Running a website is a very challenging task on its own, let alone when you're competing against other bloggers, each with a full-time SEO team working round the clock to elevate their position on search engines.
Of course, the mission is several times more challenging if you manage multiple websites. And although you may have access to Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and other SEO tools, it's hard to use them all efficiently without a helping hand.
The good news? Content marketers and creators have recognized this problem, and that's why we now have services like ContentKing to relieve you of your SEO and development worries.
Today, I bring you the ultimate ContentKing review. So read on to find out if this tried-and-tested service can help you optimize your web pages.
The Contentking APP provides a real-time SEO Auditing & Monitoring Platform for bloggers, content marketers, and all your pages.
If you purchase through our partner links, we get paid for the referral at no additional cost to you! For more information, visit my disclosure page.
What Is ContentKing?
In layman's terms, ContentKing is a search engine optimization (SEO) tool that helps you optimize your website's search visibility so that customers see your website on search engines when they look up relevant keywords.
In more specific terms, ContentKing is a sophisticated web crawler and SEO auditing tool.
The crawler finds all the web pages of your website, and the audit tool gives you real-time feedback on your website's SEO health through ongoing SEO performance monitoring.
It's actually amazing what it can do and the ability to detect server issues on the spot.
History of ContentKing
ContentKing's roots were as unsuspecting as those of many other successful companies.
It wasn't born out of grand plans of future success and wasn't inspired by the riches of other website crawlers. Instead, ContentKing was founded on necessity.
Before Vincent van Scherpenseel founded ContentKing in 2015 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, he and his team were running a digital marketing agency. And as their client websites grew bigger, they realized the need to automate dull tasks.
And although there were some website crawlers in the market back then, they mostly offered easier access to the tools you already had rather than automation.
So you'd still have to do those dull tasks by yourself. And although it may work at first, it wasn't going to be scalable as clients' websites got bigger.
And that's all the motivation van Scherpenseel and his team needed to turn their need into a successful project.
How Can ContentKing Help You?
If you're running a website or blogging business and your goal is top SEO quality, how can ContentKing benefit you?
In theory, ContentKing doesn't offer a new magical service or SEO tool you can't already find somewhere else.
You can see in the app dashboard, it's giving me advanced info on one of my blog posts.
However, it combines all the tools you need into one place alongside its trademark features to make your life easier. By having all your tools in one box, you save plenty of time and effort.
But ContentKing isn't just a toolbox! You can use it to manage multiple sites from the same dashboard.
And with all the detailed feedback ContentKing provides, it'll be a gem to your PPC and analytics agency.
ContentKing Pros and Cons
ContentKing is rich in features. But realistically, no app or service is perfect in every aspect. So in a sense, each app in the market competes to maximize its pros while minimizing the cons.
And I'm not going to sugarcoat it, either, as it's important to talk about the good and the bad fairly. So let's look at an overview of ContentKing's pros and cons.
Pros
- 24/7 real-time monitoring
- Analysis using live data
- Fast and customizable alerts
- Integrations with useful third-party apps
- Easy to use without deep technical knowledge
- 100% cloud-based service
- Fair pricing model
- Amazing customer support
Using ContentKing is like hiring someone to keep an eye on all your web pages all the time and help you with identifying technical issues, content errors, or any other problem that might affect your ranking.
And you don't even need to be an SEO guru to use ContentKing effectively. The intuitive interface is laid down for you in a digestible way to enable anyone to optimize their pages without being an SEO specialist.
Lastly, ContentKing's pricing model is often overlooked, but it's very nuanced. It's unique in how it charges you based on your page bundle. But it's fair because it doesn't charge you for broken links or high user traffic. However, it has a few downsides, as well.
Cons
- The pricing model can be confusing
- Will sometimes highlight non-issues
- Can be slow
- No JavaScript rendering for the Basic plan
- Only supports single hosting
The ContentKing pricing model is fair but a little harsh on people on a budget because the Basic plan doesn't include JavaScript rendering.
Apart from that, the real-time alert system can sometimes catch "issues" that don't really harm your website. But we'll give it a pass because of how thorough it is, regardless.
But if any of ContentKing's cons are pushing you away, you can check out some of its alternatives.
Related Blog Post: Cons of blogging and how to fix them
Key SEO Tools on ContentKing
I briefly mentioned how ContentKing solves multiple problems through some features like proactive monitoring and combining multiple domains and tools in one dashboard.
Now it's time to go into more detail about ContentKing's key features.
Real-Time SEO Monitoring
One of ContentKing's best features is its trademark Monitoring tool, which keeps an eye on everything happening on your websites on the front-end and behind the scenes.
ContentKing Monitoring ensures all your website changes go live without problems. And if a problem arises, it'll help you track it down so you can fix SEO issues immediately before they harm your business.
This is great as a blogger who doesn't want check their reports constantly.
Real-Time SEO Auditing
The ContentKing Monitoring feature audits your entire site 24/7 without waiting for the crawl to end. So when you see a page's performance, you know it's real-time data.
ContentKing also uploads the data you need to its cloud, allowing you to access it easily at any time and place. And the algorithm that sorts SEO issues by their priority is another indispensable tool.
Alerts Before Search Engines Catch Errors
SEO issues are inevitable. And you certainly don't want problems like broken links or HTML semantic mishaps to turn into SEO disasters and destroy your critical ranking pages.
Luckily, the ContentKing Monitoring feature is an intelligent system. Once it spots a problem with any of your web pages, it'll alert you immediately so you can take action before search engines catch them and give your SEO ranking a hit.
Real-time alerts will notify you of technical SEO errors, issues with your platform or hosting, and problems with your HTML semantics or content.
You can even set up alerts for custom features on your website if ContentKing's system doesn't cover it already.
And you can decide who gets notified when the system detects a problem, so it's easy to collaborate with your development team.
Change Tracking
Change Tracking is another trademark ContentKing feature. As its name suggests, it keeps track of all changes to your websites and even changes within individual pages. And it's all in real-time, too.
ContentKing also saves all your change logs in their cloud, so you can see month-long changes to your pages and how they've changed your website.
Even your HTTP headers and your HTML source code are saved, allowing you to troubleshoot the most elusive issues on your website.
Log File Analysis
Understanding how search engine bots interact with your website can help you boost your SEO quality. Luckily, all search engine bot activity is logged in a file (i.e., the log file), which you can view and analyze directly from the ContentKing dashboard.
You can view how often these bots see your web pages when their last visits were, and if they spotted recent changes, you made to your website.
Actionable Insights and Detailed Reports
The performance data you can view from the dashboard is already precious in its raw form. Yet, ContentKing has an automated system that summarizes key data and highlights them for you in elegant and digestible reports.
The level of detail in these reports is quite impressive, as well. And the visual representation of the most relevant points you need to focus on makes it easy to work on SEO optimizations, even if you don't have an SEO specialist.
APIs and Integrations
The ContentKing APIs are easy to integrate into your internal project management workflows on third-party apps like Slack and Microsoft Teams.
You can also integrate it into other SEO managers like Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and Adobe Analytics.
However, the only restriction is that some third-party integrations are limited to specific pricing plans, which I'll discuss in the next section.
But it's still great to add into your affiliate marketing resource.
ContentKing Pricing
ContentKing doesn't have a fixed price for everyone since they don't offer a one-size-fits-all service for all website sizes. Instead, how many pages you need to monitor (your page bundle) determines the price you'll pay.
You can also save some money in the form of commitment discounts. In other words, if you choose a longer billing cycle, you'll pay a smaller total monthly sum.
In addition to monthly billing, ContentKing offers quarterly and annual billing for 10% and 15% discounts, respectively.
Lastly, there are four plans with different prices: basic, standard, pro, and enterprise.
Basic
The Basic plan comes at $39 per month for 1,000 pages and $169 per month for 10,000 pages without the commitment discounts.
Here's what the Basic plan offers:
Unlimited users
Unlimited websites
Unlimited rechecks
Data retention for six months
Real-time auditing
24/7 monitoring (limited to US, UK, and EU)
Change Tracking
Proactive alerting
Co-branding
Email and live chat support
Tutorial videos and guides
Additionally, the Basic plan allows you to integrate with Slack, Chrome extensions, Google Search Console, and Google Analytics.
Standard
The Standard plan comes at $89 per month for 1,000 pages and $379 per month for 10,000 pages without the commitment discounts.
Here's what the Standard plan offers in addition to the Basic plan:
Data retention for nine months
Custom element extraction (five per website)
JavaScript rendering
Previews of HTTP headers
Monitoring core web vitals
Additionally, the Standard plan allows you to integrate with the platforms above, Google Data Studio, and Reporting API.
Pro
The Pro plan comes at $149 per month for 1,000 pages and $539 per month for 10,000 pages without the commitment discounts.
Here's what the Standard plan offers in addition to the above plans:
Data retention for 12 months
Custom element extraction (ten per website)
Log file analysis
Content indexing with IndexNow
Additionally, the Pro plan allows you to integrate with the platforms above and Microsoft Teams.
Enterprise
Doing a simple Google search, you can find the enterprise plan.
The Enterprise plan starts at $550 per month for 1,000 pages and $1,279 per month for 10,000 pages without the commitment discounts.
Here's what the Standard plan offers in addition to the above plans:
Data retention for up to 60 months
Custom element extraction (20 per website)
Previews of HTTP bodies
Additionally, the Enterprise plan allows you to integrate with the platforms above, Data Enrichment API, and Adobe Analytics.
As you might expect, the Enterprise plan is more of an exquisite plan for large businesses and their vast storage needs.
Every Enterprise plan is adjusted to the customer's needs. And Enterprise customers get higher priority when contacting support.
Alternatives to ContentKing
Based on your SEO needs, Content King can be a perfect solution for your blog or eCommerce site, but sometimes we need something that's not as advanced.
Let's go over a few Content King Alternatives:
- Surfer SEO
- MarketMuse
- Frase IO
- Serpstat
With Surfer, you can have your articles ranked on the first page of Google by using machine learning and other ranking factors.
We earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no additional cost to you.
Create optimized SEO reports for each blog post and webpage on your site
We earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no additional cost to you.
One of the SEO Content Optimization Tool & AI Writer for websites
We earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no additional cost to you.
Growth Hacking Tool for SEO, PPC, and Content Marketing
We earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no additional cost to you.
Conclusion: Is ContentKing Worth It?
ContentKing fills a sizeable gap in the market for affiliates and marketers.
A big part of ContentKing's powerful features can be attributed to its founding members, who created the software out of necessity. Vincent van Scherpenseel and his team were their own first customers.
One of ContentKing's selling points is that it can help you manage your sites effectively without an expert's SEO perspective. In addition, its user-friendly interface is intuitive, and you'll often find what you're looking for right away.
And with its several trademark features, like real-time Monitoring and Change Tracking, it'll feel like you hired someone to supervise your website, check all your pages for their SEO performance, and let you know if something goes wrong.
So if you're struggling with managing several web pages but still want to reach a high search engine visibility, consider giving ContentKing a shot.