Last updated: April 11, 2024
I have been using RankIQ for around 18 months to increase traffic to my blogs, so decided it was time to do an honest RankIQ review to help you if you’re considering signing up to use it.
I’ll start by saying that I love RankIQ and it has helped my business immensely. My main website is monetized with Mediavine ads and as a result of the increased organic search traffic that using RankIQ has brought me, my income from ad revenue and affiliate sales has dramatically increased over the past year and a half.
As you will see from my stats below, RankIQ has been pivotal in getting my blog posts on the first page of Google and other search engines to generate more visitors and subsequently more money.
Let me show you how using RankIQ has transformed my business.
What is RankIQ?
RankIQ is a tool that does a few different things for you as a blogger.
It has a content optimizer which is the main reason I use it. What this does is help you to include the right keywords within your posts to fully optimize them to appear in search results. The higher up the rankings your posts are, the more traffic you get to them.
I now write all my blog posts using the content optimizer. It’s a great tool which takes the hard work out of figuring out what to include in your blog post.
RankIQ also has a keyword research tool which is a huge list of low-competition keywords in various blog niches. If you write posts focussing on a low competition target keyword, you stand the best chance of appearing further up the search engine rankings.
I don’t actually use the keywords in RankIQ because I prefer to search for my own using KeySearch. This is mainly because I love hunting down the top keywords in my various niches, and I use KeySearch to track all my keywords too so I already pay for the service (and I love it).
However this does not mean the keyword library in RankIQ isn’t useful. You don’t need KeySearch or any other keyword database if you have RankIQ as you can just use theirs and their tracking tool.
It is the content optimizer tool in RankIQ that has been most beneficial for me when it comes to content creation and increasing clicks to my websites, so I am going to focus on the results I’ve seen from using that in this RankIQ review.
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How I grew my organic search traffic with RankIQ
Let me start by saying that before I even signed up for RankIQ I was an experienced blogger. My main site (not this one) has been in existence since 2015 and has been monetized with Mediavine since 2018.
You could say that was already a successful website since the goal of many bloggers is to get their sites accepted by Mediavine to run their ads. They currently require 50K sessions per month.
However, I had not managed to grow my traffic levels much beyond that threshold so my income from ads stayed fairly low. It was only when I started to use RankIQ and took some time to learn the basics of SEO (search engine optimization) that the website really took off and the ad revenue increased drastically. I recommend this tool if you are an amateur blogger in particular.
Here is a screenshot of my analytics for the whole of 2022:
I started to optimize my posts using RankIQ in mid-2022. Traffic began to increase, and then slumped a little during August (which is normal for my blog since many people are on vacation then).
From September onwards the site experienced incredible growth and you can see this in the graph. This is only because I wrote all of my new posts, and re-wrote many of my old posts, using RankIQ’s content optimizer. My posts started to rank highly in Google from this point onwards.
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Here is an overview of my Mediavine income for the whole of 2022:
As you can see, my Mediavine ad revenue increases in line with the increasing traffic to my website.
The optimizer enabled me to write high-quality content containing the latent semantic indexing or LSI keywords which RankIQ gave me to include in my blog posts. These blog posts then went on to place highly in Google rankings and bring more visitors to my site through the rest of 2022 and all throughout 2023.
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What exactly is the content optimizer?
The content optimizer tool in RankIQ is a writing tool which grades your content in relation to that of other content creators who are targeting the same keyword as you.
You simply choose the keyword phrase you want to target in your blog post, and run it through the optimizer to generate a RankIQ report.
In hardly any time (less than a minute, usually) it gives you the top competitors for that keyword in Google and an extensive list of keywords to consider adding to your own post. You are also shown a recommended word count to reach and a suggested content grade to hit to outrank your competition.
All you need to do now is write your post! It’s so simple. You just type it out directly in to the content optimizer, and then paste your post into WordPress (or other CMS) when you’re done.
The keyword list is automatically ticked off as you include each one in your post, and your grade and word length totals both update in real time.
Hit all your targets, try to go above and beyond competitors’ posts, and you’ll have an excellent blog post written with a much better chance of ranking highly than if you had written it without these targets.
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With all my posts, I always surpass the recommended word count and hit grade A++ wherever possible. Doing this has significantly increased the number of page views to my website, as shown in my graph above.
With the help of RankIQ my ad revenue, and consequently affiliate sales, have dramatically increased.
The title analysis tool
A relatively new tool included with RankIQ is the title optimizer which enables you to write an attention-grabbing, SEO-optimized title for your blog post.
It works in the same way as the content optimizer. You get a competition analysis report, and a list of keywords you can use to put together a good title. Again, it has a target word count and content grade to hit to make things much easier.
The keyword research library
I mention above I don’t often use this tool within RankIQ. I research my own keywords for new blog posts for my more established sites.
I do however use RankIQ’s library when researching a new site to set up and deciding what to blog about, because it has hundreds of the best keywords to target in many different niches. Browsing this library is one of the easiest ways to get ideas for new content or to look for low competition keywords for a brand new site.
You simply click ‘run report’ on any of the keywords in RankIQ’s library to generate the AI SEO report to write your blog post from. So easy!
How much does RankIQ cost?
The RankIQ pricing structure is very simple and is based around how many reports you can run per month.
It starts at $49 per month which gives you 16 reports. You can upgrade to higher plans if you find you need more monthly reports for your business or blog.
I have the standard plan at $49 per month and find this to be sufficient for me, as I write all my own posts and don’t outsource anything.
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Is RankIQ worth the price?
After using RankIQ for well over a year, I am firmly in the camp that RankIQ is a tool that is worth investing in.
It is because of RankIQ that I have seen incredible traffic growth to my main site and on the new blogs I have subsequently established.
The price of $49 per month is returned to me in less than a day from the ad revenue this traffic generates for me, so it is definitely worth it in my opinion. Before I started using RankIQ I really was making a stab in the dark with my blog posts and they wouldn’t generate the page views I wanted no matter what I did.
RankIQ is also one of the most affordable tools out there for bloggers, especially when compared to some of the big names in SEO tools:
Using the content analysis tool on new posts and when I’m updating old underperforming posts has landed most of my blog posts on the very 1st page of Google within only a few weeks.
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Are there any downsides?
Yes, there are some minor downsides I’ve experienced when using RankIQ:
If you don’t run all your reports within the calendar month, your total resets and you lose any unused reports. So, remember to get all your paid-for reports run by the end of each month.
You don’t need to be an SEO expert to write good blog posts, but some knowledge of the basics of SEO is highly recommended. I watched a lot of free videos from SEMRush when learning how to properly optimize my posts for search engines. You must also know how to structure and tag your posts for them to be most effective.
Finally, if you’re looking for high traffic keywords for your blog post then RankIQ is not for you. The keyword library only includes very low competition keywords, and these do not usually have high traffic associated with them. Writing lots of blog posts around lower traffic, lower competition keywords is the tactic of RankIQ founder and top blogger Brandon Gaille and it works for him and many others. Expect to write a lot of posts to generate a lot of traffic and be in it for the long run. Being lower competition, you will have a higher success rate this way.
Who would benefit from using RankIQ
RankIQ has lots of benefits to both new and established bloggers.
People who are setting up their first blog will find the keyword library very useful. It means you don’t have to pay for separate keyword tools when you start out. Instead, just browse the content library within RankIQ to find the best keywords for your target audience and blog niche.
Established content publishers will also find RankIQ a really useful investment, as has been the case with me. I had been blogging for years before signing up to RankIQ, but it was only when I started writing all my posts with this tool that I saw the kind of traffic growth I had been hoping for. It seems I am not alone in this. Mediavine bloggers have seen similar increases in ad revenue to me:
It has transformed all of my sites, bringing in new visitors and income in an increasing fashion so I highly recommend giving the tool a go if you’re looking to skyrocket your blog.
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