Whether which type of content you aim at, you always need writing and SEO tools. Those tools support you to implement four different tasks that make content SEO friendly, readable, unique, and error-free.
Below are six tools I've used over years of writing SEO content:
Keep reading to see what they are, how they work, and my experience with them. You can click the links above to move to each tool faster.
Yoast SEO
What is Yoast SEO?
Yoast SEO is a paid third-party plugin on WordPress. So you can’t use it as independent software.
This plugin is helpful for SEO specialists and content writers to check whether blog posts are readable and SEO friendly.
What do I Use Yoast SEO For?
As a content writer, I only needed to care about its readability analysis. Meanwhile, an SEO specialist took care of other factors like SEO analysis or Social Media share.
But I still needed to work with the SEO specialist to discuss which SEO criteria to include in my blog posts. They include the density of key phrases, the length of SEO titles and meta description.
How does Yoast SEO Work?
If your content is readable, the bullet next to "Readability" will turn green. But when the bullet turns orange or red, you should look through the analysis results and see what needs improving.
Based on my experience, the "orange" bullet is also acceptable in the Readability analysis.
When you click the "eye" icon next to each criteria, you can see how many sentences carry transition words, passive voice, and more.
Source: Yoast
Flesch Reading Ease: it measures how your content is easy to understand for search engines and human readers. The score should be between 60-70.
Passive voice: no more than 10% of sentences contain passive voice.
Consecutive sentences: avoid starting consecutive sentences with the same words. Let's say an example, "Writing a blog post is not so hard for beginners. Writing is much easier than you thought." In this instance, I used the word "Writing" to start two subsequent sentences. You should avoid this mistake.
Sentence length: no more than 25% of sentences contain over 20 words
Paragraph length: no more than 150 words per paragraph.
Subheading distribution: no more than 300 words per subheading.
Transition words: at least 30% of sentences contain transition words.
Word complexity: this is a new function on Yoast SEO. Accordingly, you shouldn’t use more than 10% of complex words that have no more than three syllabus.
What do I Think About Yoast SEO?
Yoast SEO is great. It's one of the most helpful tools I've used to improve whether my content is easy to read and SEO friendly.
But it also carries some annoying issues:
Passive voice
According to Cambridge, a sentence carrying passive voice had this formula: be + past participle.
For example, “you are guided to build SEO-friendly content”.
But Yoast SEO also marked some phrases like “a detailed survey” as a kind of passive voice, just because of the word “detailed”.
Transition words
Yoast SEO doesn't include transition words in English. It even didn't count "in other words" as a transition word in my old blog posts although this phrase appeared in Yoast's table of transition words.
Readable
What is Readable?
Readable is an online toolkit that helps writers check whether their content is easy to read. Besides, this toolkit offers other services including:
Score and monitor a whole website's readability, spelling and grammar
Integrate ReadableAPI with your apps, CMSes and other tech to test their readability
Offer a spelling and grammar checker
It only has a paid version with three pricing plans: ContentPro, CommercePro, and AgencyPro.
What do I Use Readable For?
I use Readable to analyze the readability of blog posts. And I'm now using ContentPto.
How does Readable Work?
As I only use Readable's content analysis service, I'll dive into how the tool works in this section.
When you paste your text in the left-handed box, Readable automatically analyze your text in different aspects. The results after analysis will show you:
Your readability grade: from A to E. Your text should reach B or above.
Your text's issues: language, writing style, readability, and text density.
Professionalism: to measure the degree to which you're writing for your readers, not yourself. In the picture below, my text's professionalism reached 95%.
Total words of your text.
There are many criteria in Readable analysis, but you can't focus on all of them. So I now just go further in important parts that help you to improve your text's readability.
01. Readability Grade
Readable accumulated plethora of index to calculate the final score of your text, such as Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level or Gunning Fog Index. All those indexes need to be lower than 10.
But I advise you against caring those indexes. Because they're only used to compute a more important score in the image below: Flesch Reading Ease. Like Yoast SEO, The ideal score is in the range of 60-70.
So how to improve this score? Let's look through this score's formula first:
Flesch Reading Ease = 206.835 - 1.015 × (total words ÷ total sentences) - 84.6 × (total syllables ÷ total words)
Based on this formula, two critical variables that affect the score are sentences and syllables. Imagine you often write averagely 1500-word blog posts. So the more sentences you have and the fewer syllables each word has, the better the score is. That's why you need short, simple sentences to improve the score.
So how to write short, simple sentences? Let's move on the Issues part.
02. Issues
As I said, Readable will show you four kinds of issues here. But you should focus on Readability first to improve sentences and words.
According to Readable, your text should include:
less than 6% very long sentences (which are highlighted red)
less than 12% long sentences (which are highlighted yellow)
less than 3% words with more than four syllables
less than 3% words with more than 12 letters
After focusing on such criteria, I improved my text from B to A. And my Flesch Reading Score also increased from 53.0 to 56.6.
After that, you can look through other parts as spelling, grammar, tone, or professionalism depending on your website's requests.
Should You Focus on Readable Rating or Flesch Reading Ease?
It depends on your company. My company requires Grade A and says nothing about how much I should get in the Flesch score. When I tested some blog posts, I realized they got low Flesch scores but still performed well in search engines. So my advise is you should write high-quality content for your target readers first before caring about the score.
What do I Think About Readable?
Readable works really well in testing how easy to read my blog posts are. Further, it suggests alternatives for too long words. I find this function helpful for non-English speakers to choose simpler alternatives for my text.
The only problem I had with this online tool is spelling. Readable marks some names as spelling errors, such as RankTracker, or RemoteOK. I tried to add those names into its dictionary, but I couldn't. Readable seems to have some errors and it doesn't allow me to add new words into the dictionary.
Frase
What is Frase?
Frase is a paid AI writing and SEO tool. In particular, the tool uses AI technology to help you perform different tasks like building introductions, writing meta descriptions, or improving sentences. It has no free version, but paid one.
This tool can either serve as an independent app or be installed as a plugin in WordPress.
What do I Use Frase For?
I use Frase to optimize my content and improve sentences with AI support. This tool only checks my content optimization based on keywords, not readability.
How does Frase Work?
To use Frase, you first should register for an account, then choose a subscription plan.
Here's how Frase works:
01. Frase uses a keyword/keyphrase you offer to search for top-performing blog posts with the same keyword/keyphrase.
02. Then, you can reference those posts to build a suitable outline for yours. Instead of opening those posts on separate tabs, Frase gathers all of them in one place and facilitates the building of high-quality outlines.
03. You'll write and optimize content. In the Optimize section, Frase collects all relevant keywords/keyphrases that appear on those top-ranking posts. The tool considers your content optimized if its score exceeds the average Frase score (yellow line).
In the screenshot below, the Frase score is 32%, lower than the average one. A writer should include more keywords or keyphrases suggested below to increase the content's optimization.
Screenshot from the Frase video
Please note that you don't have to include all of the keywords, because many may be irrelevant to your content. Just focus on building high-quality content and making it more natural.
04. Finally, you can use AI writing assistant to improve sentences and paragraphs if any.
Frase also has an interesting, detailed series, Quick Start Video, to instruct you how to use this tool step by step.
Screenshot from YouTube
What do I Think About Frase?
For me, Frase is an acceptable alternative for Yoast SEO. It allows me to check if my content is SEO friendly based on the number of keywords included.
This tool isn't helpful in readability or grammar checking. So I still need to use other tools such as Readable and Grammarly for those functions.
Hemingway Editor
What is Hemingway Editor?
Hemingway Editor plays the same role as Readable. It allows writers to test whether their text is easy to read. But unlike Readable, Hemingway Editor is a free app available on the Internet. It also offers a paid desktop app for MacOS and Window.
What do I Use Hemingway Editor For?
I use Readable to analyze the readability of blog posts. And I'm now using a free version.
How does Hemingway Editor Work?
On Hemingway Editor, you can format your text with headings, images, bullets, and more. The tool also shows you some critical factors to help you know better about your text's readability.
Grade levels: you should reach Grade 8-9 for your text or lower. When I tested many blog posts on Readable and Hemingway Editor, I realized those getting 8 on Hemingway Editor would be marked A on Readable. Meanwhile, those with Grade 9 come with Grade B.
Adverbs: the number of adverbs depend on the length of your text. Adverbs will be highlighted blue.
Passive voice: the number of sentences with passive voice depend on the length of your text. Passive voice will be highlighted green.
Complex words: the tool doesn't require how many complex words you should include. Complex words will be highlighted pink. But I think the figure for complex words isn't correct.
Hard-to-read sentences: the tool doesn't require how many long sentences you should include. Long sentences will be highlighted yellow.
Very-hard-to-read sentences: the tool doesn't require how many very long sentences you should include. Very long sentences will be highlighted red.
Hemingway Editor allows you to remove adverbs, turn passive to active voice, and suggest simpler words instead.
How do You Improve Your Text on Hemingway Editor?
Hemingway Editor's free version can be a bad choice if you prefer a deeper analysis. But if you still choose it because it's free, here's my advice to improve your text:
Firstly, you should chunk your long sentences into shorter ones, and replace complex words with simpler ones until you get 8 or 9.
Finally, you should check the text again on other tools such as Yoast SEO. But the question here is, why shouldn't you use tools that analyze readability at the first place? There are many reasons for this:
You may not afford paid tools like Readable.
Or you aren't authorized to access a WordPress website which incorporates with Yoast SEO. This is also my case. I was granted access to their websites only if senior managers required me to adjust my texts based on Yoast's SEO requirements.
Or other tools like Grammarly or Frase cannot analyze your text's readability as well as Hemingway Editor.
What do I Think About Hemingway Editor?
What I like most about Hemingway Editor is it allows me to format my text right on the app. Further, it's simple to use and free. But compared with Readable, I still find Hemingway Editor less helpful.
Grammarly
What is Grammarly?
Grammarly is a cloud-based tool that reviews spelling, grammar, and plagiarism. Further, the tool suggests you how to make sentences easier to understand, more interesting, and more impressive for readers.
What do I Use Grammarly For?
I mainly use Grammarly to check my grammar, spelling and readability.
There are many pricing plans for different services. But in this blog post, I only talk about my experience on Free Account and Premium Account on iPhone and browsers.
How does Grammarly Work?
You can sign up for a free account and paste your text to check its spelling, grammar and other factors. Also, you can install Grammarly extensions on browsers, or apps for desktops and mobile devices. You then can set goals to tailor writing suggestions.
For Free Accounts: you can test spelling, grammar, and sentence clarity.
For Premium Accounts: you can test all those criteria:
Spelling, grammar, and punctuation: underlined red.
Clarity (whether your text is easy to understand): underlined blue.
Engagement (whether your text is interesting): underlined green.
Delivery (whether you text makes the right impression on readers): underlined purple.
Plagiarism: this function collects data from the Internet to check how much of your text matches data sources.
Besides, you can check how your text performs through the overall text score, word length, readability, and more. You can download a PDF report to have an overview of your text, although I find this report not quite helpful.
However, this tool doesn't give you any suggestion to improve your text's readability. So if you want to use it to analyze how easy to read your text is, I don't recommend this tool.
Like Readable, Grammarly also marks some names as spelling errors. But you can add those names to its dictionary and it'll not mark them as errors anymore.
What do I Think About Grammarly?
Grammarly is a great spelling and grammar checking tool. I love it because it allows me to check and correct mistakes in any materials and anywhere. It works very well in checking my spelling and grammar, and plagiarism. Other functions also work well in some ways. But there are many things I don't feel satisfied about Grammarly.
Its suggestion is sometimes not good for SEO
In some blog posts, Grammarly suggested me to replace some words with more complex alternatives, for example, from "extended" to "comprehensive". But I found this suggestion unhelpful because as a content writer, I'm trying to use complex words to boost readability.
Also, when I checked for clarity, Grammarly also suggested me to merge sentences. But I intentionally split them to make it easier to read and SEO friendlier.
Problems with Grammarly apps for mobile devices and browser extensions
I realize Grammarly works best on your text when you checking it directly on its website. I also work with Grammarly apps for iPhone and browser extensions. And I realize they don't detect some errors as well as the website version. Even they came with some errors and made my text messed up.
I advise you against using it for SEO or readability purpose. Grammarly only functions well as a error checking tool. You should be more aware of which suggestions of Grammarly suits your content. That's why you should use Grammarly with other SEO tools such as Readable to check your text before publishing.
Besides, you should use Grammarly website version to your text instead of other variants.
SEO Small Tools
What is SEO Small Tools?
SEO Small Tools is a set of text tools to check your plagiarism, grammar, spelling, and more. It has free and paid versions. The former will limit the length of your text being checked every time, for example, maximum 1000 words for plagiarism checker. Meanwhile, the latter allows you to deeply check and analyze your text.
What do I Use SEO Small Tools For?
I use a free version of SEO Small Tools only to check plagiarism.
How does SEO Small Tools Work?
Working with SEO Small Tools is very straightforward. You just need to copy & paste your text, or upload your text from your desktop/drive, and wait for analysis results.
What do I Think About SEO Small Tools?
I only speak up my opinion about this toolkit's free version. Although I only use it for plagiarism, I also trial other functions and here are some of my opinions.
Plagiarism
Like Grammarly, this tool set also collects data from different sources and tests your text's plagiarism. But its free version doesn't check plagiarism well. Many years ago, I applied for a company and they required to do a short test. When I checked my test through Small SEO Tools, my writing got 100% unique. But when the company rechecked it, they detected some "copy-paste" parts.
So, if you want a deeper check, you can sign up for a paid version.
Grammar & Spelling
Compared with Grammarly's free version, that of Small SEO Tools works worse. Here are two different results from Small SEO Tools and Grammarly respectively:
Screenshot from Small SEO Tools
Here, the grammar & spelling checker only marks contractions ("it's" or "aren't") and names ("Yoast" or "Frase") as errors.
Screenshot from Grammarly
Meanwhile, Grammarly indicates spelling and grammar errors better.
Article Rewriter
This function allows you to rewrite your text to a readable one. But as you see, it's more complicated and hard to understand.
Let's look through an example: At first, I wrote "Hemingway Editor's free version can be a bad choice...". But the tool then rewrote the word "version" to "interpretation". The latter is both long (not good for SEO) and difficult to understand. Other rewriting suggestions even look worse.
Paraphrasing
This function helps you rewrite your sentences and paragraphs. You can use this function to avoid plagiarism.
This tool's rephrase suggestions are not so good nor bad. In other words, it only rewrites insignificant words that don't affect the meaning of your sentences and paragraphs. For me, these suggestions are for reference only, but not so helpful.
So, among four functions I reviewed, I suggest you to care about plagiarism because other functions don't work well as I thought.
Final Thoughts
Writing and SEO tools are essential for writers to produce SEO friendly and readable content.
In this blog post, I reviewed different tools that perform three important tasks to write better: optimizing content, checking its readability, making it unique, and removing grammar or spelling errors. Each of them comes with pros and cons. Therefore, you should pick up suitable tools that support your content writing to the fullest.
Besides, you can consider image editing tools if your company has no designers to cover it separately.
However, you shouldn't depend too much on writing and SEO tools. Just write for your target audience first and take care of SEO later.