With so much available in a single online search, just creating good web content isn't enough to stand out. As much as we'd love search engines to just discover our content and deem it superb, that's not how SEO works. You need to optimize your content so it gets both discovered and loved--by readers and search engines alike.
With the right optimization tools and a structured process, you can create content that connects with your audience, ranks higher in search results, and drives traffic to your website. This guide explores the top tools that can help you along the way.
I tested dozens of tools to find some gems that would fit in my content optimization process. Since my process is always evolving, I like to keep my eyes open for new tools and revisit some more widely-known options too. For this post, I’m highlighting these current standouts:
Before I get into my methodology, let’s review what content optimization is. That way we have a good yard stick for deciding what make an SEO tool a helpful one.
Content optimization is everything you do on your page so that search engines can better understand it, properly index it, and serve it up to an interested and relevant audience. These days it also includes making it more user-friendly, so that people can make sense of what you have to say. Do it right, and they’ll come back for more.
When you have those elements down, you can expect to see these benefits:
There are two standout metrics that tell us what we already knew about the importance of ranking on the first page of search results. If you don’t land on page one, people aren’t going to find you.
Before you get discouraged, remember that putting in the work to improve your page is going to lift you on more than one keyword. Even if you don’t hit the top 3 for your most competitive keywords, the increased SEO effort will pay off. This is about increasing your visibility to get more traffic, and strong content optimization is what it takes to get there.
I’ve outlined a content optimization workflow that covers both technical and strategic opportunities. Following a structured process like this will help you tackle the most critical steps and avoid mistakes that affect your SEO. Keep an eye out for tools that help maximize your content optimization work.
A content audit can cover a lot of ground, but the main goal is to ensure your overall content’s health. This could be flagging thin content, keyword gaps, and topics you need to address. You should also identify any cannibalizing content in need of canonicalization. I’d suggest running a full audit at least every quarter. You can even break this down into small steps over time.
Here's how to conduct a basic content audit:
For example, you might find blog posts targeting valuable keywords that have thin content (under 500 words) or are missing important on-page elements. Optimizing those posts could yield quick wins.
Find relevant keywords to target, prioritize based on difficulty and search volume, and map them to specific pages. This gives you a better grasp of the pages and topics that answer what your audience wants to find.
Effective keyword research involves:
One easy shortcut is to use SpyFu’s Top Pages feature here. It pulls together the top performing pages for a domain and ties them to keywords that they already rank for. By organizing your pages by search intent, you can get a better picture of details that you need to address.
Optimize elements like title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and the content itself for quality, depth, and search intent. Some of these content optimization tools have built-in features to help write these shorter clips with relevant tie-ins.
When you optimize elements on your page, pay attention to these tasks:
Each of these should include the target keyword or, in smaller header tags, related keywords—but only in reasonable numbers. I want to stress that it’s not helpful to overload your keyword in each of these tasks. It doesn’t belong in every header, and adding it too much is going to harm your readability.
The Rytr tool has a feature made to optimize headers and meta descriptions.
Track metrics like rankings, traffic, and engagement to gauge performance. It’s important to find tools that include your history, if possible, so you can compare your growth against a benchmark from where you were before.
Important metrics to track include:
I included some tools that helped with specific parts of that optimization workflow, but there are others that hold there out with broader and larger benefits. Let’s look at the top tools that you can use to optimize your content for better SEO.
Each of these tools level up my process to optimize our pages for better SEO.
Surfer SEO provides data-driven content suggestions to align with search intent and boost rankings. Top features include:
How Surfer SEO helps optimize content:
Surfer’s content editor includes suggestions for keywords, headings, and word count.
Surfer focuses mostly on blog articles with little opportunity to venture outside of that box. Not helpful for businesses that want help with landing pages or niche solution pages
Pricing: Their plans range from $89-$239/month based on needs.
MarketMuse uses AI to help you research content ideas, accelerate content creation, and optimize content to rank well. It offers:
MarketMuse's approach to content optimization:
Its ability to estimate content ROI is unique
This price point puts MarketMuse out of reach for smaller businesses, and it has a steep learning curve that means you won’t see big benefits very quickly.
Pricing: MarketMuse ranges from $99/month to $499/month for its advanced plans.
Frase aims to offer teams a research-to-publish content optimization platform. Highlights include:
Frase's content optimization process:
The outline section is usually something you breeze over in other tools. I like the interactivity of this one that made me feel I had a little more control over the article’s direction.
At first glance you might think that Frase is for article creation, but that’s an add-on. The starting price will be you content briefs and analysis. If you need help with writing, another tool will be a better fit.
Pricing: Plans start at $15/month for a single user, $115 base for 3 or more.
Dashword breaks down your SERP competitor content into interactive outlines, giving you a chance to build a brief on the best of what you see.
Using Dashword for content optimization:
Content decay monitoring is nice, especially as you have more depth in your content that can be harder to track.
The content monitoring feature comes only with the hefty $349 cost.
Pricing: There’s a big ranges in plans from $99 to $349/month.
RivalFlow’s unique angle helps you identify page-specific content gaps that are keeping you from ranking higher. It generates original copy for you to add to your page, optimizing your content by making it more helpful.
How RivalFlow optimizes content:
By focusing on optimizing content that you have already published, RivalFlow complements other optimization tools. It helps you build on what you already have, boosting content without the need for a full rewrite--and its users are seeing incredible results.
It can integrate with Google Search Console to track before and after results. Awesome for dropping into a client report.
RivalFlow only works on existing (published) content, so you will need a separate tool for new content generation.
Pricing: Starts at $79/month billed annually
Hemingway is a straightforward tool made to improve your writing. Its editor flags any issues or elements that you should review. This could be anything from word choice to sentence structure. Hemingway’s role in optimization is making your page more readable and user-friendly. Here are some ways it does that:
Benefits of using Hemingway:
In the style of its namesake, Hemingway makes writing punchy and more concise.
I can write a sentence that makes perfect sense in my head, but an objective editor might find it hard to follow. I like Hemingway’s “eyes” for that.
It looks like the “proofreading” part is free, but rewrites are priced on a sentence-by-sentence basis, with a limit of 5000 sentences per month.
Pricing: Plans start at $100, billed annually
Content optimization is a vital part of any successful SEO strategy. However, it’s more than a few steps, and many of those steps lean on sifting through a lot of data. That’s where the right tools can help you make the content optimization less painful, if not more effective. The payoff of good SEO optimization is worth investing in a few tools to ensure a better outcome. If you can narrow down your trusted toolset with help from our tips, then you are on your way to making valuable additions.
