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Do you want to write blog posts that rank on Google’s 1st page in half the time? RankIQ is an AI-powered SEO tool that advertises as the right tool specifically for bloggers to do just that.
I’m a blogger. I want to be on the 1st page of Google. So I tried out RankIQ for a month and got some experience to form my opinion whether RankIQ is worth the price and is the perfect fit for my blog (or not).
Read below my personal RankIQ review and the free alternatives that I used in the past and will continue using when my month of RankIQ runs out.
When reading this just keep in mind that this is all my personal opinion. My blog is a few years old, has some traffic, but it is by no means so successful that I can quit my job and become a blogging millionaire in a few years. So maybe there is something that I just haven’t noticed in the tool that just clicks for some other bloggers that have written outstanding reviews for RankIQ.
What is RankIQ
RankIQ is a tool that actually combines several functionalities that are necessary in order to create a blog post that can rank in Google. There are several videos guiding users in the tool on how to use each of the features.
RankIQ has been designed specifically for bloggers and small business owners and differentiated itself from other SEO research tools with this mindset. It is easy to use and has just the functionalities and data useful for bloggers, and not the detailed statistics that SEO experts use and that might be just irrelevant for a regular blogger.
Features
RankIQ features kind of link from one to another to help you in the process of writing a new blog post. Here is how I’ve used them.
Keyword Research Library
First, there is a keyword research library with the lowest competition keyword phrases handpicked by the tool founder. There are high-traffic keywords so it’s really worth the effort trying to rank for them. You can use some basic filters to get a list of all keywords that interest you starting by filtering by niche and by how much time it will take to rank for them.
As this is generally a travel blog, I searched for “travel”. There were many niches for travel in the USA divided by states or regions and some other countries. In addition, there was travel insurance, cruises, and what to pack.
On Wandernity the majority of posts are about Europe and some general travel advice, so I didn’t find a niche specifically for me, but a few keywords from the existing niches were interesting to me. I filtered out the ones with the lowest competition as my blog doesn’t have much authority. It’s currently DA22, which is kind of low but is better than nothing, so I assume that I could easily rank for the lowest competition keywords.
The chosen keywords can be added to “My keyword library” so that you don’t lose the research that you have already done.
AI SEO report
So when you get to your list of keywords you can run a report for the ones that you are interested in writing about. You get 16 SEO reports created by artificial intelligence in a month and the number resets at the beginning of the month. So theoretically if you start your month on the 15th date, you can actually get 32 reports for the same price.
Running the report takes a bit of time, but it yields interesting results.
The report analyzes 30 sources that probably rank for the same keyword and gives you information on what and how you need to write in your blog post to be able to compete. Using the provided keywords in the content of your blog post gives it the best chance for ranking in search engines.
Also you can analyze the report to make a decision on which blog topics are actually worth writing and will not take a lot of time to research for outperforming the competition.
There is:
- a suggested word count
- topics and other keywords that the competitors have used in their ranking posts that you should also include in your post – these may help you to create a good outline for your blog post after some analysis
- title analysis – which keywords have been used and how many times in the top-ranking posts for the same topic so that you can craft your own top-notch title
- competition analysis – top 3 most comprehensive blog posts already on Google that you have to compete against and their content grade
Content optimizer
This is the place where you can actually write your blog post and it gives a rating and suggested keywords during your work. It’s kind of a game – you write a blog post and tune it in a way that increases the content grade. RanqIQ’s content optimizer is one of my favorite features as it helps to create high-quality content.
How I did this was that I wrote the whole blog post that I had in mind first and then played around with the “Topics to include” until I got the maximum grade. Unfortunately, I just couldn’t reach the word count as I’m not a native English speaker and I said everything that I wanted about the topic in 2000 words.
You can use the content optimizer both to write new posts and optimize old posts by pasting them in the tool. Just write your target keyword on the “Your reports” page, run a new report on the old post’s keyword, and you will get to the content optimizer.
Check rankings
You can also see some cool statistics from your Google Search Console in the “Check rankings” page focused on traffic and specifically the things that bloggers care about. You can see here if there are results for the hard work that you’ve put in writing blog posts:
- Keywords that drowe the most traffic to your blog in the previous 28 days – I liked that it showed the rank and whether it has improved or decreased
- Organic clicks comparison of 90 days and previous 90 days for desktop/mobile/tablet users
- Pages with the Biggest Organic Google Traffic Increase
- Pages with the Biggest Organic Google Traffic Decrease
- Pages with Most Organic Google Traffic over the Last 3 Months – I liked that it showed the position of the page as for me many posts that aren’t on the Google 1st page have a proportionally big number of clicks
As an alternative, you can get similar reports in your Google Analytics, but it probably will take some time to figure out how to filter this data and it won’t be nicely laid out in the same page for an overview.
Pricing
RankIQ costs $49 per month.
It’s certainly lower than the most popular SEO tools, but it’s also not cheap for a monthly subscription.
At least I don’t make so much with Wandernity blog each month to afford the monthly cost.
Fortunately, you can try the tool for a month, export the keywords that interest you That way get more value from the tool while waiting for the 16 optimized blog posts to start bringing in some traffic that can be monetized. Hopefully, that would be enough for you to be able to afford RankIQ on an ongoing basis and produce more ranking and money-making blog posts.
My experience with RankIQ
I’ll admit I haven’t written 16 blog posts with RankIQ. I have used it to write this post about what to pack for Disneyland and to optimize this post that you are currently reading. I have a few days of my first month left and plan to write at least one more blog post using the keywords provided by RankIQ.
You may ask, why haven’t I used the tool more?
Read below to understand my point of view.
Using RankIQ to find keyforsd for writing a blog post
The biggest value in a tool like RankIQ for me is the list of low competition keywords. That’s the first step when choosing what to write about and a halfway to success in ranking in Google.
Unfortunately, I don’t think that the keywords listed in RankIQ were a good fit for my blog.
I’m not entirely sure what is the reason for this.
One thing definitely is that my niche is not really covered in the available keywords. I’ve read online that you can contact the founder of RankIQ and he can create a keyword list for your niche. So probably this is a problem that could be solved with a bit more initiative and activity from my side.
Another thing is that I don’t really think that the provided keywords are easy to rank for and have low keyword difficulty. I’ve run a few AI reports and even if I chose the lowest competition it always required A++ grade content and 3k+ word blog post for ranking. I’m not sure how often are the keyword lists refreshed in the RankIQ tool, but I got a feeling that for the keywords that I’ve checked people have already written blog posts with this tool and now I’d have to compete against them, and it’s not what I’d call “easy to rank for”. I’d prefer some keywords with maybe a lower amount of yearly visits but with the competition that isn’t getting fiercer with each person in my niche that signs up for the tool.
Results for a blog post written with RankIQ
It’s been a few days since I’ve published my blog posts that were optimized with RankIQ. Google doesn’t rank blog posts that fast to tell whether there is a difference between a regular blog post and the one optimized with RankIQ. I’ll have to update this part sometime later.
But one thing to note is that it is really easier to create a blog post if you have a tool like RankIQ. Not only does it tell you which keywords you should be able to rank for, but also hints at the blog post structure that you would have to outline, and the keywords that the blog post should contain.
I don’t have the results for page views, but I can confirm that a quality blog post can be created much faster with RankIQ than starting from a blank page.
RankIQ alternatives
As I mentioned above, I have been using other SEO tools previously and continue to do so after the month with RankIQ runs out. It’s probably not the most convenient way to use multiple keyword tools for blog post writing, and the trial versions are quite restrictive, but if the budget is tight there is no other choice.
But if the ease of use is a very important consideration for you, then writing new blog posts with RankIQ gives you everything you need for content creation in one place.
Keyword Surfer extension
One of my favorite keyword research tools is the free version of Keyword Surfer which can be installed as an extension on the Chrome browser. You can find it under Product -> Free tools -> Keyword surfer extension.
It may not have the fancy features to tell you how difficult it will be to rank for a keyword or doesn’t give a list specific to your niche, but it shows the monthly count of searches right when you query something in Google. It also shows how long are the posts that already rank on Google for that query, so you might guesstimate if you can write something similar in length to compete.
This keyword research process is less straightforward than in RankIQ. But it’s nice to see the search results for the keyword straight away and the related search terms that Google itself offers you to see in the search field.
I use SEO surfer extension to check if a keyword I’m thinking about writing actually gets any traffic. If it is 0, then there is no point in writing a post about it. But if it is below 1000 visitors a month and doesn’t have all 1st-page posts with unrealistically high word count, I deem it as not that competitive and worth writing about. But then the keywords still need to be checked in Ubersuggest to see their difficulty based on how high the domain authority of other sites ranking in Google for the same keyword.
Keyword Surfer is a free tool and an easy way how to know that you aren’t writing for 0 people.
Ubersuggest
Another tool that can be used to search 3 times per day for free is Ubersuggest. It can be used in multiple different ways – but I mainly use it to check a single keyword difficulty and to check which keywords are other blogs in the same niche as me getting some traffic for and maybe trying to target the same keywords.
Here is what Ubersuggest says about the difficulty to rank for the keyword that was listed in RankIQ with 12 for competition (which should be considered as low). In Ubersuggest the difficulty is 47 at the moment, and the average blog that ranks for the keyword in the top 10 has a domain authority of 46. I’d say that it’s a keyword that’s quite competitive for a new blog with low domain authority.
Marketmuse
MarketMuse provides a similar tool as RankIQ content optimizer. It comes with a free plan where at the moment of writing this blog post you can get 15 queries per month with their free plan. It is really easy to use – you just open “Optimize” from the applications, write the main keyword phrase, and run the query. MarketMuse then lists all keywords that you should add in your content, how many times you should add them, and colors the added ones in the text.
It also has the same feature of ranking your content against the competition and giving you a score increase when you include more of the suggested keywords in the content. And it gives an indication of how long the blog post should be.
Summary
RankIQ is a neat tool that includes the things that you need for writing a good quality blog post and actually ranking in the first page of Google. There are a lot of raving fans out there writing great reviews for the tool and that encouraged me to try it out.
In my experience, the tool was not what I expected from the reviews. Maybe I’m just not lucky to be in the right blog niche, or my choice of the keywords that I checked was not the best. I hope that my RankIQ review was helpful to bloggers in a similar situation to mine.
I suggest trying this tool if you are with some blogging experience and this is not the only budget you have for your blog expenses. If you are a new blogger just starting out and budget is an issue, there are some free tools that you can try that don’t have the all-in-one approach but are usable.