Content Marketing is one of the most beneficial and at the same time most difficult strategies when you start implementing digital marketing for your business.
If it is one thing to write the content you would like to, it is a whole different level of difficulty to decide on the topics to write on that has enough amount of search intent and are feasible to rank competing with other top websites in your niche.
Therefore, any software tool that might help you in this process is going to be of massive value in saving time, effort, and money.
Surfer SEO is one such tool that has some excellent features to do basic keyword research and to come up with a structure for your content to help you with your overall content marketing strategy.
As good as Surfer SEO is as a content optimization tool, you might be looking for a cheaper alternative or a comparable tool with even features.
If you are one of those, we will have a look at some of the best alternatives to Surfer SEO in this post. Let's get right onto it.
Pricing - Starts from $14.99 for 4 articles and 4,000 words generated per month.
Frase is an all-in-one content generation and optimization tool that lets you do everything from the research for your article, build the outline for it, write the long-form post, and optimize it to get ranked in search engines.
Once you have done the keyword research for your article or blog post, Frase lets you build a content brief easily within minutes to get a complete outline of it.
The automatic passage paraphrasing and rewriting features help you with repurposing existing content in addition to generating fresh content for your blog.
With pricing starting at just $14.99 per month, it is a lot more affordable tool compared to Surfer SEO and offers an equal or sometimes even better option depending on your requirements.
If you are an agency, there is a Team plan as well costing $114.99 per month providing access to 3 user seats that can be further added for $25 per additional seat.
You can also compare your generated article with the best-performing posts for the selected primary keyword.
It is also possible to connect your Google Search Console account to sync the data and get content suggestions and opportunities that you can rank for.
Also, if you need AI copywriting as well, there is a Pro Add-on that costs $35 per month that lets you generate an unlimited number of words.
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This is a huge advantage as you can have all your content generation within a single app and there is no need for a separate login for yourself and your team for another AI copywriting tool.
Pricing - Starts from $39 per month for 5 articles and 100,000 AI words per month.
Scalenut is another all-in-one content research, generation, and optimization platform that has an incredible array of features.
First up, you can do some really in-depth keyword research with data on the search volume, relevance, and cost per click. Scalenut will provide you with topic clusters which will be really handy to plan a lot of content around a single main topic.
Next, you can get detailed insights and analysis on the content of competitors and match your strategy to get better and rank higher.
Some of the details you get include the word count, number of header tags, number of images used, the NLP terms the article ranks for, etc.
With the data provided on topic research and competitors analysis, Scalenut can provide you with a detailed content brief or outline which you can expand further to get the full-length article.
Once you start writing the article, Scalenut will give you real-time feedback and NLP analysis to maximize the chances of the article being as optimized as it can get with data on keyword usage too.
After you have completed the article, you get an SEO score on how good the chances are for it to rank well on search engines. This score is also in real-time, therefore any changes you make to the article have an immediate effect on it.
On top of all, you can a very generous amount of words that you can use to generate AI-written content all within Scalenut.
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When it comes to pricing, plans start at just $39 per month. Although most of the features are available across all the plans, you get unlimited content generation in the mid-level plan and above.
In the highest Pro plan, you can generate up to 75 SEO-optimized articles per month, audit & optimize up to 75 pages, and also get a dedicated customer success manager.
However, you get only 1 user across all the plans, and only in the Pro plan, you can add more users at a cost of $49 per month.
Pricing - Starts at $49 per month for unlimited content generated.
Ink is a fairly lesser-known product in this space and it is quite a surprise considering how feature-rich it is as a platform.
It is another tool that has every feature converted to device a full-blown content marketing strategy right from keyword research, content planning and outline generation, AI content generation, content optimization, etc.
There are more than 150 pre-trained AI models or templates available to get a start for anything you would want to write on.
INK supports both short and long-form copy across diverse use cases. This combined with being an SEO optimizing tool as well makes INK one of the best all-around copywriting tools in the market.
Apart from text, it can also generate AI-based images to go with the generated text content. INK supports more than 20 languages to generate content.
INK also has a unique feature called AI content shield which helps you make sure that your content does not get penalized by checking the originality of the content that was generated.
While it is always good to edit the content generated by any AI tool with your own tone of voice and brand identity, it is still good to have a feature to help you with that.
Similar to Surfer SEO, you get a real-time SEO score as and when you optimize your article to get an idea of the likelihood of getting ranked higher on search engines.
The optimization to get a better SEO score is grouped into five different sections namely, Relevant topics, Content Shield, Word tasks, Document tasks, and Headline tasks.
Once you complete all the tasks within each section, there is a high chance that your article is optimized to its best level in order to achieve good rankings.
The pricing model is pretty straightforward with only two paid plans, Professional and Enterprise costing $49 and $119 per month respectively when paid monthly.
The best part is even the Professional plan gives you access to an unlimited number of AI content generated including text & images, unlimited SEO articles, keyword research & clustering, all the templates, etc.
The higher Enterprise plan gives you 3 user seats making it a good option for SEO or content marketing agencies.
Pricing - Starts at $250 per month for 8 full-length & long-form blog posts generated.
Content at Scale is primarily an AI-writing tool that is designed exclusively to write long-form blog posts in a single click with minimum editing required.
However, it has a very good content editor as well that is similar to Surfer SEO and supports keyword research, keyword score, SEO score, etc., to get a well-researched and optimized article in a few minutes.
Content at Scale uses its own proprietary AI to make sure that the quality of the content generated is decent enough for it to need a minimum level of additional effort before publishing the article.
With regards to pricing, although it might seem expensive at $250 per month for 8 articles generated, the true value lies when you compare it to paying a copywriter to write a similar-length blog post.
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It would definitely cost you more than $25 and that's the market Content at Scale targets.
Pricing - Starts from $69 per month for 10 SEO documents and 400 keyword assessments.
Outranking is another all-in-one content marketing tool with AI-assisted content generation, content briefs, keyword assessments, and on-page optimization.
Content Brief will give you an overview of the complete SERP analysis for your primary keyword and lets you build an outline of the article you want to write on that topic.
There are three paid plans namely Solo, Pro, and Company costing $69, $129, and $249 per month respectively.
The main difference between each plan is the number of keyword assessments you can make, the number of SEO documents that can be built monthly, and the number of domains you can connect.
While the base plan gives you access to only one user, you get an additional user seat in the Pro plan and 2 additional seats in the Company plan.
Try Outranking for just $7 for the first month
While there is no free trial to check the tool before purchasing, there is an option of trying the base plan for only $7 for the first month instead of the regular $69 per month pricing.
Pricing - Starts from €19 per month for 2 projects, 25 content analyses, and 15,000 AI credits.
NeuronWriter is another excellent affordable alternative to Surfer SEO with a wealth of useful features.
The available features are divided into three main categories namely Content ideas, content plan, and content manager.
As the name would suggest, content ideas will give you suggestions based on your target niche & audience, your competitor's content, etc. to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to the content strategy of your business.
Pricing starts from €19 per month to €97 per month depending on the number of projects you would want to work on, the available number of content analyses, and the number of AI credits per month.
The Gold plan which costs €57 per month and above gives you access to an unlimited number of team members making it one of the more affordable solutions for agencies in particular.
Pricing - Starts from $49 per month for 300 AI runs and 50 SEO audits monthly.
Copyspace is another powerful AI copywriting tool that has built-in features to do SEO audits and optimize your posts.
The best part of it is that you can use your own Chat GPT API key and generate a ton of words at very affordable prices.
Conclusion
To wrap up, although Surfer SEO is a fantastic tool in what it does, there are some very good alternatives in the market to choose from based on your specific use cases.
If you ask for my choice, although you could go no wrong with all of the above choices, I personally like the user interface of Frase, and if you need a tool to come up with strong keyword research, both INK and Scalenut are the best options.