The 5 Best Free or Low-Cost Content Optimization Tools

Note: none of these content optimization tools contain sponsored links or are affiliated with me in any way. I have picked them because I find them super useful in my daily content writing life. I hope you do, too! 🙂

There’s a ton of software out there that can help organizations optimize SEO content for their websites. As a freelancer with over 6 years of experience, I’ve met them all. 

If you’re relatively new to the whole SEO scene, though, the plethora of tools out there can be overwhelming. 

To help make it easier to choose your content optimization tools, I’m sharing the most beginner-friendly SEO tools I’ve worked with so far. 

(TL;DR? Check out the table below for a quick overview of everything I cover in this post.)

1. Hemingway

Hemingway is one of the best SEO content optimization tools for making sure your copy is easy to read. This is important for SEO because search engines want to offer searchers content that’s quickly digestible. 

You can either type directly into Hemingway or copy and paste your work from Google Docs or Microsoft Word or whatever word processor you use. 

Hemingway will highlight five characteristics of your text:

• Red: Sentences that are very hard to read

• Yellow: Sentences that are hard to read

• Green: Grammar issues

• Blue: Weakeners

• Purple: Words with simpler alternatives

As a freelance writer, I use Hemingway every single day. 

But I only really pay attention to the red and yellow highlights. If you put a piece of copy into Hemingway and it comes up with zero highlights, there’s a good chance it’s a robotic read. 

A march of short sentence after short sentence that reads more like a Bob Book than a blog post.  

So instead, I try to keep my copy free of red highlights. I don’t mind a few yellow-highlighted sentences in there, either. 

This keeps me from getting too wordy and complicated, which is something I’m a little notorious for. Or at least, I was before I met Hemingway. 

An embarrassing example: I once wrote a paper in college with the title, “Cuba: A Paradisiacal Oubliette.” 

AKA, a prison in paradise.

(I mean, really. A prison in paradise is way more compelling—and easier to understand by about 1,000% percent.)

Another great thing about Hemingway is that it’s free to use the basic copy/paste highlighting features. 

And so far, I really haven’t needed more than that from this epic tool for SEO content writing.

Hemingway Pricing

For more sophisticated writing help with Hemingway, pricing begins at $8.33 a month if you pay yearly. Otherwise, you’ll fork out $25 a month.

2. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an SEO tool that offers keyword research, domain tracking, site audits, and competitive analysis. I count it as one of the best SEO content optimization tools because it’s user-friendly and provides really good, fresh data. 

For instance, in the screenshot above, you can see the Ahrefs dashboard with the following information for the keyword “best dog breeds for kids”:

• Keyword Difficulty: 15

• Search Volume: 2.2k

• Traffic Potential: 6.6k

• Value: $18

• Keyword Intent: Informational

Here’s what these tools tell you:

• Keyword Difficulty: How hard it is to rank on the first search engine results page (SERP) if used in a webpage or blog post 

• Search Volume: How often people are currently entering the keyword into search engines 

• Traffic Potential: Ahrefs’ projection for how much traffic the keyword could see in the future 

• Value: How much money it would cost each month to get the same amount of traffic for this keyword using PPC ads instead of organic traffic 

• Keyword Intent: What people are looking for when they enter the keyword—Do they want to navigate to a specific website (navigational keyword)? Get information about a topic (informational)? Are they considering their options before making a purchase (commercial)? Or are they ready to buy (transactional)?

All of these features help you write SEO content that’s relevant to your target audience. The more relevant and useful it is to your audience, the more likely it is to get pushed to the top of SERPs.

I mainly use Ahrefs to find keyword topics to use in my clients’ blogs. 

Ahrefs Pricing

You can use a free version of Ahrefs that tells you basic keyword information, like which keywords clients are looking for, how hard they are, and whether the search volume is above or below 1,000.

A paid plan is a lot more comprehensive. Until relatively recently, monthly plans started at $129 a month for 500 credits to use on Ahrefs’ core tools like Keyword Explorer, Rank Tracker, and Site Audit. 

Now, though, Ahrefs offers a $29 starter plan for 100 credits.

I got this plan and then made the mistake of using my 100 credits up within a day or two. 

If I had slowed down and checked the credit usage meter on my dashboard, I would’ve been able to make it last a lot longer! 

To be fair, though, the meter kind of blends into the page and is hard to spot.

So, I ended up upgrading to a pricier plan, but so far it’s been well worth the cost. I’ll probably keep the more expensive plan going forward.

3. SEOSpace

I use Squarespace as my website builder, mostly because I’m not patient or skilled enough to figure out WordPress web design. 

If you use Squarespace, I highly recommend SEOSpace. It’s basically Yoast (a popular WordPress content optimization tool) but for Squarespace users. 

Sure, Squarespace comes with places to fill in SEO information like your SEO title and meta description. But there's no baked-in SEO wizard to help you make sure your content is optimized to the nth degree.

SEOSpace is that wizard. It’s super easy to use, too. The first step is to create an account and install the content optimization tool’s Chrome plugin. 

See the white arrow in the screenshot of my website below? It’s pointing to the SEOSpace plugin icon, which appears on every page of my website, including the blog post pages.

When you’re working on a webpage or blog post within your Squarespace dashboard, you can tell SEOSpace to run a scan of your site. 

Enter a primary keyword to scan the page with if you’re looking to rank for a specific keyword. Or, leave that field blank. 

SEOSpace will scan the page to evaluate its on-page, off-page, and technical SEO strengths and weaknesses. You’ll get an overall SEO score plus a list of things you can do to improve the page’s optimization. 

I’m relatively new to SEOSpace and have a lot of work to do on my site. But with this content optimization tool, I feel like I’ve got a helpful friend by my side to make sure I’m maxing out my SEO efforts on every single webpage. 

Depending on which plan you end up using, SeoSpace also offers: 

• SEO site audits

• Tutorials and courses

• AI recommendations 

• Blog post idea generation

• Scheduled reports and monitoring

• Keyword research

• Competitor analysis 

SEOSpace Pricing

The free plan comes with the SeoSpace plugin and basic tutorials. 

The DIY plan, which costs $14.99 a month if you pay monthly, offers AI recommendations, SEO site audits, blog post ideas, scheduled reports and monitoring, and limited keyword research and competitor analysis tools. 

This is the plan I’ve decided to go with. 

If you spring for a more expensive Pro or Agency plan, you essentially get more of what’s already in the DIY plan: more site audits, comprehensive keyword research, and more blog post suggestions. 

The agency plan—which is ideal for bigger companies—offers things like an onboarding call, white-labeled PDF reports, and priority support. 

All paid plans come with a 7-day free trial. 

SEO Optimization Tools for Other Website Builders

If you don’t use Squarespace, you’ll still want an SEO tool that can plug into your website and offer tips for on-page, off-page, and technical content optimization. 

Here are the best content optimization tools for SEO for the most popular website builders and/or platforms: 

• WordPress: Yoast SEO or Rank Math

• Wix: Built-in Wix SEO Assistant or Rabbit SEO

• Shopify: Plug In SEO

• Webflow: Lighthouse

• Hubspot: Built-in SEO recommendations

• GoDaddy: Built-in SEO wizard

4. CoSchedule Headline Studio

Ever wonder if your blog headline is something that’ll attract people’s attention, be readable, and hit all the SEO sweet spots? 

CoSchedule’s Headline Studio is the content optimization tool for you. All you have to do is pop in your headline, click the “analyze” button, and see what score you get. CoSchedule breaks down each headline according to two separate scoring systems. 

The Headline Score measures:  

• Word balance: How many common, uncommon, emotional, and power words you use.

• Headline type: The type of headline entered, from list to how-to.

• Reading grade level: The reading level a person would need to understand the headline.

• Sentiment: Whether the headline sounds aggressive, positive, sad, or neutral.

• Clarity: Whether the headline is clear or not. 

• Skimmability: How easy (or hard) the headline is to quickly skim. 

The SEO Score measures: 

• Keyword quality: How many high-quality, rankable keywords are in your headline.

• Keyword density: How well the search terms are targeted in the headline and how likely your audience is to find your piece.

• Average monthly searches: The number of people who search for the keyword phrase in your headline every month.

• Search competition: How hard or easy it is to rank for your keyword phrase.

• Keyword trend: Whether searches for your keyphrase are trending up or down.

• Search preview: What the headline will look like in SERPs.

• Headline competition: How much better (or worse) your headline is compared to competitors.

• Keyword variations: Other keywords people search for when they’re looking for information about your keyword phrase.

• Related questions: Questions people ask that include or are similar to your keyword phrase. 

It’s a lot of information, I know, but CoSchedule presents it in a skimmable, color-coded way. Red means bad, yellow means better, green means great. Boom. 

One tip: don’t try to turn every single SEO and Headline Score criteria green. It’s really hard to do, and you’ll find that if you turn something from yellow to green, another thing will, at the same time, go from green to yellow. 

Content optimization tool fatigue is real, folks. Don’t let yourself get sucked in.

Just aim for a green overall SEO and Headline Score, and you’re good to go. 

CoSchedule Headline Studio Pricing

The free version of CoSchedule Headline Studio only gives you a Headline Score, not a SEO Score, and you only get 10 credits per month. 

For context, it takes 1 credit to analyze a headline 1 time. Any little change you make will cost another credit to reanalyze. 

If you want the SEO Score, pay a base price of $4 a month or $29 for the whole year for 10 credits. 

For the SEO Score feature and more than 10 credits, use the sliding scale to see what your price will be. I’m on the 50-monthly-credits plan.

5. Compressor.io

Okay, so images on your site aren’t written content, but they are content you should have on your websites and blog posts. People like to see screenshots and pictures. They help break up text and provide a more well-rounded view of a topic.

But making sure your images are the right size for technical SEO optimization is key. 

This is where the content optimization tool Compressor.io comes in. 

With the free version of this tool—which is what I use—you can upload 10 images at a time, as long as they’re no bigger than 10 MB each. You can then pick from three types of compression: 

• Lossy: Cut size down significantly without visibly sacrificing photo quality

• Lossless: Cut size down a small amount without sacrificing any photo quality.

• Custom (only available on paid plans): Set the parameters for image size reduction yourself.

I use Compressor.io to quickly cut the size of my photos by half or more without sacrificing much visible quality at all. 

My favorite feature is the Before and After tool, where you can see what each image will look like after the compression. 

Honestly, it’s hard for me to see any difference between the before and after for this image! 

Compressor.io Pricing

If you want more fine-tuning image optimization capabilities, a Compressor.io Pro plan costs $50 a year.

Content Optimization Tools to Save Cash

With these five content optimization tools in hand, you can optimize your blog and websites without making your wallet weep. 

Or, if you want to save time and let someone else do the heavy lifting, that’s fine too. As an experienced SEO content writer, it’s what I’m here for. 😌

👉🏼 Need help crafting SEO optimized blogs and web copy that engage readers and drive results? Learn more about how I can help you!

Content Optimization Tool FAQs: 

Which is the cheapest SEO tool?

There’s no one-size-fits-all SEO tool, but the most affordable SEO content optimization tools are of the freemium variety. Tools like Hemingway, Ahrefs, SEOSpace, CoSchedule Headline Studio, and Compressor.io all come with free plans to get you started.

The premium features cost between $4 and $30 a month for these tools, so not bad at all.

How can I start SEO as a beginner?

Start by learning SEO basics like keyword research, on-page optimization, and link building. Use freemium tools like SEOSpace, Ahrefs, and CoSchedule to optimize your content for SEO.

Focus on creating quality content, optimizing site speed, and staying updated with SEO trends.