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SEO Blog Writing Tools: Which Platform Offers the Best Value?
How To Choose the Best SEO Blog Writing Tool for Your Brand
Nicola Vaughan
January 25th, 2025
When it comes to writing content for your website or blog, it’s super important to ensure it’s optimized for search engines. You could have the coolest, most beautifully written blog out there, but if it isn’t on Google’s radar you’re unlikely to receive much traffic.
This is where SEO blog writing tools come in. These tools facilitate most of the SEO essentials such as meta descriptions, keywords, and analytics, allowing you to focus on what you do best - creating great content that you know your audience will love.
In this guide, we’ll discuss the importance of SEO writing tools for bloggers, mistakes to avoid when choosing a platform for optimized content, and why beehiiv stands out as the ultimate SEO tool for you, compared with other blogging tools such as Substack and Medium.
Table of Contents
3 Reasons Why SEO Tools Are Essential for Bloggers
If you’re a blogger, you’ll know that traffic to your site is your bread and butter. Without people regularly finding your blog online, your content will unfortunately be falling on deaf ears. There are also over 600 million blogs currently online (Web Tribunal), so how can you make sure your blog stands out from the crowd?
SEO tools are essential for bloggers because they significantly expand reach, while still engaging readers in meaningful ways.
Here’s an example. Let’s say you have a cooking blog that provides healthy, fun recipes for people to try out. When a user types in a search query such as ‘healthy lunch recipe’, you want your blog to be at the top of the search engine results pages. SEO tools help you to do this, without sacrificing the quality of your content.
Expanding Your Blog’s Reach
SEO tools can improve a blog’s visibility in several ways, helping creators reach a broader audience.
Correct URL structure is crucial in ensuring search engines can properly index your blog posts. beehiiv’sSEO tool does this well, allowing you to fully customize your URL from within the post editor with the keywords you want to focus on. Many SEO writing tools will auto-generate a URL slug, which results in a big missed opportunity for SEO.
Another element that beehiiv handles well is page speed. Google wants to show its users websites that are quick to load, with speed being a core metric for page rank - this makes website speed vital when optimizing your blog for SEO.
beehiiv has recently made several optimizations to improve page speed, while also ensuring that pages are mobile responsive - another key metric in Google’s guidelines for optimization.
Improving Content Relevance
A key ranking factor for Google is content relevance. Google wants to provide its users with content that is as relevant to their search query as possible, and SEO tools can be super effective in helping with this.
For example, beehiiv allows you to customize meta tags within a blog post to make your post more relevant to key search terms. This includes the title of your post and meta description, elements that tell Google what your blog post is about, allowing them to easily align content with user search intent.
In short - you want to make it as easy as possible for Google to pick the most relevant piece of content for their user, and meta tags are one of the best ways to do this.
Boosting Engagement and Revenue
Once your content has been optimized and you’re drawing more relevant audiences to your website, you’ll want to focus on improving engagement and monetization. SEO tools such as those in beehiiv can help with this too, making sure you’re getting the most out of the blog traffic that you’re receiving.
beehiiv makes it super easy for users to implement interactive content into posts, and keep your audience active and engaged. These include polls and opportunities for feedback, opening a direct line of communication between your blog and your subscribers.
There are also many ways to monetize your blog content using beehiiv. The beehiiv Ad Network provides sponsorship opportunities for your blog, embedding logos of well-known brands to improve trust and monetization. You can also use beehiiv Boosts to not only make money by recommending your subscribers to similar brands, but also by growing subscriber lists by purchasing recommended users from other blogs.
4 SEO Features That Make beehiiv a Standout Choice
beehiiv is a newsletter and SEO blogging platform combined, allowing creators to optimize their content for search engines while growing a subscriber list.
There are a few key features that set beehiiv apart as an SEO-friendly blogging platform. These include user-friendly SEO options, customizable meta and keyword fields, extensive audience growth tools, plus an advanced analytics platform to help creators refine content strategy.
User-Friendly SEO Options
beehiiv was built with SEO at its core.
They’ve simplified the optimization process in the beehiiv interface to ensure key SEO elements are ticked off, while creators can focus on producing great content.
Customizable Meta and Keyword Fields
beehiiv allows bloggers to customize their meta fields, giving them greater control over the search appearance of their blog.
For example, if your blog is targeting specific search terms, you can include these within your meta title and meta description. This allows your blog to be flagged by search engines but also will display within the snippet on the search engine results pages, giving users a preview of what your blog contains.
This helps increase website traffic and will ensure that only the most relevant users are directed to your website.
Audience Growth Tools
There are many community-building features that beehiiv offers to help amplify SEO efforts, thereby making it easier to attract and retain readers.
One key way beehiiv does this is with the beehiiv Referral program. This system allows creators to assign milestones to their subscribers, producing incentives for referring your newsletter to other people. This not only helps to grow your audience but also improves your relationship with existing subscribers by showing you value their support and referrals.
beehiiv also allows you to purchase recommended subscribers via their Boosts system as mentioned earlier in this guide. This is a great way of gaining access to more subscribers from other like-minded publications that may share similar followers to your community.
You can also make use of the share buttons that beehiiv allows you to drag and drop into your blog posts. This allows creators to encourage users to share content with friends via Social Media networks, thereby expanding reach and improving audience growth.
For a real-life case study on a brand that used beehiiv to grow its community, check out this blog post on Travel App creator Mady Meio!
Analytics To Refine Content Strategy
Analytics are key in ensuring your content strategy is performing as best as possible. If you aren’t measuring results from your blogging efforts, it’s impossible to know where you need to refine your content strategy to continually grow and improve.
beehiiv has extensive analytics capabilities that are updated in close to real-time, helping bloggers to refine content based on the most up-to-date, accurate performance data.
Some key data that can be tracked via beehiiv analytics include:
Subscriber Details: beehiiv’s extensive Subscribers Report provides data by acquisition channel, allowing creators to understand where their best subscribers are coming from and therefore where they should further invest their marketing efforts.
Post Performance/Engagement: The Posts Report from beehiiv analyzes the performance and engagement of posts, helping to evaluate key insights including engagement via metrics such as bounce rate, click-through rate, and time on page.
3 Comparisons: How beehiiv, Substack, and Medium Handle SEO
There are many SEO blog writing tools on the market, each providing different features and benefits tailored to brands’ aims/goals.
The three top SEO writing tools that stand out to most bloggers/creators are Substack, Medium, and beehiiv. In this next section, we’ll present a balanced comparison, showing which tools excel in certain areas and which may need improvement.
Ease of Optimization for Search Engines
A great SEO tool needs to ensure that SEO can be performed as easily as possible, to allow creators the ability to focus on what they do best - writing.
Let’s start with Substack. Many creators are drawn to Substack for its ability to host either free or paid content and its rise in popularity over the last year. However, it becomes clear quite quickly when using Substack that it wasn’t built with SEO at its core, lacking categorization and customized domains. This makes it very difficult to build authority with search engines, resulting in minimal organic traffic.
Medium is a blogging platform that focuses a little more on SEO, providing creators with customizable SEO titles and meta descriptions to improve their appearance in search engines. They also encourage users to engage with the Medium community to build links between different blogs. However, it is lacking in more advanced SEO tools that bloggers may expect from blogging platforms.
beehiiv is the clear winner when it comes to SEO, built with simpler yet powerful tools for optimizing content. Not only does beehiiv include customization of meta titles/data and the ability to categorize posts to improve SEO, but you can also use a custom domain to build SEO authority to your own dedicated blog site. This builds authority for your blog, rather than the beehiiv site, thereby improving SEO.
There are also other great SEO features within beehiiv including:
Breadcrumbs: Digital breadcrumbs are enabled on beehiiv as default, offering SEO benefits such as increased crawling abilities for search engines, better indexing capabilities, and improved ranking in search engines.
Sitemaps: beehiiv auto-updates blog sitemaps to make it super easy for search engines to crawl publications. They’ve also added a robots.txt file to more efficiently direct web crawlers’ activities.
Image Optimization: Images can also be optimized for search engines on beehiiv through the use of alt text.
Flexibility and Control for Bloggers
One of the most important features of a successful SEO blogging tool is flexibility and control for its creators. Bloggers need to retain as much control as possible to protect their brand and ensure its performance long-term, while also having a flexible, easy-to-use platform for day-to-day blogging.
Medium is a platform known for its flexibility, being extremely easy to use and free at the point of entry. However, its pitfall is the control that bloggers hold, as all content is hosted on Medium- providing limited control over site functionality/monetization. This makes it difficult to control the SEO benefit a site can ultimately hold, as all SEO authority goes back to Medium.
Substack has similar drawbacks, with a lack of control over design, domain authority, and SEO, as well as functionality. You’re also charged 10% on all subscription earnings from Substack, making it impossible for creators to have complete control over their publication. However, it’s highly flexible for a more casual blogger with different tier options for paid subscribers, allowing creators to make content exclusive for different kinds of users.
beehiiv provides more granular options than Substack or Medium when it comes to SEO. You can use a custom domain in the beehiiv system which improves domain authority for the creator rather than being tied to the beehiiv domain, plus you can set SEO options for specific custom pages and posts rather than your blog as a whole.
You can provide users with more control over their options for paid subscriptions, such as a choice between monthly or annual subscription options.
Tools for Targeting and Engaging Readers
SEO tools that allow creators to target and engage their readers naturally provide better results, with a more tailored experience for subscribers and ultimately provide the ability to nurture a more engaged community.
Substack has fairly decent segmentation features, allowing creators different ways of segmenting their lists and sending specific newsletters to different groups of subscribers. However, there are limited options for email automation, and it doesn’t offer basic engagement features such as personalization options such as addressing users by their first name. Lacking simple yet effective features such as these limits Substack when it comes to creating an engaged audience, as other tools excel more easily in this area.
Medium excels when it comes to brand awareness and reaching large audiences, as there is already a wealth of readers on Medium that may be attracted to your blog too. However, there is no way of building a dedicated email list on Medium, which makes it fall down against other tools such as beehiiv, plus there is a lack of engagement tools in comparison to its competitors. For example, its built-in audience means creators lack extensive ability to target users via other platforms, and Medium doesn't encourage the depth of discussion on posts such as WordPress or beehiiv.
beehiiv specializes in supporting creators with better targeting and audience engagement than its competitors. They do this by creating simple tools to allow users to build bespoke experiences for their community, with advanced design tools, subscriber growth campaigns, personalized content (e.g. addressing users by their first name), a range of paid subscription options, plus audience segmentation to target specific groups of subscribers with relevant content.
By focusing on bespoke content, they allow creators to target and engage readers on an individual level, providing a more personal service and therefore developing a more unique experience.
They also allow creators to build automated workflows into their content. This automates campaigns based on subscriber actions and triggers, saving time by making actions more efficient, but also providing subscribers with more relevant content. Examples of these could be automated welcome campaigns when users subscribe to a mailing list, or engagement-based follow-ups such as abandoned shopping cart emails for example.
Why Listen to Me? I have been working in the digital marketing space for nearly 10 years, predominantly helping brands with their email marketing and online presence. I now specialize in creating great content for beehiiv to help people nail their email strategies!
5 Tips for Using beehiiv’s SEO Tools Effectively
An SEO tool may have the potential for success, but only if used effectively and extensively.
It’s easy to miss key opportunities for SEO benefit, and with the SEO world becoming more and more difficult to navigate, you’ll want to make the most of each and every possibility for SEO optimization.
Here are our 5 top tips for using beehiiv’s SEO tools effectively to leverage its SEO features to their full ability.
Setting up Meta Descriptions and Titles
First and foremost, you must make sure you’re setting up meta descriptions and meta titles for every blog post.
As mentioned previously, meta tags give search engines the information they need to decide where your site should rank in its search engine results pages. Giving them as much relevant information as possible will increase the chances of your site ranking for key search terms, and therefore generating as much organic traffic as possible.
Going through your meta tags on beehiiv is a great place to start when it comes to improving your SEO. Make sure they’re consistent in brand voice, and that you’re targeting high-volume keywords - more on this in the next section.
Choosing Keywords for Better Visibility
Choosing which keywords to target and where to place them is a fundamental part of SEO. Do this correctly and you’re likely to reap the rewards in relevant, organic traffic to your blog - get this wrong and your blog will likely be a ghost town.
beehiiv encourages its creators to carry out extensive keyword research prior to beginning a blog post. Research tools such as Ahrefs and SEMrush can be helpful in determining what your target audience may be searching for online, and using these keywords throughout your content can help to boost search engine visibility.
Make sure to use high-volume search terms within your blog content, meta tags, and headlines to show your users that your content is relevant to them, and also to improve positions in search engines.
Structuring Content for SEO
Another tip for using beehiiv’s SEO tools effectively is to ensure you’re structuring your content with SEO in mind while balancing this with user experience.
Search engines want to show users content that is readable and easy to digest. This is why using a mixture of beehiiv’s image and text capabilities can make your content well-structured for user experience and SEO purposes. Make sure you’re using clear headings to ‘sign-post’ content, and include a strong CTA (Call To Action) to drive conversions. Content that converts is more appealing to search engines than content that doesn’t, so think about conversion when structuring your content too.
You should also structure the content of your URLs correctly to ensure search engines can crawl them easily while also improving page relevance. This includes ensuring your URLs include a relevant category, as well as relevant high-volume keywords. Clear URL structure can also make backlinking easier, another highly effective strategy for SEO.
Leveraging Built-in Analytics
Using beehiiv’s inbuilt 3D analytics can significantly improve a blogger’s ability to track performance and adjust strategy.
For example, if your analytics are reporting a high bounce rate and a low click-through rate, this would show that your users aren’t engaged with your content and are clicking away from your website. This may suggest that you aren’t targeting the correct people, or that you need to expand on your blog content with more detail and CTAs to encourage users to click through to other pages on your site.
While blog results may be intimidating, it’s super important to monitor and act on them to learn how to improve your blog moving forward.
Enhancing Engagement With Audience Tools
beehiiv’s range of audience tools can be used to increase reader interaction and ultimately build a loyal community for your blog.
Audience Segmentation is a key feature of beehiiv’s audience tools, allowing creators to target subscribers by individual attributes and activity. This means more relevant, unique content can be served to subscribers, increasing engagement levels and conversion rates.
beehiiv allows creators to set up re-engagement campaigns via their segmentation tools, determining which subscribers haven’t engaged recently and either targeting them with specific content to bring them back into your community or removing them if they’re no longer interested. This makes subscriber lists more relevant and engaged, therefore producing better results.
Other tips for using beehiiv to increase engagement include personalizing content, using interactive content such as polls and forms, and introducing referral benefits to loyal subscribers to grow your mailing lists and build long-term relationships.
2 Common Mistakes Bloggers Make With SEO Tools
Sometimes bloggers can get wrapped up in the extensive features of SEO writing tools and make common mistakes that can be surprisingly detrimental to SEO performance.
Here are some typical pitfalls that bloggers often encounter, and some tips on how to avoid them when using beehiiv.
Ignoring Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords are often missed when carrying out keyword research, with shorter keywords often displaying higher search numbers.
Long-tail keywords are search phrases generally containing three or more words that are more generic and often less competitive in search engine results pages. The benefit of using long-tail keywords in your content is generating more relevant traffic to your website, and avoiding the competition often associated with shorter search terms.
beehiiv makes it easy to target these search terms by encouraging the use of keywords in the structure of custom domains and providing a range of areas to embed long-tail search terms such as meta titles and descriptions.
Overlooking Content Updates and Refreshes
Refreshing your content may fall to the bottom of your list when you’ve got a wealth of new blog posts to publish, but beware of neglecting your content updates.
Revisiting existing content is a great strategy for SEO as the content literally already exists, providing you with a great basis for new traffic. You may have old blog posts that just need a few tweaks to gain new traction and may take you less time than writing a brand new post.
beehiiv allows creators to edit existing posts and republish optimized content. Search engines love seeing content being updated regularly on websites, and while old, authoritative posts may rank highly in search results, it’s important to carefully tweak them to ensure they adhere to current best practices.
Choose beehiiv as Your SEO Blog Writing Tool
If you’ve read this guide and are keen to get started with beehiiv as your new SEO blog writing tool, start a free 30-day trial today.
With a range of plans to choose from, it’s easy to pick the features that suit your blog best, from custom domain functionality and optimized deliverability to posting on up to 10 publications.
Get started with beehiiv and start growing your blog today.
Google’s People Also Ask Questions:
How to write a blog with SEO?
Writing a blog with SEO is vitally important to ensure you receive a high amount of organic traffic. To write a blog with SEO you’ll need to include the following elements:
Keyword Research: Carrying out keyword research will help you understand which keywords to target within your content, based on relevance and high search volume.
Optimized Meta Tags and Headings: Optimizing your headings and meta titles/descriptions will allow you to embed keywords throughout your blog in a way that search engines can index.
Readable Content: Striking a balance between content for search engines and content that your readers can easily digest is crucial in optimizing your blog for SEO purposes.
Does writing blogs improve SEO?
Writing blogs does improve SEO in the sense that search engines favor fresh, relevant content on websites.
If you produce a blog within your website, search engines will have more opportunities to crawl your site and ultimately index more pages within its search results, therefore improving SEO.
How much is SEO writing AI per month?
SEO Writing AI is a tool that allows users to quickly create content using AI, which is specifically targeted at search engines. There is a free plan available with a pro plan which starts from $12 per month.
Is SEO writing assistant free?
There are a range of free SEO Writing Assistant tools available online for creators to use. However, it’s worth bearing in mind that all writing tools should be tested and used alongside writers to ensure quality and relevance are achieved and maintained, particularly when trying to engage communities and improve results in search engines.
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