With so many moving parts in the content creation process, it's hard to keep up with every opportunity to optimize your page. The closest thing to replicating yourself (without the sci-fi consequences, of course) is enlisting the right arsenal of SEO writing tools.
By leveraging tools for keyword research, competitive analysis, content optimization, and AI-assisted writing, you can streamline your workflow, craft more impactful content, and watch your search rankings soar.
I’m sharing 16 tools with different specialties to help you be more effective at different steps of your writing process.
In this comprehensive guide, we'll walk you through these 16 indispensable tools across four key categories - research, writing, optimization, and efficiency. You'll learn how each tool works, key features, pricing, and practical use cases to elevate your content strategy. By the end, you'll be equipped to build your own ultimate SEO writing toolkit.
Google Keyword Planner is a free tool that helps you discover new keywords, get search volume and forecasts, and plan your Search campaigns. Simply enter words or phrases related to your business or service, and the tool will generate relevant keyword ideas along with historical metrics like average monthly searches and competition level.
While the tool is geared towards Google Ads, it's an excellent starting point for organic keyword research. Use it to identify high-volume, low-competition keywords to target in your content. Keep in mind that search volumes are rounded ranges and competition refers to paid, not organic search.
What I liked: Trustworthy data from a familiar tool. I appreciate the depth of data from Google tools.
What I didn’t like: Not all SEO writers have a Google Ads account to access this tool.
Pricing: Free with a Google Ads account
For more advanced, granular keyword data, Ahrefs Keywords Explorer fits nicely at the start of your research. Enter a keyword, and the tool will generate thousands of keyword ideas categorized by relevance and keyword difficulty. You can view key SEO metrics like search volume, clicks, CPC, and parent topic for each keyword.
Use Ahrefs to find low-difficulty keywords with high click potential, analyze search intent, and uncover content gaps. Ahrefs is a popular tool for many stages of SEO work, but it tucks away helpful data if you’re not on the right price point. Some plans limit access to historical data, taking you to a dead end on some important keywords.
What I liked: One standout feature is the ability to see keyword metrics for 10 different search engines across 171 countries.
What I didn’t like: The complex interface ends up derailing me while I’m deep into research. I click a URL, expecting its keywords. Only that's not what I get. It takes a few more non-intuitive steps that are just slightly less complicated than the hokey pokey to get there.
Pricing: Plans start at $99/month
For years, Answer the Public has been listed among top idea-building tools, and for good reason. It visually maps searches into more long tail, related terms that can inspire new content ideas. You will see your first keyword sprout into questions that people want to know about it, branching into phrases that use "for," "can," "near," "without," etc.
The result is a goldmine of long-tail keyword variations and content ideas based on real user queries. Use this tool to ideate blog posts, FAQs, and topical clusters that directly address your audience's pain points and curiosities.
What I liked: This tool has a comparisons category. Comparisons are important for almost any topic, but we can get bogged down in that kind of content. Nice to see it separated no matter if I’m saving it for another day or if I’m loading as many keyword ideas as possible.
What I didn’t like: The free version is pretty limited with only 3 free searches per day.
Pricing: Free for 3 daily searches, Pro plan starts at $99/month
Another powerful question-mining tool, AlsoAsked scrapes People Also Ask boxes and visualizes related questions in an expandable map. Simply enter your keyword and watch questions branch out into sub-questions, revealing a treasure trove of semantic and thematic connections.
Use this tool to easily see content gaps and opportunities to build topical authority. Export the questions and use them as H2s, FAQs, or to inspire new content. AlsoAsked offers some free insights but requires an account to unlock full features.
What I liked: As much as I love great data in my keyword research, it’s nice to have a simplified visualization that lets me skim ideas without distraction.
What I didn’t like: I wish there were more metrics integrated into the results, like search volume or difficulty scores.
Pricing: Limited insights for free, paid plans start at $15/month
Want to know why your competitors are outranking you? Enter their URL into SpyFu for a behind-the-scenes look at their producers like top organic pages, SEO keywords, backlinks, and more. By learning which pages drive the most traffic, you can drill into the very content and keywords that are giving them a valuable pipeline.
Use these competitive insights to reverse-engineer their content strategy and identify gaps in your own. Look for pages with lots of keywords and traffic but few backlinks - these may be opportunities to create better content and steal their rankings.
What I liked: Once you have an account—even a free login—SpyFu lets you customize your dashboard with competitors. Then it creates personalized shortcuts to insights like “new content.”
What I didn’t like: I wish SpyFu could tell me more about my website from a technical SEO perspective and identify opportunities to improve my rankings.
Pricing: Plans start at $39/month
Semrush’s organic research tools help you find your competitors’ keywords in both Google and Bing. We don’t expect a huge gap between the two search engines but it helps to have them covered. By watching for strong SEO competition, you might catch some website names that weren’t already on your radar.
What I liked: The competitive positioning map is a cool visualization of the amount of traffic a domain is getting from the keywords it has. It’s like a keyword efficiency map, helping you spot competitors that get strong SEO results for their efforts.
What I didn’t like: Semrush seems to be growing more expensive for features that I can get elsewhere. If you already have this in your toolset, it’s handy to help with competitor traffic info. Otherwise SpyFu is a more affordable option.
Pricing: Plans start at $129.95/month
Surfer SEO is an on-page optimization tool that analyzes the top ranking pages for your keyword to come up with suggestions that should drive your content quality. Enter your keyword, and the tool analyze your SERP competitors’ top-ranking content. It suggests ideal article length to target, keyword usage and even H1, H2, H3 details.
Use Surfer's Content Editor to stay on task with the right subtopics and relevant keywords. The built-in content grader scores your content against competitors and identifies areas that can use clarification and more detail. Warning: be careful about Surfer’s over-emphasis on keyword usage. Too much repetition puts you at risk of stuffing your article and distracting the reader.
What I liked: It keeps a running color-coded list of keywords to target in the side panel. Green means that you’ve covered a search term in detail; red shows where you want to give into those details a little more.
What I didn’t like: Surfer is all about blogs. If you are writing to optimize more marketing-focused pages, you won’t find the flexibility to carry suggestions over without a blog style approach.
Pricing: Plans start at $89/month
It takes a lot of resources to create new content and then hope it ranks well. RivalFlow AI leverages your existing content, making just a few page updates turn into SEO gold.
This SEO tool analyzes your existing pages against competitors to find why the content of their page would outrank yours. That’s just step one—RivalFlow is more of an SEO writing tool than an analysis tool. It writes original copy for you to add to your article specifically to close those topic gaps that it identified so you can outrank your competitor.
This SEO tool analyzes your existing pages to write new copy that makes your page more thorough and helpful than other competing pages on the SERP.
With Google’s emphasis on creating helpful content that is useful to readers, this tool gets at the heart of true SEO content optimization.
What I liked: Updating content can be a chore, so I like RivalFlow’s new AI-driven feature that scans your page and tells you where to put the new copy.
What I didn’t like: RivalFlow works best for text-focused pages, so it won’t work well for businesses that want to optimize product pages.
Pricing: Free trial, plans starting at $79/month
I first used the Yoast SEO plugin years ago when we had a Wordpress-based blog, and remains a top-of-mind resource for SEO writers. This comprehensive tool handles on-page SEO basics like title tags, meta descriptions, canonical URLs, and XML sitemaps. It also evaluates your content's readability and keyword optimization, providing suggestions for improvement.
Use Yoast's content analysis feature to ensure your post is well-structured, readable, and includes your target keyword in all the right places. The built-in snippet editor lets you customize how your page appears in the SERP.
What I liked: Yoast generously loads a lot of features into its free version.
What I didn’t like: Yoast isn’t widely available for CMS platforms outside of Wordpress and Shopify. Before you fall in love with the idea of what it offers, make sure your editor is compatible.
Pricing: Free, Premium version starts at $99/year
Clearscope is an AI-powered content optimization tool that helps you create comprehensive, search-engine friendly content. Enter your target keyword, and Clearscope will analyze the top ranking pages to find other keywords that you should touch on in your content.
Use Clearscope's real-time content editor to optimize your draft and ensure you're matching the content depth and quality of the top SERP results.
What I liked: The keyword map feature identifies gaps and opportunities to incorporate more relevant terms.
What I didn’t like: Yeeouch, that price point is rough. This won’t be the right fit for smaller teams or solo operations that don’t have this much budget to work with.
Pricing: Plans start at $189/month
MarketMuse uses AI to build authoritative, topically-rich content. The platform's key differentiator is its focus on "Content Depth"—a metric that measures how well you cover a given topic compared to the competition.
Use MarketMuse's Research tool to analyze any keyword or topic and get a list of related topics, questions to answer, and internal linking suggestions. The Optimize tool scores your draft's content depth and provides specific recommendations to improve topical authority. MarketMuse is a powerful tool for crafting expert-level, search-optimized content.
What I liked: Any tips to help me stay on top of internal linking are always welcome!
What I didn’t like: Its recommendations aren’t as “ready to use” as what I would get from other similar tools. Insights are handy, but this tells me what’s wrong instead of showing how to make it better.
Pricing: Free, limited access with premium plans starting at $99/month
While not strictly for SEO, Grammarly is an indispensable writing tool that helps you create clear, error-free, and readable content. It checks your draft for grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors, while also providing suggestions to improve clarity, brevity, and tone.
The readability analysis helps you keep your content engaging and easy-to-read. We writers might think we’re beyond needing Grammarly’s help with spelling and grammar, but the tool uncovers some crutches that we would otherwise miss. It’s nice to have a helpful editor available for every sentence.
Grammarly offers a robust free version with more advanced feedback in its Premium plan.
What I liked: Grammarly has a Chrome extension so you can proofread your content directly in WordPress, Google Docs, and social media posts before you set them live.
What I didn’t like: Sometimes I wanted to tell Grammarly to chill. A single word changes the cadence, so getting nudges to shorten a phrase for the sake of being concise? That can get old.
Pricing: Free with premium plans starting at $12/month
Jasper.ai is a popular AI tool used to create high-quality content you can use in multiple formats. Its built-in templates help start blog posts, social media content, and ad copy, but you can also use the editor for more long-form pieces.
It's a user-friendly tool for outlining, drafting, and generating SEO-optimized copy. Use the built-in Grammarly and Copyscape integrations to polish your draft and pass plagiarism checks. As with any AI-powered writing tool, remember to fact-check and add your own insights to the generated content.
What I liked: I like being able to adjust Jasper’s tone—including a humorous voice. SEO works across many different styles and doesn’t have to be buttoned-up.
What I didn’t like: While using Jasper, we had results that were all over the place. With AI tools, it’s important to nail down your prompts, but Jasper didn’t always deliver consistency from one project to a similar one.
Pricing: Plans start at $49/month
Copy.ai is another AI-powered writing tool that helps you generate compelling copy for blogs, ads, product descriptions, and more. With over 90 templates and a free-form editor, Copy.ai is designed to kickstart your writing process and overcome creative blocks.
While the AI's outputs can be hit-or-miss, the tool is great for brainstorming ideas, crafting attention-grabbing headlines, and generating SEO meta descriptions at scale. Use the built-in content rewriter and simplifier tools to polish your draft and ensure it's optimized for search.
What I liked: Copy.ai thrives on feedback and iteration, so it’s fun to keep testing angles to see what nails the output you’re hoping to find.
What I didn’t like: There is a high learning curve when it comes to workflows. Testing can also be a pain as they will often time out or take a really long time to process.
Pricing: Free plan, Pro starts at $49/month
Frase is an AI-powered SEO content tool that helps you research, plan, and optimize content for search. The platform's standout feature is its content brief generator, which analyzes the top ranking pages for your keyword and creates a comprehensive brief complete with an outline, talking points to hit, and keywords to target.
Use Frase's brief template to keep all of your team’s writers on the same page. It’s also helpful to make sure that your content matches search intent and covers subtopics well. It pacing from keyword to topic to outline all the way through offers a valuable focus for a process that could easily go off in tangents.
What I liked: The built-in content optimization tool compares your draft against the brief and provides a content score and actionable recommendations. You don’t see this accountability often in tools.
What I didn’t like: Frase makes word count a key factor in its competitive comparisons. That metric has already been deemed irrelevant by Google’s search teams, so it’s disheartening to see it hold such a prominent spot in a summary of page characteristics.
Pricing: Plans start at $15/month
Wordtune is an AI-powered writing companion that helps you communicate more effectively by rephrasing and polishing your writing. Simply write your draft and let Wordtune suggest alternative ways to express your ideas with better clarity, concision, and flow.
While not a substitute for human editing, Wordtune is a great tool for improving your writing style and ensuring your content is engaging and easy to read. Use the tool's "casual" and "formal" tone options to adapt your writing for different audiences. Wordtune offers a generous free plan with more advanced features in its Premium version.
What I liked: The UI is great for editing, I love how clear it is when showing the modifications to a sentence or paragraph. It provides a few different outputs to choose from and the variety of outputs are great.
What I didn’t like: The grammar checker is okay, it didn’t catch as much as Grammarly while I was writing. I wish it had a plagiarism detector.
Pricing: Free, Premium starts at $9.99/month
Bonus: We put together a comprehensive guide covering how to integrate AI into your content strategy.
By now, you've seen the breadth of tools available to supercharge your SEO content creation process. But with so many options, it can be overwhelming to know where to start.
Here's a quick recap of the key tool categories and how they fit into your content workflow:
The specific tools you choose will depend on your budget, team size, and content goals. Here are a few recommended stacks for different use cases:
Of course, these are just suggestions - feel free to mix and match tools based on your unique needs and preferences. The key is to choose tools that integrate well together and support your end-to-end content workflow.
To get the most out of your toolkit, we recommend the following best practices:
Investing in the right SEO writing tools is one of the best ways to scale your content creation, improve content quality, and drive organic traffic growth. By leveraging tools for keyword research, competitive analysis, optimization, and AI-assisted writing, you can achieve your content goals faster—even if your resources are already stretched.
Not sure what to try first? Your existing content already gives you a head start. We recommend checking out RivalFlow AI—a tool that analyzes your content against competitors and provides specific, actionable recommendations to close the gaps in your content that kept you from moving up the ranks. RivalFlow AI answers the questions about what was missing from your page so you can outrank your competitors on the SERP.
