If you’re looking for InLinks alternatives, you’ve got a fleet of options. From internal linking to content planning, optimization, and schema, the SEO market is bustling with thousands of tools offering similar features from different approaches. There’s also a variety of price points to consider, ranging from $0 to five figures yearly, but you won’t spend anything near that if you’re using InLinks.
To make this post easy, I’ve identified InLinks’ differentiating factors and compared them against the competitive landscape. You can use the links below to jump to specific features.
- Entity-based internal linking
- Topic analysis and topical maps
- Content planning and clustering
- Content optimization
- Schema markup
- Social media
Entity Based Internal Linking
InLinks
Using an entity-based approach to internal linking allows us to create an organized information network within your website. We use our Natural Language Processing Algorithm (NLP) to discover the important topics your website covers and then build contextually relevant links between the target page for each topic and other related pages.
We call them contextually relevant because our NLP algorithm only builds links between pages that cover the same underlying topics, not just those that mention the same keywords. This means your internal links use varied anchor texts that look natural and provide context about the linked pages. This way, your website has more context, making it easier for search engine crawlers to understand, index, and rank your pages for the right topics.
Once you add and validate our Javascript code on your site, InLinks will work in the background, optimizing your links as you add more content pages. The JS code works on all kinds of websites, whether WordPress or built with codes. As your internal linking profile grows, we help you audit and fix common problems like links with 4XX, 5XX, 3XX, and 200 error codes. We can fix these problems all at once with one click to save you and your dev team hours of manual labor.
The Competition
Linkstorm automates internal linking by analyzing your website to suggest linking opportunities. However, it doesn’t use entities to understand your site’s underlying topics or ask you to associate specific pages with their target topics. This means its suggestions are not necessarily based on the relationship between content pages.
Links Whisper works as a WordPress plugin. Once installed on your site, it can suggest internal links as you write within the WordPress editor based on the existing articles on your site. However, its auto-linking feature uses a keyword approach to build links. The tool asks you to specify the keyword you wish to target and the URL to which you want to build links. Then, it creates links from all articles on your site that mention that keyword. This means you may not get a varied link profile but, instead, exact match links, which may make it difficult for the search engine to decipher the authority page for each keyword.
Internal Link Juicer is another WordPress plugin that automates internal linking based on your specific keywords. However, it claims to diversify the anchor texts using an intelligent gap feature. The tool also offers reporting on the status of your internal linking profile.
Takeaway
InLinks is the only internal linking tool that uses a modern entity approach for internal linking. While other tools focus on mentions of keywords, ignoring the underlying meaning of your content, InLinks prioritizes context and only builds links where it makes sense between pages.
Topic Analysis and Topical Maps
When it comes to the content side of things, InLinks doesn’t just look at the keywords you wish to target and their related phrases. Instead, it analyzes the overall topic on which you want to build expertise, authoritativeness, and trust. Then, it creates a topical map to show you how to organize and structure your content to achieve that goal.
We offer two kinds of topic analysis and topical maps: site-wide and SERPs. The site-wide topical map measures your site’s overall authority in your niche by revealing topics and opportunities you’re missing and those you’ve covered. The SERP topical map reveals the entities you should cover to create an authoritative article on a specific topic. Whether you’re analyzing your overall website or an individual topic, InLinks’ topic analysis reveals:
- The categories by which Google structures your topic
- The subtopics relevant to your business
- The essential entities Google associates with your topic in its knowledge graph
- The specific keywords users search on Google to find your topic (all grouped into clusters)
- The real intent searchers have disambiguated with verbs (not generic intent buckets with little to no meaning)
- The questions you should consider and answer with your content.
The Competition
Most SEO tools focus on keyword analysis to simply uncover the phrases users use to search. Only a few tools pay attention to topic research and analysis to show you how to write about your topic.
Marketmuse carries out topic analysis and reveals many insights, including keywords, questions, their semantic relationship to your topic, and how competitors write about your subject. It provides a topic model to show how well your content covers the topic and the missing elements you should include to create authoritative content.
Although a content optimization tool, Frase provides a topic model and heat map to help you create comprehensive content. It offers suggestions on questions to answer to improve content coverage and even links to include in your article. However, as far as critical topic analysis is concerned, I couldn’t find any evidence of such a feature.
Takeaway
Even though Google now prioritizes topics and intent over keywords, many SEO tools ignore it. InLinks leads the way in topical analysis and provides all the data you need to create content for Google’s semantic web.
Content Planning and Clustering
We do content planning at the site level based on your site’s overall core theme. After analyzing your existing pages, we’ll extract the entities within them. Then, our NLP will mirror Google’s knowledge graph to identify related content ideas you’re yet to explore and their search intent.
It’ll then group those ideas into clusters, categorize them based on relevance to your site’s theme, and show you the queries that lead searchers to those topic ideas. This way, you can easily create content that closes the gap and presents your website as the go-to resource in your niche.
The Competition
MarketMuse offers content planning as part of its premium features. According to their website, the tool analyzes your content inventory to see the areas you have authority in and where you do not and then recommends content ideas to improve your topical authority.
Outranking uses NLP to cluster content ideas based on the keywords you provide and data from Google search console. It’ll deliver a report of keyword ideas grouped into clusters with variants for creating SEO content.
WriterZen offers a topic discovery tool that identifies pillar topics and subtopics based on your seed keyword.
Takeaway
Only InLinks and MarketMuse conduct website analysis before recommending content ideas. This way, their recommendations are more personalized and aligned with the general theme of your site.
Content Optimization
For content optimization, InLinks uses NLP to create comprehensive content briefs, offer AI assistance for generating new content, and provide suggestions for improving existing content with entities.
Our content briefs reveal critical insights about the competitive landscape for the topic you wish to write about, user intent analysis, entities, and questions to consider. We also provide word count recommendations based on your SERP competitors.
We use our audience research tool to uncover the different target audiences for your topic, ensuring that the content you create resonates. Based on your target audience, InLinks delivers a detailed content outline to guide writing.
The Competition
MarketMuse bases its optimization suggestions on the topic model it builds for your topic. However, the tool prompts you to mention variants of the same keyword instead of focusing on the underlying meaning of the search query as it claims to do on its website. Essentially, it continues to optimize for keywords instead of entities.
Surfer SEO is a great content optimization tool that at least analyzes entities when optimizing content. It uses IBM Watson’s entity analyzer but offers entity analysis as an option, differentiating it from the regular keyword recommendations. Its entity analyzer is also less aggressive and accurate than InLinks.
With Frase, you can create briefs, generate content with AI, and optimize the content using keyword recommendations. The tool identifies questions people are asking from different sources, such as Quora, Reddit, and People Also Ask, so you can answer them in your content.
Clearscope claims to use IBM Watson’s and Google’s NLP to analyze the top-ranking results for your topic before providing optimization recommendations. Still, it continues to focus on keyword optimization by emphasizing keyword variations, search volume, and density. Outside that, the tool is helpful for creating content briefs that include competitor and keyword research data.
Outranking offers content briefs, AI writing assistance, and guidance on optimizing different parts of your content, including the title, description, media, and links. It provides progress bars for visualizing the strength of each element as you create content in its editor. Incorporating its suggestions will increase the strength of a particular element.
WriterZen allows you to create briefs and use AI to generate content based on the outline it initially puts together. Its optimization is very similar to Outranking’s as it uses progress bars that improve as you incorporate its suggestions.
Takeaway
The market is saturated with content optimization tools. The only problem is that most tools do not care about entities, semantic connections and structuring content the way Google looks at it in its knowledge graph. And worse still, most of these tools come at a high price point. If you’re looking to optimize content properly in a way that readers and search crawlers can understand, use InLinks.
Schema Markup
After creating content, InLinks helps you convert it to machine-readable language with schema markup. Immediately you specify the target topic for your page, we’ll generate the relevant webpage schema to adequately describe the page’s content to Google. We’ll also create FAQ schema when we find multiple questions in your heading tags. All of this happens automatically in the backend without you tagging elements on the page. And we’ll push the schema live onto your site if the JS code is active.
The Competition
WordLift is a solid schema markup tool that uses open-source tools to create and publish your knowledge graph. The tool works as a WP plugin, so creating Schema with it is a bit of a manual process. You’ll have to go into WP admin, open the page to which you wish to add structured data, and then select the most important entity for that page from the list of entities the tool has recognized. Once you make the selections, WordLift will immediately add schema markup to your page.
Unlike InLinks, tools like Schema Pro, Schema App, Hall Analysis, Rank Ranger, and Webcode tools do not inject schema codes directly into your content. After generating the markup with any of these tools, you have to copy the code and manually add it to the head section of your page. This makes it difficult for non-technical users to implement schema markup.
Social Media
Many marketers look at social media as a different domain from SEO, and rightly so. For that reason, very few SEO tools cater to social media content. InLinks, however, is different. We provide a social media manager that uses your website’s knowledge graph as a repository of content ideas. The tool extracts questions and sub-topics of interest from your content pages and turns them into social posts for LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Google My Business.
It also includes a content calendar for scheduling the content and auto-posting to your desired platform.
The Competition
Semrush, a well-known SEO tool, offers a social media tool kit that handles the scheduling side of things. It also helps with tracking your competitors’ social activities to provide insights into their social media strategy. However, it doesn’t offer any help with creating or generating content ideas.
The same goes for SE Ranking, SiteChecker, and RankRanger, which only focus on auto-posting and tracking your content’s performance. They do not offer any help with content ideation or generation.
Use InLinks for all your SEO content needs
One of InLinks’ differentiators is that our customers do not need to maintain multiple subscriptions as we provide 360° support for all SEO content needs.
Our entity approach ensures that your content is comprehensive and authoritative and that it ranks for multiple related user queries. We also offer all these features for one subscription fee. Unlike most tools, we do not lock features behind higher-tier plans. Learn more about InLinks pricing, or create an account today to see the tool in action.
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