Honest NeuronWriter Review After Using It For A Year [2024 Guide]
This post may contain affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase something, I will receive a commission with no extra cost to you. For more information, please read my disclaimer.
Like many of my fellow bloggers, I didn’t know any SEO when I started writing articles many years ago. I was writing really good quality long-form content and putting my heart into it, but it only got occasional rankings. Only later I realized that since Google is not a human, to continuously please it and rank well, you need to speak robot language (SEO) and speak it well.
I gradually learned SEO after about a year into my blogging journey, and things started to look brighter for my traffic after understanding how it works. However, I never had a solid software tool for search engine optimization in my toolkit long enough to get results – that is until I met NeuronWriter about a year ago, and we clicked.
In this honest NeuronWriter review, I’ll tell you why it’s my favorite SEO tool, explain how it works, and share some best practices based on the 1+ year of using this tool for content optimization.
NeuronWriter Overview
Quick summary of my experience with NeuronWriter
NeuronWriter is the first SEO tool I found valuable enough to consistently use for a year. It gives you a very specific roadmap for improving your search positions by suggesting the exact keywords to include in the article, making it more semantically relevant from the robot’s perspective.
Whenever I optimize a piece of content with NeuronWriter, I see a noticeable uptick in traffic after a few days. I love that it’s 100% based on data from real-time rankings, which removes all the guesswork from the on-page SEO.
Overall, NeuronWriter is a really great, easy-to-use AI tool that helps optimize your content for search engines and strengthen your SEO strategy.
What is NeuronWriter?
NeuronWriter is an AI-powered content optimization platform that helps you create engaging content that performs well in search engines. It uses natural language processing (NLP) to analyze top-ranking pages and provides you with suggestions for key terms, questions, and topics to fully cover a subject area.
You can leverage these semantic recommendations along with AI generation to produce comprehensive articles and web pages.
With over a million analyses completed, this SEO tool has helped organizations worldwide significantly increase their organic search traffic and grow their businesses.
NeuronWriter is very loved in the SEO community due to its pricing and effectiveness. I personally know at least 20 bloggers other than me who are using the Gold Plan or higher as their primary content optimization tool.
NeuronWriter’s benefits
Outrank competitors
NeuronWriter analyzes the top-ranking articles and gives you actionable advice so you can jump higher in SERPs and steal the top positions for all the money-making keywords.
Rank smarter
Instead of continuously producing content and hoping some of it ranks, you can leverage what already works and use data-driven insights to rank every page strategically.
Get more traffic
When your content ranks higher and shows up at the top in search results, it attracts more people to your website. And more visitors means more brand awareness, new customers and consistent business growth.
Enjoy the process
NeuronWriter takes the hassle out of making content that ranks well. Its easy-to-use tools guide you step-by-step, so producing optimized articles is a fun and enjoyable process.
Who is NeuronWriter for?
NeuronWriter is for anyone who wants to create great content that gets found online, including:
- Bloggers who want to grow their audience and earn more from their sites. NeuronWriter makes it simple to optimize posts and leverage AI to publish more consistently.
- Content marketers who need to develop strategies and produce well-optimized long-form content at scale.
- SEO specialists looking to boost traffic and rankings for their clients. NeuronWriter’s keyword and competitive research tools help target the right opportunities.
- Digital marketing agencies managing many clients’ content needs. They can leverage its planning, drafting, and optimization features to work more efficiently.
- Small business owners wanting to enhance their web presence through organic search. NeuronWriter is affordable for solopreneurs and SMBs looking to outrank larger competitors.
Whether you’re an individual creator or large enterprise, NeuronWriter has professional-grade yet easy-to-use tools that any marketer can benefit from, and a variety of pricing plans to meet everyone’s budget.
Key NeuronWriter features
With this overview of the main NeuronWriter features, let me walk you through an easy process of creating a well-optimized article that will likely rank on Google.
1. Setting things up
Let’s start in the dashboard. After you sign up, this is where you end up. This is the home for all your projects (usually one project per website, but you can use a different system if you prefer and just treat projects as folders).
You can have anywhere from 2 to 50 projects, depending on your plan. Most content creators will never need so many (I can have 10 on the Gold plan), but it’s very useful for agencies and SEO consultants to separate the scope of each client’s website.
To create your first folder, click on Create New Project. You’ll be prompted to fill in the URL (optional), choose target country and language.
All left to do is to press Create!
2. Content queries
This is the place you see the most often in NeuronWriter (apart from the editor) and where the process of optimizing a new article starts.
You get here by clicking on any of your projects/websites. (If you have only one project, I recommend bookmarking this page so you save a couple of clicks every time you use the app!)
Here is an example of how my project in NeuronWriter looks at the moment:
There is a lot to talk about on this screen, and there is probably about twice as much data that you don’t see due to my custom columns/filters. (Yes, you can customize this view so you only see the fields you care about!)
Naturally, you see the target keyword, target SERP difficulty, search volume, trend, and CPC data for that keyword. Then there are fields like “Assigned to” (which makes sense if you have multiple writers unlike me) and “Expected” (due date for the article, not in the screenshot).
Next, there is information about your article (if there is one): content score, word count, tags, analysis date, and the date of the last revision.
3. New content analysis
To start a new optimization process, click the “New query” button at the top.
To not overcomplicate things, all you need to do here is enter the keyword you want to rank for and press Start. NeuronWriter automatically pulls country and language from your project settings, and everything else is optional.
For this example, I used the keyword “how to negotiate salary increase” and the additional keywords “salary increase negotiation” and “how to ask for a raise.”
Always think about the different ways someone might google the same information. Everyone’s thought process is unique, and ideally, you want to catch all the variations with one article. So let Google know every relevant keyword by naturally mentioning them all at least once on the page.
If you have a particular article in mind that you want to outrank, you can add a link to that article to make sure it’s also analyzed for this query.
Finally, there are additional fields to fill if you want to assign this article to a team member and/or specify a deadline.
You also might have noticed the toggle “create multiple analyses at once” – this allows you to save time, and it will create a separate editor for each keyword.
Personally, I don’t recommend this approach. While it’s quicker, you don’t have control over choosing competitors for each analysis (the next step), which is a crucial part of a successful optimization.
When you press Start, a new item appears on top of your “content queries” list, with a progress bar (from my experience, it never takes more than a few seconds).
When it’s ready, you can click either on the keyword or on the first action button, as shown in the screenshot below, to get to the next step.
Somehow, this random keyword I chose as an example has 3 as SERP difficulty (super easy), which is rare if you look at my first screenshot. Lucky!
4. Choosing the competitors
After you start the new analysis, the next step is to choose the specific competitors in search results as a source of semantic data for NeuronWriter.
NeuronWriter pulls the top 30 currently ranking competitors and gives you basic information for each, such as content score, article length, page title, and URL.
Your goal is to get a score a little bit higher than the highest competitor score.
In this case, the highest number is 68, so I would be satisfied if I get to 72-75, and will stop at that. No need to make it 90 or 100 (unless all your competitors are in that range) – in fact, overoptimizing might hurt your website if Google suspects that you are doing this for the wrong reasons.
So, how do you choose the competitors?
- First, I would remove any social media or UGC results (Twitter, YouTube, Reddit) because they clearly rank not because of the semantic SEO.
- Then, I’m looking at the top 10 results one by one and removing everything that doesn’t match the search intent. You know those high-DR websites that seem to rank for anything slightly related? We don’t want them to dilute our analysis.
- I’m also excluding anything that I see as thin content, in this case, number 3 with 572 words and number 9 with 372 words. (This doesn’t mean those are bad articles but, from my experience, they are usually not properly optimized and are ranking solely because of the domain authority as opposed to on-page SEO.)
Some people like to look at top 20 and choose everything that’s relevant to the search. I personally mostly care about top 10 (those who are on page 2 clearly aren’t doing a good job, why would we want to be like them?).
NeuronWriter recommends selecting at least five competitors in order to get a good semantic analysis for your target keyword.
Here is an example of this process directly from the NeuronWriter team:
5. Content editor
As you choose your competitors and press Next, NeuronWriter analyses all those articles and creates a content editor for you with suggested terms and other relevant data.
If you wrote at least one article in your life, the editor itself should look familiar, so let’s focus on the features that may be new to you.
Here are some important things to pay attention to on this screen (click to jump):
Feature tabs
This panel with little tabs is easy to overlook, but it has a ton of additional features you may find useful! The first tab is the current editor, so let’s look at the others one by one:
Competition
This is a super detailed breakdown of the top 30 currently ranking competitors.
You can see lots of metrics about their domains, article structure, schema, metadata, and headings, compare content length and quality, see whether or not they use images, videos, and tables, and how they use the suggested terms.
There is also a Related Searches tab with long-tail keywords that I find particularly helpful for informational articles.
Internal linking
When your article draft is ready, here you can generate internal link ideas.
NeuronWriter will find semantically relevant articles on your site you can naturally link to and even suggest anchors to consider.
Next content ideas
To be honest, I didn’t realize this cool feature existed in NeuronWriter until recently!
It finds new keyword-based topic ideas related to the current article and even groups similar ones into clusters.
Search Console integration
You only have access to this with the Gold Plan or above.
After you connect your Google Search Console, NeuronWriter can pull data from it, so you can see clicks, impressions, top keywords and pages, and more without switching the context.
This is especially useful when you do SEO for multiple clients – just connect all their GSC accounts and access all the insights in one place.
Content scores
Let me show the rest of the features with one of my finished optimizations instead of the new blank one. This should make it easier to see NeuronWriter in use and appreciate the interface and color-coding!
For example, here is an article I generated in the past with Koala AI:
Actually, this example feels a little bit like cheating because I didn’t manually optimize it – this Koala-generated article had a good enough NeuronWriter score out of the box. (Read more in my full Koala review)
Nevertheless, it’s a good example of what the result should look like after optimization.
Let’s look closer at the content score panel.
This is where you can see the progress as you are editing the article.
As you can see, my article’s score is 73, which is better than the competitor’s maximum of 65 and far enough for me to consider it good enough for publishing.
Here you can also change the competitors you chose in step 4. (I think this only makes sense if you bulk-generated editors for a bunch of keywords and skipped the competitor selection step.)
Besides the overall score, NeuronWriter shows you whether you used enough terms in title, headings, content, and whether your word count is good enough. In this case, NeuronWriter target was 1993 and Koala generated 2050 words, which is a perfect match.
It’s not obvious, but you can click on the content score panel to see a detailed breakdown below. It’s called a content score checklist.
It tells you things like the number of H2 headings in your article, how many times you use bold text, and what terms are missing.
Key terms
The key terms panel is the most important area for the optimization process.
It shows you a list of suggested terms for the article based on the competitor research and roughly how many times you should use each term in your content.
I really appreciate the color coding: it lets your brain quickly find things to focus on (everything that’s not green) and grasp the whole picture at a glance.
The colors are very intuitive:
- Missing terms are in grey
- The terms you nailed are in green
- Yellow terms are those you used a little more than ideal
- Anything that’s in red says you overdid it, and robots might see you as a spammy keyword stuffer
All these numbers are being updated in real time as you are editing the article. You also have the option to copy all the terms if you prefer to write in Google Docs, WordPress editor, or elsewhere.
Of course, you don’t have to follow these 100%. Combine these with your own judgment, and don’t stress about it too much.
For example, I found that short-tail keywords (in this case, “time anxiety”) are almost always in red because you naturally can’t write an article about apples without mentioning apples.
Generally, NeuronWriter gives you a fresh perspective so you can identify repetitive wording and replace it with variations.
For me, the most important key terms are the grey ones. They show you missing opportunities and potentially the topics you failed to cover in the article. Finding a way to include those extra variations almost guarantees that you see more traffic as you start ranking for more keywords.
If you want, you can click on any term and see detailed statistics on how many competitors use it in the article and how exactly it is used. You can also highlight it in your content or exclude it from suggestions if it’s not relevant (for example, a competitor brand’s name).
Autoinsert
I wanted to mention this feature because it was requested in the community a while ago – and finally, they added it!
Autoinserting terms is an amazing time-saver and a great example of how AI can make your life easier.
Basically, when you have the first draft of your article ready, you can ask NeuronWriter’s AI to add the missing terms for you automatically.
(Don’t worry, this will not mess up your article! I was a bit scared to click that button at first.)
When you click Autoinsert, NeuronWriter analyses your article and suggests paragraphs and sentences that you can rewrite in a certain way to include new keywords. All you need to do is go through the list and accept suggestions that make sense.
Be careful with this feature, as it can easily eat a big chunk of your available AI credits. The total number of credits you have depends on your plan.
Next steps
The 3 dots in the right corner is where NeuronWriter hides even more useful features. Depending on your content production process, you might find some of these more useful than others.
Some of the things you can do here are:
- Check for plagiarism
- Import from or export to WordPress
- Download the editor content in HTML or DOCX format
- Share with your team or clients (read-only or editing access)
6. SEO-focused article audits
First of all, they didn’t have this feature a year ago.
I really wanted this feature in NeuronWriter because I saw how valuable it was in Surfer, so I even nudged my blogging friends who also used NeuronWriter to vote for it in the Neuron’s public roadmap.
The process is similar to normal optimization as I described above, but instead of writing an article from scratch, you add a link to your published content and NeuronWriter pulls the article into the editor, with formatting and all.
From my experience with different SEO tools, NeuronWriter is surprisingly good at pulling the article and stripping all the unnecessary stuff.
Other tools pulled the menus, footers, related posts, and other widgets that you have to manually delete. Neuron might grab little things like affiliate disclaimer or author bio depending on how your website is set up, but it successfully removes footers and other non-content things.
7. AI writing tools
Finally, we get to the final key feature in NeuronWriter that’s relatively new: AI assistance. Actually, it’s a set of quite a few features.
In all honesty, I don’t use any of the AI features because I either write myself or create my articles with Koala Writer (I currently find it the best AI writer quality-wise – see my review with samples here). Then, I optimize in NeuronWriter until I have a better score than my competitors.
So, I will simply show you what AI features are available to me on a Gold plan.
1. Metadata
Before you start writing the article, I recommend filling in the meta title and description because they are a big part of your total score.
You can write it yourself or let AI generate everything for you.
Make sure you always fill it in, or you’ll have a hard time getting the desired score!
2. Outline
NeuronWriter offers to generate an outline for your article (go to a tab next to the Terms).
It is actually better than generating an outline with an AI writer or AI chatbot because Neuron aims to include some of the suggested terms in the outline. This means your outline is SEO-optimized right out of the gate, and there are enough key terms across the headings.
Other than generating a full outline, NeuronWriter shows you ALL the competitor headlines (any of which you can steal in one click – I don’t recommend ever doing this).
It also generates smart headings based on the leftover terms and suggests relevant questions from “People Also Ask” and other sources.
3. AI writing templates
Next to the Outline tab, there is the AI-writing tab with about 20 available templates.
Some of those are basic and everyone can use it, while others are considered advanced and are only included in the Gold plan and above.
Basic templates allow you to expand/rephrase text, generate a paragraph or article intro, FAQs and product descriptions, email and YouTube descriptions, etc.
Advanced templates available to me are the following:
- One-click long-form article
- Article based on your outline
- One-click landing page
- Landing page based on your outline
- Advanced article outline
- FAQ with unused terms
I know you are probably curious about the one-click article generator, so here is a quick 1-minute video where you can see the process and read the output.
The output is on par with what you’d get from ChatGPT and other generic writing tools. I personally find it too bland and boring (like most AI tools I tried), which is why I use Koala Writer instead. Jasper AI is also good at writing more human-like content.
If you are a bit more hands-on, NeuronWriters provides a step-by-step flow for you to create your own custom AI templates. The process is fairly straightforward but requires some technical understanding and basic AI prompting skills.
Other things I like about NeuronWriter
I feel like this review is becoming not just a review but rather a full tutorial for NeuronWriter. I apologize for the length, but I hope you are getting value from it!
There are a few more useful things I’d like to mention about this tool after a year of consistently using it. Things that didn’t make it to the key features but must be mentioned in my NeuronWriter review because all these little things add to the overall impression.
Color coding & highlights
One nice feature you’ll find in the content editor is highlighting the terms.
Not only it highlights all the occurences but it also color codes them in the same way as in the terms panel! This way, you can see at a glance where your writing is repetitive or where the blank areas are with potential opportunities for insertion.
Content planning
Sometimes, I randomly come up with ideas for future articles, and it’s nice to have a place to jot them down.
Just go to the Plan tab at the very top and press New Idea. You can add the target keyword, additional keywords (optional), and even assign it to someone and set a due date (for example, if it’s a trendy topic and should be prioritized).
If you can click the Write button near any topic, it will take you through the familiar process of creating a new content editor.
Chrome extension
If you want to optimize your article without disrupting your normal content creation process, you can use the NeuronWriter browser extension to bring it with you.
For example, I prefer to write directly in WordPress, so I like that I can see the terms right here in the sidebar thanks to the Chrome extension.
I know many people who like to use Google Docs – if that’s you, you don’t have to change your flow, just use the Neuron extension!
NeuronWriter academy
I feel like this is becoming more common among SEO tools, or at least that’s what see more and more with the tools I come upon.
NeuronWriter has a bunch of easy-to-follow tutorials to introduce you to their most useful workflows. It’s called the NeuronWriter Academy, and you can even get a certificate if you finish all the videos and answer some simple quizzes correctly.
Most videos are only a couple of minutes long, and there is a Shorts collection where each video is just a few seconds.
No more clicking around trying to figure out what each button does! It also saves you from burning through the AI credits while you are just getting familiar with the app.
Facebook group
The last thing I wanted to mention in this NeuronWriter review is their lovely and active Facebook community with supportive members and responsive admins.
It’s called NeuronWriter Family!
(I don’t often see communities like this in the SEO/marketing world, where many people only care about monetization and promotion.)
If you are a part of this Facebook group, you get to know before anybody else about the upcoming updates, ask developers questions and advice, and vote for the new features.
But my favorite part is when people in the group share their successes with NeuronWriter, and everyone cheers!
Let me show you what I mean and give you a sneak peak into the group (hope my NeuronWriter family won’t mind).
Case study 1
Case study 2
Case study 3
In the SEO world, you don’t come by really supportive and motivational groups very often, which shows how much this product’s team cares about us bloggers. They know that our success equals their success, so they do their best to keep us engaged, add new useful features, and keep NeuronWriter awesome!
NeuronWriter pricing
I initially chose NeuronWriter because it’s way more affordable than the alternative SEO tools (yes, Surfer, I’m looking at you!), while offering more or less the same functionality for optimizing articles.
And if you are lucky to get a lifetime deal (more in the next section), you get mindblowing value with a single payment that you could leverage for years to come on multiple projects!
But first, let’s look at NeuronWriter’s pricing structure:
As you can see, there are 5 plans, and you get about a 17% discount if you pay annually.
Plans range from 25 content analyses and 15.000 AI credits (Bronze) to 150 analyses and 75.000 AI credits (Diamond).
Pretty much everybody I know uses the Gold plan because it’s the best value for money and you get access to a bunch of additional useful features that smaller plans don’t have.
But you need to use your own judgment and estimate how much content you can realistically produce/optimize per month – this will tell you which plan is best for your business.
For reference, the most popular competitor to NeuronWriter, Surfer SEO, starts at $89 per month, with AI features only available on a $219 monthly plan.
Does NeuronWriter offer a free trial?
Yes, NeuronWriter offers a generous 30-day free trial, which is a limited equivalent of the Gold Plan. You can optimize three articles and use 1.000 credits, which is more than enough to try the tool out and see how it performs.
The best thing? They don’t even ask for your credit card, which is rare.
And if you are skeptical, I recommend making the most of the free trial, optimizing three articles that are currently on page 2 or 3, and tracking those positions for a week or two (depending on how authoritative your blog is). You’ll likely be surprised!
Does NeuronWriter offer a lifetime deal?
Yes, NeuronWriter currently offers a sweet lifetime deal not many people know about!
The lifetime deal costs less than 4 months of a corresponding subscription plan, which means you are basically using it for free after 4 months, potentially saving several hundred, if not thousand, dollars per year.
Each plan costs $89 more, and the right one for you depends on the functionality you need:
- With Bronze Plan, you can optimize up to 25 pieces of content per month and get 15,000 AI credits.
- With Silver Plan, you can optimize up to 50 pieces of content per month and get 30,000 AI credits.
- With Gold Plan, you can optimize up to 75 pieces of content per month and get 45,000 AI credits.
- With Platinum Plan, you can optimize up to 100 pieces of content per month and get 60,000 AI credits.
- With Diamond Plan, you can optimize up to 150 pieces of content per month and get 75,000 AI credits.
I initially was on a Silver Plan but recently upgraded to the Gold Plan because it offers more advanced AI features, powerful integrations with Google Search Console and WordPress, and some other perks.
Room for improvement
Even though NeuronWriter is my number-one choice for an AI SEO tool in 2024, it’s not perfect and could use some guidance from its top competitors.
Here are some cons:
Best NeuronWriter alternatives
As I mentioned, NeuronWriter is my favorite SEO tool.
But if you want options, here are some other tools I had good experience with:
- MarketMuse is what I call a full SEO suite and probably the most impressive feature-wise out of all the tools I played with. Its main strength is powerful keyword research with a patented model, competitive analysis, and unique features like SERP X-Ray and Heatmaps. Read my MarketMuse review.
- Scalenut is a more affordable version of a MarketMuse. It doesn’t have as many fancy unique features, but it can find you relevant keyword clusters, generate good outlines, enrich your content with AI generations, and optimize for SERPs. Read my Scalenut review.
- Koala AI is the best AI article writer for SEO purposes. It gives you an opportunity to be as involved as you want, from guiding AI with custom prompts to generating unlimited number of long-form articles almost in one click. Read my Koala review.
Final verdict: Is NeuronWriter worth it?
For me, NeuronWriter is undoubtedly worth it based on the results I’ve seen over the past year of consistent use.
Given its effective feature set, intuitive interface, and how it has translated into more traffic and better rankings, NeuronWriter delivers excellent value as my go-to AI optimization solution.
I love auditing my older articles and almost always see an uptick in ranking positions after a day or two!
Knowing how much more affordable NeuronWriter is than Surfer and other tools with comparable functionality, investing in it should be a no-brainer.
While this tool is not perfect and continual enhancements are underway, NeuronWriter has proven highly useful in helping me strengthen my overall SEO strategy through intelligent article optimization. I would recommend it to any content marketer seeking to boost organic search visibility.
Pros
Cons
(No credit card required)
![Hands-On Keyword Insights Review 2024 [Full Content Workflow]](https://juliety.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/keyword-insights-review-768x512.png)
