Great optimization tools can identify missing topics and keywords, suggest and refine headers and titles, generate meta-data, and show tons of useful information about your competitors’ articles. If you aren’t using an optimization tool, you probably should.
I work at Ahrefs, and we make an AI content optimization tool called AI Content Helper. I think it’s the best in the market (I really do: I even make feature suggestions based on the experiences of our content team).
But that does make me biased. So to help you pick the best tool for your needs, I also asked the teams behind three other popular optimization tools—Surfer, Clearscope, and Frase—to explain what makes their tools unique.
If you’re wondering whether content optimization tools are worth the hype, here’s Louise from our blog team adding 65% traffic to an article using our content optimization tool, AI Content Helper. They work!
I’ve optimized hundreds of articles over the years, and used half a dozen different tools. From my experience, there are a few core features that every tool needs to include:
Content scoring
By scoring or grading how well your articles are optimized (usually from 0-100, or from A-E), you can make it much easier to understand and improve the search rankings of all your content.
57 content score, not great, not terrible.
If your article scores a lowly 30 in a SERP full of 70+ articles, you’ll probably benefit from adding in some missing sub-topics or making the post more detailed. Generating content scores for all of your blog posts makes it easy to quickly see which articles are due a content refresh.
And as an extra plus, content scoring makes it much easier to talk about SEO in terms other people in your company understand—like your boss, or your CMO. It’s one of the reasons many bigger companies use content scores as part of their KPIs (like aiming to optimize every article to 80 or greater).
User-friendly content editor
If you’re going to be writing and editing content directly in your content optimization tool, you’ll need a decent content editor that lets you format and style your writing.
(And even better if your content score increases in real-time with the text changes you make.)
Here’s the content editor in AI Content Helper. Clean!
AI (used in useful ways)
It’s a given that modern content optimization tools use AI—in the form of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning—for topic analysis and content scoring.
But with the explosion of generative AI onto the scene, it’s also worth looking for other AI features to speed-up your content workflow. Some tools can use AI to help you:
In AI Content Helper, you can highlight any section of text and ask the AI assistant for help:
Competitor data
The best optimization tools also include information about your competitors’ content, too. At the minimum, it’s helpful to see a content score for the top-ranking articles in the SERP for your target keyword.
But beyond that, understanding how long the top-ranking articles are, or how their headers are structured, or even how many referring domains they have, can help you decide how much effort will be required to (hopefully) knock them from the top spot.
Here’s AI Content Helper showing a content score, word count, referring domains and domain rating for competitor articles—with the option to see even more information whenever you want:
Better rankings
When we studied the correlation between rankings and content scores for four popular optimization tools, we found weak correlations all around.
That might not sound very impressive, but even a weak positive correlation is pretty helpful. Our study suggests that optimizing on-page text does genuinely improve ranking performance, at least by a little.
Considering that Google uses tons of ranking factors in all manner of complicated ways, it’s pretty great that something we control can improve performance.
Obviously, correlation is causation, and you will be the best judge of how helpful a content optimization tool is for actually improving your rankings.
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