12 Best Content Optimization Tools in 2023

Tomas Laurinavicius
January 12, 2024


Since 2016, the number of live websites on the internet has boomed from 900 million to around 2 billion in 2022. That’s roughly 2 billion competitors, 2 billion content strategies, and 2 billion examples of successful and failed approaches to online presence.

The upshot?

Although standing out in such a massive content marketing network is far more challenging, we have quite a few reliable resources to use and learn from.

The ultimate goal is to help you create search engine-friendly content based on your rivals’ best practices that drive organic traffic to your website.

It doesn’t happen by chance (small hits can happen, though).

You must constantly feed Google (or any other search engine) with valuable and well-optimized content, and SEO tools can help you.

Now, you may be thinking, “Why bother when I can pay for advertising?” and to be fair, you’re not entirely wrong.

Paid advertising can occasionally be effective, but it won’t last a second compared to organic traffic. First, organic traffic is far more affordable than PPC, and you don’t have to pay a fortune for a few leads.

Also, organic traffic is a scalable content strategy.

It’s a snowball effect that makes it even more valuable as a long-term investment. So if driving traffic is your holy grail, you should focus on creating in-depth, evergreen content that won’t go stale.

And here’s the million-dollar question, “How?”

That’s what this article is all about.

12 Content Optimization Tools Pro Marketers Swear By

The wild evolution of content optimization tools has reached an incredible point in 2023.

There are nearly 10,000 MarTech tools and solutions on the market, so finding the right set for your content strategy can be challenging.

But you don’t have to go through every single tool and check whether it works or not.

Here are the 12 best content optimization tools to make you a next-level content marketer.

1. Surfer

Surfer SEO is a robust cloud-based content optimization tool.

Its primary focus is on-page website optimization through analyzing and comparing your pages with the top-ranked websites on a given topic (or keyword).

Assumptions don’t work in SEO. You can’t try to guess what kind of content Google likes to rank best. That’s why you should let Surfer give you a data-driven answer, identifying how much content is missing from your page.

Surfer is a convenient tool to analyze URLs, keywords, or domains without digging through an overwhelming ocean of data.

Plus, unlike many content optimization tools that only provide raw data, SurferSEO will give you a visual representation of all the areas that require modification.

Top Features

  • Keyword-driven content planner
  • On-page SEO optimization
  • SEO audit tool for existing content

Pricing

Get a 7-day trial for $1. Basic plan starts at $49/mo.

2. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is more than a keyword research tool. It includes tools for competitor analysis, rank tracking in Google, and site audits.

It’s one of the best SEO tools for higher-level keyword research and backlink generation of various sites.

You can also use Ahrefs SEO Toolbar as a browser extension for competitor analysis and link building. This SEO and social media marketing tool is more than an extra capable pair of hands for website owners, content marketers, and SEO professionals.

With this toolbar, you can access page and domain metrics, including Ahrefs Domain Rating, Ahrefs URL Rating, Ahrefs Rank, total backlinks, referring domains, estimated organic search traffic, and the number of relevant keywords.

But that’s not all. You can customize this toolbar, and you can mouse-pick relevant metrics. A single click on a selected SEO metric is enough to bring up the corresponding report in Site Explorer or Keywords Explorer.

Top Features

  • Optimized algorithm to find all the related keywords
  • Backlink analysis
  • Optimizing for Image and Local Pack

Pricing

Lite plan starts at $99/mo up to $999/mo for Enterprise solutions.

3. Long Tail Pro

Long Tail Pro is a handy SEO tool for freelancers, bloggers, and small business owners looking to invest in content marketing.

With this excellent content optimization software, you can quickly discover new promising LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing) and assess the competition based on the KC (Keyword Competitiveness) score, saving you long and tedious research.

You’ll instantly love Long Tail Pro’s user-friendly interface if you’ve already spent some time with other SEO tools.

If you’ve no previous experience, the training videos will teach you every trick to find exact keywords for your business website.

Top Features

  • Identify and target keywords using proprietary KC score
  • Searching multiple seed keywords simultaneously
  • On-page optimization

Pricing

Starter package starts at only $37/mo (far more affordable than many other keyword research tools).

4. MarketMuse

If you want AI as a superpower for planning, researching, and writing high-quality content, MarketMuse could be the content optimization software.

MarketMuse highlights the keywords that could be helpful for you to score easy wins in the market based on your existing content.

You can also request content briefs within MarketMuse.

Using content briefs, writers can create ready-to-use outlines based on the topics covered, average word counts, and KPIs they should strive for. This is AI creating an original piece of content for you.

Top Features

  • Superior audience targeting
  • Optimized campaign and content management
  • Original content creation

Pricing

Free with limited access. Pricing starts at $79/mo and grows based on your needs**.**

5. Semrush Content Marketing Platform

Using Semrush is almost a no-brainer in marketing. If you already use Semrush in other areas of search engine optimization, you should expand your use to content optimization.

The SEO writing assistant allows you to edit, review, and optimize your content based on the top-ranked articles in Google organic results.

You can log into your WordPress website and install the SEO writing assistant plugin. It also works with Google Docs. After installation, activate the Google Docs plugin, and you’re ready to go.

Top Features

  • Content grading with different metrics (readability, SEO, tone of voice, and originality)
  • Plagiarism checker
  • Topic Research

Pricing

Guru plan costs $229.95/mo, and the Business plan costs $449.95/mo.

6. CoSchedule Headline Analyzer

Headline Studio by CoSchedule is the perfect content optimization tool that allows you to create a surefire headline.

Enter your headline, and you’re done. Headline Analyzer will score your overall headline quality and tell you how much it will lead to social shares, increased traffic, and SEO value.

Top Features

  • Headline type customization
  • Enhanced algorithms to Identify related keywords
  • Headline grading

Pricing

Free

7. Hotjar

Hotjar is a website visualization software that reveals the online behavior of your users.

Hotjar Heatmaps creates a copy of your page’s HTML code and categorizes each element based on its title tags, parent elements, and IDs or classes.

It’s an incredible way to track what users are doing on your web pages – where they click, how far they scroll, and what they view or ignore. Heatmaps help you improve your conversion rate and optimize your CTAs, headings, etc.

Top Features

  • Exportable Heatmap Analytics Data
  • Incoming feedback customization
  • User action-triggered surveys

Pricing

Hotjar basic plan is available for free, and Business Plan starts at $99/mo.

8. Optimizely

Optimizely is a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) that allows marketing teams and others to manage and optimize their digital activities and customer experience across all touchpoints.

It’s a popular website optimization software for businesses.

Optimizely makes it easy to run split tests for your website. Use the editor to design variations, define where the experiment runs and who sees it, and set events to measure success.

When your experiment looks and works the way you envisioned, you can publish it live for the world to see!

Top Features

  • Random or Targeted Rollouts
  • Experimentation with Feature Tests
  • Feature Configuration

Pricing

Optimizely pricing starts at $50,000/year and doesn’t have a free version.

9. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is probably the number one WordPress SEO plugin and a must-have on-page optimization tool for many businesses. It provides an SEO wizard for your WordPress site and helps you publish SEO-friendly content.

If your content hasn’t achieved the SEO-friendly “green light” yet, don’t worry. Yoast will provide you with a list of SEO recommendations that you can change to write SEO-friendly content for your blog or web pages.

Top Features

  • Optimize your website with the right keywords for your users
  • Identify and avoid dead links
  • Improve content quality and link suggestions

Pricing

Yoast has a free plan, as well as a premium plan which costs $99/yr.

10. FAQ Page JSON-LD Schema Generator

The FAQ Page Schema Generator is one of the JSON-LD Schema Generators that can help you quickly create the required structured content eligible to be displayed as a rich result in Google search.

This tool is straightforward, and you won’t need any coding experience. Get access to FAQ Page JSON-LD Schema Generator on all mobile and desktop devices and optimize your content for Google featured snippets and “People Also Ask” questions.

Top Features

  • Device responsiveness
  • User-friendly and easy-to-use interface
  • More search visibility

Pricing

Free

11. ProWritingAid

ProWritingAid is a world-class grammar and style checking platform combined with detailed reports to help you improve your writing.

ProWritingAid offers a unique combination of suggestions, articles, videos, and quizzes that make writing fun and interactive.

It’s available via web browsers on both Windows and Mac. ProWritingAid also supports Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and one of the most popular book writing tools, Scrivener.

Top Features

  • Contextual In-depth reports
  • Context-sensitive style suggestions
  • Visualize sentence lengths and variation

Pricing

Premium version costs $20/mo$79/yr, or $399 for a lifetime subscription. It also offers a 100% free version that won’t include the features most serious writers need.

12. Wordly

You can attend almost any multilingual conference, meeting, webinar, or training and find that there is always some problem with translation, even with the best human interpreters, months of planning, and big budgets and teams.

Wordly solves the problem efficiently.

It’s the leading provider of an AI-powered interpretation service that gives you a better grasp of the hottest debates and fresh-out-of-the-oven content in your business and helps you optimize your content to make it more effective.

Top Features

  • Translate simultaneously into 20+ languages
  • AI-powered interpretation
  • Platform compatibility

Pricing

On average, it costs $100-$150/hour.

Conclusion

With the mounting competition in marketing and every business line, content optimization tools are necessary. But remember, it shouldn’t be only about gaining more leads. You can also enjoy the ride and have a good feeling about yourself when you create high-quality content.

That said, you don’t need every single one of these tools to create winning content.

Review your strategy, goals, workflows, needs, and interests, and then pick tools to get you where you want to be.

Tomas Laurinavicius

Hi! I'm Tomas. I'm a founder, marketer, designer, and writer from Lithuania, now happily living in Alicante, Spain. I'm a marketing advisor at Devsolutely and a partner at Craftled, building Best Writing and Marketful, among other useful products.