thin content, broken links and more. I can even customize the crawl settings for more accurate results.
Pro also provides rank tracking across engines to gauge SEO efforts over time. Access to their keyword research tools rounds out the capabilities.
11. SE Ranking
SE Ranking has become my most trusted rank tracker for its breadth of capabilities monitoring keyword positions across search engines.
For national keyword tracking, SE Ranking monitors rankings in Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex. I can see my site’s positions for any keyword across these engines in one dashboard.
Granular location-based rank tracking is also possible based on city or zip code for better local SEO measurement. Few rank trackers offer this detailed local tracking.
SE Ranking also provides ranks by device – desktop, mobile, or tablet. With mobile-first indexing, tracking phone rankings is crucial.
Some of the other helpful SE Ranking features include:
- Rank change alerts – Get notified if a key term drops or improves in position.
- Automatic position updates – New ranks get logged daily without manual checks.
- SERP analysis – See what competitors rank for your keywords and their page elements.
- Custom reporting – Tailor keyword reports with various filters to analyze progress.
- Competitor tracking – Monitor competitor rankings across engines to inform strategies.
- API integration – Sync rankings with other software like SEMrush.
The breadth of accurate rank data SE Ranking captures allows me to thoroughly monitor if optimizations are working. The customizable reports and alerts enable real-time rank insights so I can respond quickly to changes. It takes the headache out of daily rank tracking.
12. RankMath Pro
RankMath Pro stands out as one of the most powerful WordPress SEO plugins, with professional-grade optimization capabilities.
Some of the key features that make RankMath Pro invaluable for SEO include:
- Intelligent schema markup – Automatically implements schema for richer search appearance without coding.
- Focus keyword targeting – Optimize pages for singular focus keywords for better optimization.
- Insights dashboard – Track keyword rankings, traffic, search visibility and optimization tasks.
- Competitor tracking – See competitors’ keyword ranks and traffic sources for intelligence.
- Role Manager – Lets you assign SEO access by user role for managing a team.
- Redirections – Redirect manager to fix or create redirects and improve site architecture.
- Bulk editing – Change titles, meta descriptions, focus keywords and more across multiple posts.
- Sitemap suite – Generates XML, HTML, News and Video sitemaps for better indexing.
- SEO & readability analysis – Checks content against SEO and UX metrics and provides improvement tips.
RankMath Pro ultimately makes executing technical and on-page SEO seamless in WordPress. The breadth of its features provide enterprise-level capabilities to maximize search performance. It’s a must-have for any WordPress site serious about SEO.
Advanced Paid SEO Tools for Professionals
While the affordable paid tools provide tremendous SEO value, more advanced tools exist for seasoned professionals managing large websites or clients. For enterprise-class capabilities, here are the top premium SEO platforms:
13. Mosaic
If you’re looking to take your SEO strategy to the next level, our Local Landing Page Solution, Mosaic, is a game-changer. This advanced programmatic SEO tool allows businesses to create hundreds or thousands of hyper-targeted local landing pages at scale. Mosaic is designed to deliver maximum visibility in search engines while driving highly qualified, conversion-ready traffic.
Here’s how Mosaic can transform your SEO efforts:
- Hyper-Focused Keyword Targeting: Mosaic identifies and targets long-tail, bottom-of-the-funnel queries that users search when they’re ready to act—whether that means making a purchase, booking an appointment, or requesting a quote.
- Rapid Scalability: By automating the creation of location-specific landing pages, Mosaic helps businesses reach potential customers in every corner of their service area.
- SEO Visibility Meets CRO: Mosaic doesn’t just drive traffic; it brings visitors who are primed to convert. Each page is optimized not only to rank highly but also to deliver a seamless, user-focused experience that boosts conversion rates.
- Expedited ROI: Unlike traditional SEO campaigns that can take months to generate significant traffic, Mosaic accelerates the path to ROI by focusing on high-intent users and building search engine visibility quickly.
- Perfect for Multi-Location Businesses: Whether you’re a franchise, healthcare provider, or service-based business, Mosaic ensures that each location is well-represented online, attracting local traffic and driving growth.
By leveraging Mosaic, businesses can dominate local search results, attract more qualified leads, and achieve conversions at scale.
14. Majestic
Majestic touts the largest link index on the web, crawling over a trillion pages. The breadth of backlink data their index provides offers unmatched accuracy.
Some of the key backlink analysis features Majestic offers include:
- Backlink History – See new links to a site over time going back years. This identifies impactful link building wins to replicate.
- Referring Domains – Get the full list of domains linking to any site along with domain-level trust metrics.
- Anchor Text – View the exact anchor texts used in backlinks pointing to your site or competitors.
- Link Neighborhood – Assess other sites linking from the same page for context on the type of placements acquired.
- Link Intersection – Directly compare backlinks between sites to surface new link opportunities.
- Filter Options – Isolate backlinks by type, trust, region and other factors for deeper analysis.
Majestic also provides Flow Metrics showing the link equity passed over each backlink. This helps identify the most powerful links worth pursuing more of.
Having this incredibly detailed backlink intelligence allows me to conduct superior link prospecting, outreach, and growth tracking. I rely heavily on Majestic’s unparalleled accuracy for making smart link building decisions. The wealth of link data they provide can’t be matched.
15. CognitiveSEO
CognitiveSEO is an enterprise-grade SEO platform combining robust technical audits with intelligent content analysis.
For audits, CognitiveSEO uses headless browser crawling to render pages like a user for more accurate technical SEO diagnostics. This identifies problems that impact rankings that other crawlers miss.
Some of the audit features include:
- Page Speed Analysis – Tests page load times from multiple regions to surface optimization opportunities.
- Broken Link Checking – Identifies any non-working internal or external links to fix.
- Mobile Friendliness – Checks if mobile pages are optimized and loads fast.
- Security Issues – Flags any HTTPS or vulnerability problems.
- SEO Content Analysis – Assesses content against readability, length, keyword use and other on-page factors.
- Custom Audits – Tailor audits to focus on specific optimization factors.
The audit provides an overall site health score along with a detailed breakdown of issues to address in priority order.
Beyond audits, CognitiveSEO tracks rankings for your brand and competitors across engines. You can also research competitors’ top keywords and traffic sources to inform your targeting.
Having CognitiveSEO’s robust technical diagnostics and competitive insights gives enterprise SEO teams the data they need to boost large, complex sites. The depth of detail they provide is unmatched.
16. Kerboo
Kerboo stands out as the most powerful crawl-based SEO audit tool in my experience. It capably handles even enormous enterprise websites to surface fixes that evade other platforms.
Some key technical issues the Kerboo crawl identifies:
- Indexing errors – Finds any pages blocked from indexing with specific fixes.
- Duplicate Content – Uncovers thin, duplicate, or auto-generated content hurting rankings.
- Page Speed – Tests page load times from multiple regions with optimization tips.
- Broken Links – Locates any non-working internal, external, or image links.
- Security Issues – Flags insecure resources or vulnerabilities needing remediation.
- JavaScript Errors – Identifies any JS errors that are impacting site functionality.
Kerboo crawls each page in detail to build a comprehensive technical profile and passes pages through Google’s mobile-friendliness test.
The audit results highlight the most pressing issues to address first for the biggest ranking gains. Key factors like page speed are graded for easy diagnostics.
For large-scale sites, Kerboo’s custom dashboard also makes shareable to collaborate across teams. The accuracy, detail and insight Kerboo audits provide make it invaluable for enterprise SEO.
17. Botify
Botify leverages advanced machine learning and analytics to surface technical SEO problems traditional crawlers cannot. For fixing complex crawling errors, Botify has no equal.
Some unique capabilities Botify provides:
- ML-powered crawling – Machine learning guides the crawler to efficiently traverse enormous sites.
- JavaScript rendering – Their crawler fully renders JS-heavy pages for accurate analysis.
- Actionable error clustering – Issues are statistically grouped so you can fix entire classes of errors quickly.
- Crawling analytics – Data science reveals patterns in crawling data to optimize information architecture.
- Root cause identification – Machine learning pinpoints the core issue behind clusters of errors.
- Crawl gap prioritization – Models determine the gaps between Google and Botify’s crawl to focus fixes.
These techniques help uncover granular technical obstacles like JS-dependent content Google can’t access or problematic chained redirects. The actionable insights Botify provides fix the complex issues that really move the needle on organic traffic. It’s unmatched for large-scale SEO.
18. DeepCrawl
When it comes to comprehensive on-page SEO optimization, DeepCrawl delivers unmatched capabilities. Their platform combines powerful crawling with AI-driven content and technical analysis for unsurpassed optimization.
Key features that make DeepCrawl excel at on-page SEO include:
- Readability analysis – Assesses content against lexical complexity, structure, length, subheadings and more to improve readability.
- Text optimization – Checks keyword usage, outlines improvements to content structure and identifies thin content.
- HTML optimization – Recommends adding alt text, fixing broken links, improving site architecture and other optimizations.
- Page speed insights – Identifies page speed optimizations opportunities based on performance data.
- Visual reporting – Crawl results presented visually to easily identify patterns and high-priority fixes.
- Version control – Compare page changes over time to optimize new versions.
- AI-assisted workflows – Machine learning recommends the most impactful optimization actions to prioritize.
With these comprehensive capabilities, DeepCrawl provides unmatched visibility into how your pages are performing technically and as a user experience. It gives you the insights and tools to make pages incredibly search-friendly.
19. Surfer SEO
Surfer SEO stands out for its powerful functionality to research competitors and identify the best link building opportunities. For competitive analysis, Surfer SEO is unmatched.
Some of the key competitive insights Surfer provides:
- Backlink comparison – See backlinks your competitors have earned that your site lacks to reveal top prospect sites.
- Referring domains – Analyze the domains sending competitors the most referral traffic to target similar sites.
- Link intersections – Compare common backlinks between domains to find new link acquisition opportunities.
- Link context analysis – Review the types of content and pages you’re mentioned on to identify relevant link placement options.
- Link velocity – Track new links competitors are acquiring over time to emulate their outreach.
Surfer also integrates a site auditor with diagnostics for indexability, page speed, on-page factors and more. Robust rank tracking shows both your and competitors’ keyword positions.
Having this wealth of competitive intelligence allows you to model what’s working for leaders in your space. Surfer SEO provides unmatched competitive insights to build smarter links faster. It’s an essential competitive research toolbox.
AI Writing Tools for SEO Content
A vital part of executing successful SEO campaigns is producing high-quality, optimized content that ranks. Thankfully, AI writing tools can make creating effective SEO copy easier than ever before.
AI writing assistants use advanced language models to generate natural sounding, engaging long-form content targeted to rank for specific keywords. They save enormous time over writing manually.
Here are the top AI writing tools I recommend for SEO copywriting:
20. Claude by Anthropic
Claude stands out as an AI assistant that can create SEO blog posts and articles with an impressively human touch, and little guidance needed.
After providing a headline or topic, Claude asks clarifying questions to dial in on intent. It then writes long-form content hitting key elements for optimization:
- Focuses content around primary and secondary keywords to target.
- Includes related keywords naturally throughout for semantic optimization.
- Structures content using subheadings, lists and prose for strong readability.
- Links out to authoritative sources and internal content where relevant.
- Creates thoughtful metaphors and analogies readers resonate with.
- Uses vivid yet accessible language with minimal jargon.
- Provides helpful images or graphics to reinforce points.
- Formats posts for easy skimming with bolded sections.
Claude can turn a short prompt into a 2000+ word SEO article optimized for search ranking factors and engaging visitors. The content impresses with strong narrative flow and skillful use of descriptive language unlikely to be flagged as AI-written. For SEO blogging, Claude sets a new bar for quality and optimization.
21. ChatGPT by OpenAI
ChatGPT by OpenAI has emerged as an exceptionally powerful AI tool for writing detailed, nuanced SEO content.
After providing ChatGPT with target keywords and content goals, it crafts long-form posts that check all the boxes for optimization while reading impressively human-written.
Features that make ChatGPT ideal for SEO content:
- Thoroughly answers reader questions and intent around a topic.
- Expands on concepts in-depth with thoughtful analysis and reasoning.
- Uses related keywords and subtopics naturally without awkward over-optimization.
- Structures content in logical sections with seamless narrative flow.
- Writes clear, engaging information supported by facts and sources.
- Paraphrases and varies sentence structure for better readability.
- Creates easy to scan content with bold headings and short paragraphs.
- Adds images, quotes or graphics to reinforce key points.
The level of nuance, variation, and insight ChatGPT can provide on a topic is unmatched for SEO long-form content. It produces informative, keyword optimized articles that come across as authentic and engaging.
22. Contently by Skyword
Contently by Skyword stands out as an AI writing platform specifically designed for business and marketing copy including blog posts ideal for SEO.
After inputting a blog post theme and keywords to target, Contently generates posts dialed in for both conversions and search ranking potential.
Features that make Contently great for SEO content creation:
- Creates articles around a focused main keyword supplemented by related keywords.
- Follows clear introductions and headers for easy skimming.
- Structures posts with the ideal length and section word count for strong on-page SEO.
- Skillfully incorporates links to internal content and external authoritative sources.
- Produces content specifically aimed at either informational or transactional intents.
- Optimizes copy for both search engines and human readers.
- Allows for customization of tone based on brand voice.
- Includes visual assets like images, stats and videos for engagement.
Because Contently is purpose-built for business blogging, the posts it creates are honed to convert visitors while also ranking for valuable SEO keywords. It’s an ideal AI tool for producing SEO website copy at scale.
23. Jasper
A key advantage of Jasper.ai is its ability to produce SEO-friendly content tailored for different digital formats – from long-form posts to social media captions and email copy.
For long-form blog articles, Jasper asks insightful questions to understand goals before crafting posts optimized for ranking potential with:
- Structured outline hitting key elements needed to answer reader intent.
- Focus keywords woven in naturally along with complementary keywords.
- Engaging sections with skimmable headers and scannable formatting.
- Links to authoritative sources and internal content to boost authority.
For social posts, Jasper optimizes captions for platforms like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn by:
- Keeping text concise while working in strong keyword opportunities.
- Using compelling angles with teasers that build engagement.
- Incorporating relevant hashtags and @mentions for increased visibility.
For email newsletters, Jasper optimizes subject lines for high open rates while seamlessly including SEO keywords and links within email body copy.
The ability to quickly produce such a wide variety of formats sharpened for SEO gives content teams scalable creation power. Jasper allows them to efficiently develop optimized content tailored for any digital channel or need.
24. Content at Scale
Content at Scale stands out as an enterprise-grade AI writing platform optimized specifically for creating SEO-friendly long-form content.
After providing topic prompts and keywords, Content at Scale produces detailed blog posts dialed in for search ranking potential:
- Conducts in-depth research on the topic to craft authoritative, informative content.
- Optimizes outline structure around target keywords and related terms to answer search intent.
- Creates perfectly formatted posts with scannable headers, short paragraphs and skimmable highlights.
- Incorporates links to reputable external sources and internal content to boost authority.
- Varied sentence structure and natural word choices make the writing pass human scrutiny.
- Produces long-form content 2000+ words optimized for reader engagement and SEO.
- Allows for customization of brand voice and tone.
Content at Scale also integrates with marketing workflows to auto-populate images, metadata and publishing to streamline content operations.
For enterprise teams looking to scale SEO content production, Content at Scale provides unmatched quality and optimization. It enables efficiently creating large volumes of long-form posts tuned for higher rankings.
What We Learned
Having the right SEO tools is essential for executing effective search optimization and seeing real results in the form of higher rankings and more traffic.
For those new to SEO, start with the core free offerings we covered from Google. These provide the foundational insights needed to understand your site’s current search presence and opportunities.
Once ready to upgrade, the paid tools in the affordable and professional tiers unlock significantly more robust SEO capabilities. While an investment, their higher-caliber data, tracking, and competitive intelligence enable much smarter optimization.
Powerful AI writing assistants like Claude and Jasper also make creating high-quality, SEO-friendly content at scale far easier. They save enormous time over manual writing.
Optimizing a website for search is a complex, multi-faceted endeavor. But having the right toolkit of SEO software and AI gives you an advantage over the competition.
Focus on the core technical, on-page, content, and tracking capabilities outlined here needed to succeed. With the best SEO tools augmenting your skills, higher rankings and search visibility are within reach.
If you want to work with an SEO agency that has access to this full suite of tools, then get in touch with our team. We have the expertise and the toolkit to make a serious impact on your business’ search presence.
