How to Use SEO Writing Tools to Boost Your Traffic

In this blog post, we will explore how to leverage SEO writing tools to boost your traffic and improve your search engine rankings. In today’s digital landscape, search engine optimization (SEO) plays a crucial role in driving traffic to your blog and increasing your online visibility. By utilizing effective SEO writing tools, you can enhance your blog’s performance and attract a larger audience.

Here are the top reasons why you need them and the tools I use to improve my writing.

How to Use SEO Writing Tools

Search engine optimization can be tricky because Google is constantly improving its algorithm. If you try to beat the algorithm with black-hat techniques, chances are your SEO success won’t last long and you’ll be penalized once Google catches you.

The best way to grow your website and traffic is by creating content for your users that is actually helpful to them. First, you should talk about things that are relevant to your domain where you have expertise. Second, your content should be easy to understand.

SEO tools can help you find the right topics, and even what headings and keywords you should use. They give you tips on how to improve your readability according to the topic you’ve chosen.

Next, there are certain technical SEO measures you need to add like sitemaps, schema markups, robots.txt, and breadcrumbs. There are tools that make it easy to add recommended measures with just a few clicks.

So chances are you’re going to need at least 2 or 3 tools to help you stay on top of your SEO game.

To sum up, with the right set of search engine optimization tools, you can:

• grow your site traffic despite the constant algorithm changes
• discover opportunities for organic traffic growth
• fix vulnerabilities on your site that could hurt your search ranking
• monitor and grow your backlink profile
• analyze and optimize your campaigns
• speed up your overall SEO process

1. To find the best keywords to target

If your goal is to rank high on Google, writing content without targeting any keywords is risky. You can get lucky, but ranking in Google without proper targeting will be hard.

A better approach is to analyze keyword data using a tool like Ahrefs and write your content using that knowledge. 

Below, I’ll outline four ways you can use Ahrefs to help identify the best keywords to target.

1. To understand the keyword difficulty and competition 

The first method I’d suggest is to add your keyword to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer and look at the Keyword Difficulty (KD) of the keyword. 

For this example, I’ve used the keyword “typewriter.”

Ahrefs estimates it’s a hard keyword to rank for. We’ll need backlinks from ~77 websites just to rank on the first page of Google for this keyword.

Let’s contrast this with a more specific search. Let’s say we’re looking for this typewriter song; we might then enter “leroy anderson typewriter.” 

Ahrefs estimates that this is a much easier keyword to rank for. We’ll need backlinks from only ~two websites to rank on the first page of Google.

The bottom line here is that not all keywords are created equal. So choose your battles (and your keywords) carefully. 

2. To identify low-competition keywords

Let’s return to Keywords Explorer, plug in a keyword phrase, and head over to the Matching terms report. 

In this example, for the keyword “kimchi recipe,” we can’t see many low-competition keywords. 

To get the lowest competition keywords, we’ll need to add a filter and set the KD to 20. 

Once we have applied the filter, we can see more green KD scores—meaning these keywords are lower competition.

If we wrote articles about these specific keyword topics, we’d have a better chance of ranking than simply writing about “kimchi recipe” and all the initial matching terms.

3. To identify high traffic potential keywords

Open up a new instance of Keywords Explorer, plug in the keyword “kimchi recipe,” and head over to the Matching terms report.

Then add a Traffic Potential filter from 0 to 30,000.

Once we have done this, we can see the keywords with the highest organic TP.

Let’s say we wanted to take it further and filter for the lowest KD keywords in this list.

We can do that by adding a KD filter with a max score of 20. Once we have done that, we’ll get the following list.

Having keywords to target that have a low KD and a high TP means that you will stand a good chance of ranking for them in Google.

4. To identify content gaps

Another way you can find opportunities for content is to use Ahrefs’ Content Gap tool. 

For the next example, I’m going to stick with the “kimchi recipes” keyword. I’ll pretend I’m the BBC Good Food website, and I want to expand the Korean food content.

To do this, I’ve entered the top competitors of the “kimchi recipes” SERP into the Content Gap report and clicked the “Show keywords” button.

Once the report has been generated, I’ll filter it again using the keyword “korean,” as I only want to filter by Korean food content.

Here’s what it looks like:

We can see how easy it is to find keyword opportunities that other websites rank for, but your website doesn’t.

2. To write basic content

Should you use SEO writing tools to create content? Well, it depends.

Writing content with SEO writing tools is still a contentious topic—especially if we are talking about AI tools like ChatGPT. 

Here’s why I think you should be cautious when using these tools:

• They don’t always fact-check.
• They make up the data sometimes.
• Sometimes they’ll lie if they don’t know the answer.
• They draw from internet sources that are often incorrect themselves.
• They aren’t always good with technical content.

If these bullet points were describing a potential content writer—you probably wouldn’t hire them.

But before you cancel your AI subscriptions, it’s worth noting that there’s a place for tools like these. But they are best used cautiously, in my opinion.

Here are three examples of where I would use SEO writing tools to help write basic content.

1. To create article outlines

SEO writing tools can help give you a framework to build your content around, but they typically need a lot of tweaking. 

Here’s an example of me using NeuralText to create an article outline:

And let’s repeat this with ChatGPT:

We can see that with NeuralText, it’s gone for a standard structure. With ChatGPT, it’s not that different but provides a bit more detail. 

If we compare this against the structure of the top-ranking pages in Google, we can see that the structure of the top-ranking pages is different. 

In this particular example, it’s ~2000 words on the best SEO content writing tools. There’s no definition or importance of the tools; it’s just straight into the list of the top tools.

So should you use AI tools for outlines? Or is it better to write your own from scratch? It depends on how technical the writing is. 

If your writing is non-technical, then an outline that covers the definition, importance of, and role of may be more than enough. But more specific details are often needed for more technical topics like SEO.

2. To create meta descriptions at scale

When it comes to writing basic content like meta descriptions, tools like ChatGPT—and, more specifically, the OpenAI API can help you speed up the content creation process. 

Here’s a quick example of some meta descriptions I generated programmatically using a Google Apps script I found on GitHub.

Assuming your content is in cell A2, you can drag the formula below down, and it will automatically generate the meta descriptions for you using the API.

Place the following code in cell B2 after running the script:

=AI("write an interesting meta description for cell("&[TITLE CELL NUMBER]&"))")

Replace [TITLE CELL NUMBER] with your cell reference. You can change the part stating “write an interesting meta description for cell” to any prompt, but I’ve kept it very basic.

Here’s the output:

Again, I’m not saying these are the greatest meta descriptions in the world, but if you have a large website, this can be an efficient (and cost-effective) way to write them at scale.

But what does Google think about this? Well, it is completely fine with programmatically made meta descriptions. But as always, remember to follow its general guidelines around this topic.

3. To create newsletters or email templates

Another example of basic content is newsletters and email templates. Creating structured newsletters or emails with a tool like ChatGPT is a breeze. 

Here’s an example of it in action:

And you can also use it for email templates as well. 

Here’s a quick example:

As we saw with the outlines, the content here is basic and likely needs improving. But for simple frameworks, it can be useful.

3. To make your content more readable

My favorite SEO writing tool for making my content more readable is Grammarly.

Here’s what I like about it.

Grammarly

It’s a paid tool that helps improve your grammar. I find it helpful to use while writing or editing my content.

When creating a new document, you are encouraged to set goals. This allows the tool to tailor its suggestions based on your goals and audience.

Once you’ve set your preferences, Grammarly will score your writing and provide suggestions on clarity, engagement, style, delivery, and correctness.

It’s a helpful writing tool that many content teams have built into their proofreading process.

Once you have checked a few documents using Grammarly, you can get an analytics breakdown. 

It shows how many sessions you have improved. It has helped me improve 68% of my sessions—quite a lot.

I’ve used Grammarly a lot in the last year or so, and I can testify that it’s usually accurate. But I noticed once that it suggested replacing “links” with “sausages.”