AI-powered tools like Outranking and InLinks offer a faster, more accurate way of producing SEO content. Both tools use Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology to streamline keyword research and content optimization. Additionally, they prioritize using semantic connections to enhance search engines’ understanding of your content.
Yet, choosing between Outranking and InLinks can be tricky, given their similar functionalities.
In this in-depth comparison, we’ll dissect the core features of each tool, including topic clustering, content brief generation, AI writing assistance, and internal linking capabilities. We’ll also analyze their pricing structures to help you make an informed decision for your SEO needs. Use these links to jump to specific sections:
…But here’s the TL;DR version:
Both are solid SEO content tools. But InLinks wins with its more affordable pricing, entity SEO approach and a wider range of SEO tools.
Overview of Outranking
Launched in 2016, Outranking positions itself as an AI-powered content creation tool for marketers and creators of all experience levels. This Open AI’s GPT-4 powered software offers functionalities like keyword clustering, content brief generation, and content optimization, empowering users to create engaging, high-ranking content in minutes.
Overview of InLinks
Founded by SEO veterans Dixon Jones and Fred Laurent, InLinks takes a unique approach to SEO optimization. Unlike traditional keyword-based tools, it uses a proprietary semantic analyzer and knowledge graph to focus on entities and the underlying concepts behind search terms. This makes InLinks the first-ever entity-based SEO tool in the market.
InLinks uses a robust NLP algorithm to analyze your website and accomplish several tasks simultaneously, including content planning and outlining, topic recommendations, content optimization, and even automated internal linking and schema markup. Ultimately, these features enhance your website’s SEO performance and increase your chances of ranking well in SERPs.
Outranking vs. InLinks: Core Features
Both Outranking and InLinks offer a range of features to streamline SEO content creation, including:
- Topic clustering: This functionality helps organize keywords into relevant groups, ensuring your content comprehensively covers a topic.
- SERP analysis: Analyze the top-ranking search results for your target keyword to understand what content performs well.
- Content briefs: Generate detailed briefs outlining key points and target audiences, guiding content creators.
- AI writing: AI writing assistance to overcome writer’s block or generate initial content drafts.
- Content optimization: Optimize existing content for search engines by improving keyword usage and readability.
- Internal linking: Automate the process of linking relevant pages on your website, improving website structure.
While both tools share these core functionalities, some key differences may influence your choice. The next section will delve deeper into these distinctions to help you make an informed decision.
Please note that while we created a free Outranking account for this comparison, access to its premium features was limited. So, the details provided for Outranking will primarily be based on information available through demo videos, product pages, and third-party reviews.
Topic Clustering
Building a content strategy without topic clustering is like constructing a house without a solid foundation. It may seem manageable initially, but long-term success is compromised. Both Outranking and InLinks provide tools for creating SEO topic clusters.
Outranking
Outranking’s Strategist leverages advanced algorithms to analyze data from your connected Google Search Console. This allows it to learn from your website’s existing performance and adapt its recommendations based on current search trends.
Using Strategist is simple. First, create a new “Domain” project within Outranking. Link your Google Search Console or use alternative methods to provide your domain ranking information.
Then, compile a list of keywords and topics that align with your content marketing goals.
Input the list into a new “Clustering” project within Outranking. Click “Analyze Clusters” to initiate the process.
Once the analysis concludes, you’ll receive a comprehensive report. This report displays your target keywords alongside their related data and “Similar Variations” (semantically related keywords that belong to the same cluster).
Click on the “Similar Variations” to explore the clustered keywords. Afterwards, select the primary keyword you want to focus on for your content creation.
InLinks
InLinks takes keyword clustering to a new level with its innovative entity-based SEO approach. Its NLP engine analyzes search engine results pages (SERPs), Google’s Knowledge Graph, and AutoSuggest to identify entities, related topics, and user intent behind searches. This comprehensive analysis reveals crucial insights that Outranking might miss.
To get started, log in to your InLinks account and navigate to the “Content Briefs” section in your project dashboard. Click “New Brief” to begin your content planning process.
Enter your target keyword and specify your location (national or local) to guide the NLP analysis. This ensures the results are relevant to your specific audience.
InLinks’ NLP engine goes into action, analyzing various sources to uncover keyword ideas, relevant topics, and user intent behind your chosen keyword.
Once the analysis is complete, your keyword ideas are grouped into clear topic clusters under the “Keyword Research” tab. Each cluster provides vital details, including keyword variations, a relevance score, and a priority rating to help you focus on the most impactful topics first.
Recommended: SEO Topic Clusters: What Are They? And How to Build Them
Intrigued by a specific cluster? Click on it to see a list of search query variations and questions derived from Google’s AutoSuggest. This makes you understand what users are explicitly searching for within that topic area.
InLinks takes keyword research a step further with its dedicated “User Intent” tab. This tab reveals the precise intent behind user searches for your chosen topic, empowering you to create user-centric content.
SERP Analysis
Topic clustering is only one piece of the puzzle. It would help if you also analyzed the SERPs for your target keywords to see what’s already working for your competition. And both InLinks and Outranking allow you to do just that.
Outranking
In Outranking, enter your target keyword, topic, or question. Outranking will deliver a comprehensive overview of the top-ranking search results and provide insights into the keywords your competitors are using to rank for your target audience.
Outranking also shows the H2 headings used by these top-ranking pages.
InLinks
While Outranking offers a basic overview of top-ranking competitors, InLinks’ dedicated SERP Analysis section within the content brief gives you a deeper understanding of your competitive landscape.
The “SERP Analysis” tab identifies the top 20 competitors for your target keyword. This eliminates the need for manual research and ensures you’re focusing on the most relevant competitors in your niche.
For each competitor, InLinks unveils data points, including average content word count, readability score, and even a score indicating how search engine-friendly their content is. This comprehensive analysis allows you to see how your competitors’ content is performing and identify potential areas for improvement in your content strategy.
It also distils each competitor’s content structure by heading tags and sections. This eliminates the need to manually scour competitor websites and allows you to efficiently identify potential gaps in their content strategy that you can leverage to create better content pieces.
InLinks provides complete control over competitor selection. You can use the gear icon (⚙️) to edit the list and add specific websites you want to analyze for a more tailored approach.
Content Briefs
Developing a well-structured content brief is essential for creating high-quality content that resonates with your audience and ranks well in search engines. Outranking and InLinks simplify this process with their comprehensive content brief generation features.
Outranking
To create a content brief in Outranking, navigate to the “SEO Brief” feature. Input your target keyword and, for optimal results, specify your target location and language.
Outranking analyzes the top 10 ranking pages on Google for your chosen keyword and suggests title variations. It also automatically generates a concise meta description, saving you time and effort.
Then, it provides “intent-driven SEO outlines.” These outlines are comprehensive and easy to modify, providing a clear roadmap for your writers while keeping search engine optimization in mind. You can further enhance the outline by adding section-specific writing guidance to keep your writers on track.
Additionally, Outranking integrates “People Also Ask” (PAA) questions directly from Google. Select the most relevant questions and add them to your brief, ensuring your content addresses the specific needs of your target audience.
Outranking allows you to include details such as your target persona, preferred tone of voice, content funnel stage and preferred CTA in the content brief.
Once your content brief is finalized, Outranking offers two convenient sharing options. You can either share it directly within the app with your team members or download the brief for external distribution.
InLinks
With InLinks, content briefs are more collaborative. Instead of a done for you template, InLinks provides all the background research you need to create a detailed brief and then guides you to fill in the gaps.
When you begin a new brief in InLinks, its robust NLP algorithm analyzes your chosen topic, leveraging Google’s Knowledge Graph and SERPs to gather a wealth of data on relevant keywords, user intent, and competitor content. This comprehensive data is then meticulously organized and presented within your brief, providing a clear roadmap for content creation.
As you explore the keyword research and SERP analysis sections within your brief, you can effortlessly add ideas to the content brief editor by simply clicking the “+” button next to any relevant information. This ensures every nugget of insight is noted.
The AI assistant within InLinks takes things a step further. Select the page type (either a blog post or sales page), your target audience, your tone of voice, and your preferred AI engine (GPT 3.5 or 4). InLinks will automatically generate a content structure you can use as inspiration.
You can then easily add these pre-populated sections directly into your content editor using the “+ Add to ideas” option.
Once you populate your brief with content sections, your editor will look like this.
You’ll see entity recommendations on the right side of the content brief. These recommendations, along with their suggested frequency of inclusion, ensure your content is optimized correctly for search engines without compromising readability.
Once your content brief is finalized, InLinks fosters seamless collaboration. Click the “Assign to a Writer” button located on the right panel. This grants your writer direct access to the content editor within InLinks, which includes all your research tabs and SEO recommendations. This way, your writer has all the information they need to craft exceptional content that meets your goals.
Recommended: How to create an effective content brief for writers
AI Writing Assistant
Once you’re done researching and writing your content briefs, Outranking and InLinks offer AI writing assistants to make actual content creation effortless.
Outranking
Outranking’s AI writing assistant integrates with its content editor and allows you to generate content using prompts and sections.
Prompts guide the AI in generating specific content. Simply enter a prompt outlining your desired outcome. For example, you could use a prompt like “Write a 5-step process to do [something] and elaborate on each step with three sentences.” Outranking’s AI will then generate content that adheres to your prompt.
Sections provide a detailed overview of your research data and AI-generated results. This allows you to evaluate the content and adjust the primary question or concept for the AI writer based on your background data or research findings. You can also review suggested data sources (URLs) within the tool and modify your research as needed.
InLinks
In contrast, InLinks AI writing assistant integrates Open AI GPT -3 and 4 directly within its editor. This eliminates the need to switch between platforms and allows you to create high-quality content efficiently.
Remember the comprehensive content structure you generated earlier with InLinks’ AI assistance? This structure becomes the foundation for your AI-powered content creation process.
Navigate to a specific section within your content outline and click the “Write with AI” button. InLinks will then use this section as a prompt, generating relevant and informative content tailored to your specific topic and target audience.
Don’t like the initial draft? No problem! InLinks allows you to regenerate the output quickly until you’re satisfied with the results.
Once you’ve generated content you love, click “Add to Editor” to seamlessly incorporate it into your primary workspace. The text will be automatically formatted with the correct heading tags, ensuring a clean and professional look.
InLinks understands that the best content creation is a collaborative effort. And so, the AI assistant is designed to give you and your writers a head start, not replace your expertise. Feel free to review and edit the AI-generated content and use your human judgment and experience to make it sound natural, engaging, and perfectly aligned with your brand voice.
Content Optimization
Crafting content is just the first step. You also need to optimize it to ensure it achieves optimal SEO performance.
Outranking
Outranking simplifies SEO optimization by presenting crucial details in two tabs: Score and Audit. To access these tabs, navigate to the “SEO Optimization” section within the left-hand pane of Outranking’s editor.
The Score tab provides a clear overview of your content’s SEO performance across various areas, including Title, Description, Outline, Content, Media, and Links. Each section displays suggestions for improvement based on data gathered from the top-ranking pages for your target keyword in SERPs. You can dive into specific recommendations by clicking on each section.
The “Audit” tab provides actionable insights to enhance your content further and improve its ranking potential. Review these detailed recommendations and implement the suggested changes to optimize your content for better search engine visibility.
Outranking also provides an SEO content score ranging from 0 to 100 (with 100 being the best), which serves as a quick and reliable indicator of your content’s overall SEO health.
InLinks
InLinks, on the other hand, allows you to optimize existing content as well as new content while writing. When running a content brief for your topic, you can add the URL of your existing content to import it directly into the editor. Alternatively, you can draft your content elsewhere and then copy and paste it into the InLinks editor for optimization.
The right-hand panel within the InLinks editor provides valuable content insights at a glance, including:
- Content Score: A clear indicator of your content’s overall SEO health, with a score above 80% signifying well-optimized content.
- Word Count & Readability Score: Ensures your content is the appropriate length and easy for your target audience to understand.
InLinks goes beyond traditional keyword optimization by incorporating entities. These entities encompass synonyms and semantic terms, providing a more comprehensive approach to optimization. InLinks analyzes your content and suggests relevant entities, along with a recommended frequency for inclusion based on how competing content utilizes those entities. This ensures your content addresses a broader range of search terms and user queries.
Clicking on a recommended entity uncovers its Wikipedia definition, synonyms, and related terms and even showcases competitor content sections that reference that entity.
As you add entities and optimize your content, InLinks provides real-time feedback through your content score. This allows you to see the impact of your optimization efforts and ensures you’re on the right track to achieving a well-optimized content piece.
Once your content is optimized and ready to publish, click the green “Publish” button in the top right corner. If your website is built with WordPress, InLinks offers the convenient option to connect directly and publish your content straight from the InLinks editor.
Additional SEO features in InLinks and Outranking
Internal Linking
Both InLinks and Outranking offer internal linking features to improve overall website optimization, crawlability and indexation.
Outranking
Outranking allows you to optimize internal linking for existing content. Simply navigate to “Analyze existing content” and select “Optimize internal links” for your chosen content piece. Its content briefs also include relevant linking (internal and external) suggestions.
InLinks
Unlike Outranking, which relies on your sitemap for internal linking suggestions, InLinks employs a more sophisticated approach. When you set up your website project correctly, specifying cornerstone/target pages for your important topics, InLinks’ NLP engine continuously crawls your website, automatically detecting content pages relevant to those target pages. InLinks then reads your content and builds internal links between those target pages and other pages as you add content to your website.
InLinks doesn’t build random internal links. Instead, it uses its NLP algorithm to identify related content pages and then selects relevant anchor texts that provide context about the linked pages. This anchor text is chosen from the body of your content and is varied with synonyms and related phrases for a more natural link building.
More importantly, InLinks offers a comprehensive internal linking audit to allow you evaluate your internal linking structure, and fix broken links with ease.
Recommended: InLinks launches Internal Linking Audit Tools
Schema Markup
InLinks streamlines schema markup by automating the process. Based on the entities you target within your project (people, places, things, etc.), InLinks automatically generates schema markup in the JSON-LD format. JSON-LD is a popular and efficient format for schema markup, ensuring search engines can easily interpret the data you provide.
Outranking does not offer schema markup.
How Much Does Outranking Cost?
Outranking doesn’t offer a free plan. Its paid plans start at $29 per month and allows you to optimize 5 articles. The SEO Writer plan is priced at $79 per month and grants you unlimited words, 2 users, and the ability to optimize 15 articles. For $149 per month, the SEO Wizard plan bumps up the optimization limit to 30 articles and supports 3 users.
Outranking also offers a Custom Plan for agencies and enterprises that require content creation and optimization for multiple websites. This plan includes additional features like an account manager, training, and invoicing.
How Much Does InLinks Cost?
InLinks uses the credit system and starts by offering a free plan with 20 credits. With the free plan, you can analyze, generate schema and build links between 20 pages and also optimize 2 articles monthly. Paid subscriptions start at $49 per month for the freelancer plan. The agency plan starts at $196 per month and scales based on the number of pages you add, and content optimizations/audits you run.
Outranking vs. Inlinks: Bottomline
Both InLinks and Outranking are potent tools for creating SEO content. However, InLinks stands out with its:
- Entity-based SEO approach for a more comprehensive understanding of search intent.
- Deeper SERP analysis with competitor content structure breakdowns.
- Advanced internal linking using NLP for semantic relevance.
- Automated schema markup to enhance search engine understanding.
- Flexible pricing structure with a free trial and scalable pricing.
If you prioritize a data-driven, entity-based approach to SEO content creation with robust internal linking and schema markup capabilities, InLinks is the ideal choice. Create a free account here today.
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