12 Content Writing Tools for SEO: Best Tools Comparison

Search Engine Optimization, or widely known as SEO, is an essential part of digital marketing. It is almost non-negotiable for digital marketers and business units to consider SEO in each campaign they run. The name speaks for itself, SEO works by making sure you get organic website traffic and engagement when people type certain words in search engines. The question is, how does SEO work in the AI era? Is it still relevant? In this article, we will find and explore together what the lists of content writing tools for SEO are, side-by-side comparisons of all tools, and what the best tools are for proofreading articles, as well as tips on how to find the best content writing tools for SEO in your company. 

What is SEO Content Writing? 

Despite the trend that shows the higher engagement of visual content compared to text-only content, content writing is not dead. The popularity of writing platforms like Medium and Substack proves otherwise. It demonstrates that writing is still considered as an ideal way to express feelings and share opinions, arguments, and educational material. 

However, articles are worthless without readers. Hence, SEO exists to get traffic to your website page. There are several fundamental keys for SEO you need to know before doing SEO content writing. 

Keywords research

The first step to getting traffic is researching what the audience wants and needs. At this point, you will need to select topics based on the search volumes. You can also try to fill the gap, particularly on topics that people rarely write about, but have relatively higher demand for information. 

Quality assurance or SEO Audit

Once you find the keywords or phrases, it is time to do the main task, which is SEO content writing. At this phase, it is crucial to make sure that your keywords are aligned with the main ideas of your text. If you mislead the readers or visitors, they might avoid your page in the future. 

Optimizing tags, meta description, headings, and title 

In SEO content writing, you also need to consider effective usage of tags, meta descriptions, headings, and the titles of your articles. Some even recommend that you ensure the relevance between your keywords and content by writing hooks within the introduction paragraph (approximately the first 100 words). 

Multimedia

SEO also works best with the addition of multimedia such as pictures and videos. That is why you may find many high-performing articles on search engines that attach pictures and videos, instead of relying on text only. As you may already observe, when searching for images through search engines, the link leads you to a certain page. 

Internal linking 

Once you get a reader or visitor, you can optimize your website traffic by adding internal links within your SEO article. This tends to lead visitors to stay on your website a little longer than usual. 

Why Do We Need SEO Content Writing? 

Why do you still need to write SEO articles in the midst of the visual-based content trend? The reason might be a combination of personal and market-driven excuses. SEO content writing is ideal to attract audiences, whether related or not related to your business. Even if they do not interact directly with your products or services, the text-based content offers several benefits both for your own business and the audience. 

• Long-term visibility 

The first benefit of SEO content writing is the long-term visibility. Unlike videos or moving pictures, text performs better on search engines. Despite the trends, most search engines still use text indexing, and even social media has adopted search engines’ indexing methods to help users navigate what they want to see. 

• Convenience for the audience 

Text is also proven to be more favorable among internet users, instead of videos and pictures. People who want to get faster information are finding it more convenient to skim text rather than skipping parts of videos or audio recordings. Even many use AI to transform or summarize podcasts and videos into text. 

• Alternative to digital content fatigue 

You may hear brainrot, a term that is closely related to digital content fatigue, particularly caused by short-form audio-visual content. By being faithful to text, you offer alternatives to people who want to avoid further brainrot or digital fatigue. In the mid 2020s, this created a movement where people started to read more, including blog posts and essays.  

• Easy navigation 

For audiences, text is preferable as they are easy to navigate and user-friendly. It offers better structure and logic that can help them find particular information faster compared to video or audio content. 

• Signaling credibility 

Other than that, text is also a sign of credibility for a business. It is related to the fact that you need a deep understanding when writing a topic (both directly related or not to your products/services), which shows commitment, professionalism, and expertise. Video may convey this, but text has stronger implications in carving your company or business reputation online. 

Choose the Best SEO Tools for Optimizing Content Marketing

Although deemed as organic, it is best to use SEO tools for optimizing content marketing. They normally work by automatically rating your content based on certain indicators. To get more precise information, let’s talk further about SEO key performance indicators (KPIs) below. 

• Keyword ranking is useful to see your article’s performance in the search engine results page (SERP). The higher it is, the better the metrics. 
• Organic traffic is the measurement of unpaid page visits that indicate the relevance of your content. 

• Click-through rate (CTR) measures the number of visitors who click specific links (internal links, advertisements, contact details, etc.) within your page. It differentiates mere impressions from actual visits. 
• Conversion rate is the main goal of your SEO content writing. It indicates actions taken by visitors after seeing and staying on your page. It can be sales, subscriptions, calls, or requests for more information. 

Based on those criteria, these are the best content writing tools for SEO in the market. However, please note that SEO content writing is a part of a marketing strategy. SEO is also a long-term strategy and not an instant way to promote a brand or products. Even though it is focused on content writing or blog posts, there are also other considerations in the SEO strategy, such as keyword density, backlinks, and others. 

Therefore, tools for SEO are not only for creating high-quality content articles, but they are distinguished by the tasks, including specialties for content writing, SEO audit, keyword research, and others. Those SEO tools will help you to implement the SEO best practices to ensure your website is on a higher ranking on the search engine results page (SERP). Below are the content writing tools for SEO and editing tools that are specially for creating content articles. 

Content Writing Tools for SEO

Content writing tools for SEO are the tools or applications that are uniquely developed to optimize the content articles for blog posts. These tools are the heart of the SEO strategy because they will help you to improve the article quality. Thus, these tools ensure they are eligible to be crawled by the search engine, like Google, to achieve a high ranking based on the searched keyword. 

To help you find content writing for SEO, we have collected the 15 best tools. Here is the list of 15 best content writing tools for SEO to help your SEO marketing campaign. However, these recommended SEO tools are based only on our preferences, and the assessment of tools can only be decided by you as a user. 

Clearscope 

Clearscope is one of the best SEO content writing tools to help you create engaging articles that follow the SEO guidelines. Clearscope is considered the premium content writing tool for SEO. It is equipped with AI power, which makes it not only useful for search engines such as Google, Bing, and others, but also a large language model (LLM) AI that can answer your questions, also known as AEO (Answer Engine Optimization). 

Clearscope has developed into a powerful content writing tool for SEO because it has a feature called Topic Exploration to help you find the right keywords and Content Inventory to assist you in monitoring your published articles. Moreover, Clearscope provides the opportunity for internal linking to boost SEO performance 

Surfer SEO

Surfer SEO is no doubt one of the best content writing tools for SEO. It is a great option for someone who needs to focus on SEO strategy, along with a more affordable price. Even though this tool is quite cheap than its competitor, it offers rich features. The most notable features from Surfer SEO are Content Editor and SERP Analyzer. On the other hand, Surfer SEO is really easy to use and has simple navigation to find all of the features. 

Basically, Surfer SEO has become a multifunctional SEO tool and not only for editing content to ensure the article meets the SEO standard to achieve high ranking on SERPs. However, this tool is very useful for optimizing SEO content because it has an editor that fixes your article and gives recommendations. Not only that, Surfer SEO provides the internal linking opportunities by finding the semantic link opportunities. 

Rankability 

Similar to Clearscope and Surfer SEO, Rankability is an AI-driven content writing for SEO tool. This tool has tons of features that help create SEO content for your website, including an AI content brief that is essential and powerful to optimize the article. As the name implies, these features will generate the content brief based on the AI results as guidance for creating the best content article for blog posts. 

Another innovative and useful tool from Rankability is Content Optimizer. This feature allows you to check the score based on the assessment from the AI machine. By using Content Optimizer, you can fix all of the errors to revise based on the recommendations from the application to ensure that this article can perform well compared to your competitors when it is published. 

Frase

Frase has become one of the best content writing tools for SEO these days. Equipped with the AI engine, Frase is a full-fledged SEO tool to boost your SEO marketing strategy. This application will help you to solve all of the SEO content problems, from keyword research, AI writing, and optimization of SEO for your website. 

The most notable features of Frase are that it provides the results based on the search engine results as well as AI search. Therefore, Frase is offering a combination of SEO and GEO in one application. Fraser also has an easy-to-use user interface that makes the user easily access the application and use all of the features with less training. 

Jasper

Jasper AI might be one of the content writing tools for SEO that is gaining popularity recently. This tool is useful to enhance the process of creating high-quality content articles for SEO in an SEO mode feature. Instead of comprehensive SEO tools, Jasper AI was mostly designed as a writing assistant to improve the SEO content articles to make them noticeable compared to the articles from competitors. 

By using Jasper AI, you can be more productive and create several content articles for a blog post quickly. Not only for an AI writing assistant, but Jasper is also furnished with an image generator. Thus, it can be an option for creating content articles along with visuals to complete the blog post without the need to use another application for creating visual content. 

Semrush SEO Writing Assistant

Semrush is claimed to be one of the best content writing tools for SEO, and it is one of the pioneers of SEO tools, built in 2008. No surprise that most of the big companies are using Semrush to help their marketing team. Semrush is a comprehensive or all-in-one SEO tool that offers tons of features, from keyword research, writing assistant, to SEO audit. By purchasing this tool, you can access powerful features to enhance your SEO marketing strategy. 

Not only for strategic SEO, but Semrush also launched the Semrush SEO Writing Assistant feature to assist you in making optimized content articles. The other advantage of using this feature that it can easily integrate with Google Docs, WordPress, and Microsoft Word. This feature is a great option for optimizing and enhancing the readability of content articles for blog posts. 

NeuronWriter

NeuronWriter has evolved into one of the most promising content writing tools for SEO. This platform works with AI to analyze the best-performing SEO articles related to a specific keyword you are looking for. Then, NeuronWriter generated the outline content and provided recommendations or suggestions from the competitors based on Natural Language Processing (NLP). 

Not only helping with the AI writing assistant, but NeuronWriter can also help you to analyze SERP and competitors. It also has a powerful feature called Next Content Ideas to assist you in clustering content topics. Similar to other powerful SEO platforms, NeuronWriter is supplied with internal linking suggestions to ensure that your website follows the Google algorithm. 

Scalenut

Scalenut offers a unique characteristic compared to other AI content writing tools for SEO. This application integrates all of the SEO insights with the content writing optimization. Scalenut is providing AI recommendations to ensure you have implemented SEO best practices and create high-quality content articles. 

Similar to other content writing tools for SEO, Scalenut is fitted with AI writing generation, whether it is used for copywriting or content writing. The tools can even generate long-form articles with detailed topics based on the researched keyword. If you think the generated content article is robotic, there is an option to humanize the content, which can lower the AI detector score. 

Writesonic

Writesonic has turned into a go-to platform for SEO. It has evolved from only an AI writing assistant to a content writing application for SEO. Therefore, this platform is providing AI content generation, SEO optimizing feature, as well as GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) to make sure that the content article follows the Google guidelines and stands out in the top ranking. 

This application has more than 80 features or tools. The most fascinating feature is the AI Article Writer to assist you in creating long-form articles within minutes. Writesonic also supplies an AI image generator, called Photosonic and Audiosonic, to create text-to-speech audio. These features will help you create robust articles without the need to use other applications. 

Outranking 

Outranking is one of the AI-driven content writing tools for SEO that has gained popularity currently. This is categorized as an all-in-one SEO tool with many features, including content planning, keyword research, and analysis using AI to implement SEO best practices. This application is developed for marketing practitioners, including SEO professionals, content marketers, and other roles in marketing. 

Outranking actually provides many features, but the most noteworthy feature of Outranking is probably the AI writer. This feature will assist you in generating a content article from the keyword and create an outline as well as content briefs. Also, there is an SEO content editor and scoring, which can help you to identify and evaluate the SEO articles to meet the standards of search engines, to be able to compete with competitors. 

Dashword

Dashword has come to be one of the go-to content writing tools for SEO to boost your marketing strategy. Equipped with the AI engine, Dasword will help marketers to create SEO content marketing for blog posts. This application provides comprehensive features for SEO, including content planning, editing, and generating content articles to align with the search engine algorithm. 

The most notable features are the editor score and providing guidance for creating articles to perform better on SERPs. Dashword has an AI writer feature to generate content articles, especially for an intro or to summarize the outline. However, you need to check the results because the AI-generated content is commonly robotic and less humanized. 

MarketMuse

MarketMuse is one of the renowned content writing tools for SEO that can be an option to help you achieve your marketing goals. This application offers comprehensive SEO features to streamline SEO content creation. MarketMuse is also furnished with AI technology to execute keyword research for ideation, content creation, and reporting or analyzing SEO performance. 

No doubt that MarketMuse is a robust SEO application with a bunch of features, such as topic model, SEO optimization, AI assistance, and more. A combination of all features will help you stay competitive against your competitors. With MarketMuse, you can conduct deep research to accomplish the strategic goals. 

SEO in the AI era 

However, we cannot ignore that we are in the AI era. Instead of clicking through each link on page results, internet users now tend to read AI overviews (mostly by Google Gemini) that sum up the most relevant answers to their prompts or inserted keywords. They not only list the top pages, but also can provide answers to more complex questions based on data they gather and analyze. According to this development, we are in the era of also considering other frameworks like GEO, an abbreviation of Generative Engine Optimization, and AEO or Answer Engine Optimization. 

AEO principal is answering questions in more direct way. They work really well with question words such as “how” and “what” that is more often used by ChatGPT and Google AI Overview users. Meanwhile, GEO is best for elaborative answers that are normally used in AI platforms such as Google Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude AI. 

This is groundbreaking, but also a challenge. However, AI answers are not always reliable, so users might still click on the links they cite. Those links can be your website or page, and that is the chance you can maximize. Here are the tips you can use to make an AI algorithm cite your pages out of the sea of content. 

• Make sure your content has a good structure and compact paragraphs. This will help AI to extract your text.
• Better external citations will affect your visibility in AI search results, but you need to build a reputation first. 
• Do not just focus on one AI platform. Try also to learn how popular AI tools interact with text-based content. 
• Using natural language and ensuring that the logic and ideas are woven with each other, GEO prefers a semantic search that reads context instead of just identifying keywords. 
• Do not neglect AI-friendly formatting such as bullet points, concise paragraphs, and headings. 

How to Choose the Best Content Writing Tools for SEO

Deciding the best content writing tools for SEO may be a challenge because all of the tools are promoting their best features. Still, all of the content writing tools for SEO have strengths and weaknesses, so there are no perfect tools. The only things you need to remember are to choose the content writing tools for SEO based on your preference and that fit your workflow. Thus, you can use the key indicators below as the main considerations. 

Features

Before checking other indicators, it is best for you to learn the main features of each SEO tool in the market. It might be a hassle, but try to do a structural approach here. First, identify what you mostly and particularly need from the tools, list them, and cross out any tools that do not offer them. Try to list the needs in the most specific terms, for example, you want tools that also offer content planning, or you need one with AI compatibility, grammar correction, or you need content writing tools for SEO with the most comprehensive optimization (with real-time scoring, keyword suggestions, etc)

Price or plan 

This is a vital consideration if you have a limited or strict budget. Try to eliminate content writing tools for SEO with prices or plans that exceed your budget. It will lighten your burden of choosing. 

Free trial 

If you want to try out more than one tool before committing to the best choice, try to mark SEO tools that offer a free trial. This will help you find the right one for your needs. Other than trying out the main features, check if you are comfortable with the user interface (UI). Is it intuitive enough for you? 

Consider using more than one SEO tool

To be honest, there is no perfect SEO tool that can help with everything you need and want. That is why some experts recommend that you use more than one tool at the same time. This will get you the ideal results. 

Conclusion 

Deciding the best SEO tools for content writing might be tricky, but the best and simplest advice is to filter the choices based on your main necessity and goals. The last tip is using more than one tool to get the best of both. This will allow you to get better results, although the budget ceiling can be a challenge. Also, we recommend that you use comprehensive or all-in-one content writing tools for SEO, such as MarketMuse, Clearscope, Surfer SEO, and Semrush. With only one purchase, you can boost your SEO strategy, conduct better research, and generate the best outline for your SEO content articles. 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) about Content Writing Tools for SEO

1. What are the best content writing tools for SEO? 

It depends on the main features you are looking for. Also consider the price or plan, as that might influence how you perceive a tool as “best” or not. For our recommendation, you can use Semrush, Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, Jasper, Surfer SEO, and Clearscope. 

2. Are there any free best content writing tools for SEO? 

Google Trends, Google Search Console, and Bing Webmaster Tools can be the best free content writing tools for an SEO writer. Google Trends helps you research the most searched keywords based on the latest trends. Meanwhile, Google Search Console offers you features to look at the best keywords that attract more traffic based on the search engine results page (SERP). Bing Webmaster Tool, on the other hand, can help you to find keywords and audit the content articles on websites on the Bing search engine, but note that it only works for Bing, not for Google. 

3. What are the factors to determine the best content writing tools for SEO? 

The main considerations to decide the best SEO content writing tools are the features, prices, user interface, and free trial offer. Those factors are crucial for you before committing to one or more tools. However, you can use the full-fledged tools to perform an all-in-one marketing strategy. 

4. Is SEO content writing still relevant today?

Yes, fortunately, if you work in content writing, the job is not yet obsolete. Only now in the AI era, you have to learn more about the modern technologies that allow your content to be discoverable by AI-powered search engines. In other words, SEO is not dead, but evolving to connect with AI generative, which is known as AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization). 

5. What are AEO and GEO in content writing? 

AEO is Answer Engine Optimization, and GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization. Both are new terms discovered during the AI era. They are basically new frameworks and techniques in content writing whose main goal is to ensure your content will be discovered and cited by AI-driven search engines. The shift comes to life after more people are using ChatGPT to find information rather than using established search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. 

6. What is the difference between AEO and GEO with traditional SEO? 

In principle, AEO and GEO were founded to create AI-friendly content. While traditional SEO allows your content to compete to get the best spot in SERP (search engine results page), AEO and GEO are designed to enable your content to be cited by AI-powered search engines such as ChatGPT and Google AI Overview.

7. Can AI help us find the best content writing tools for SEO? 

Yes, you can use an AI platform to help you compare the best SEO tools in the market. But, they usually sum up what content writers published. In the meantime, you can ask them to analyze the best tool by listing what features you mostly need and the budget you have. 

8. Do we need to use all SEO tools for content writing? 

Yes, in order to optimize the SEO strategy for our business, ideally, we need all of the SEO tools, from tools for researching keywords, writing, editing, or proofreading, SEO audit, and others. However, you cannot insist on using all of the tools, especially for small businesses, which have a financial burden. Instead, you can use several tools that are credible and affordable to optimize your SEO strategy.