What is WriterZen and How Does Its Keyword Tool Work?

With the release of generative AI systems, dozens of companies have sprung up to leverage the power of large language models as writing tools. Some of them do everything for you, while others just use AI to provide assistance with things like keyword research, outlining, and team communications.

WriterZen is one of these modern AI-focused products. It’s a platform with a variety of tools, including topic discovery, keyword planning, and content creation. How does it all work, and is it worth using? Read on to learn what I think.

The Basics of WriterZen

First, we’ll start with the basics. What is WriterZen, and what can it do, specifically?

Broadly speaking, WriterZen is a content workflow tool. It’s made to help writers, marketers, and content creators streamline and speed up the process of doing what they do. There’s nothing new or special about that – hundreds of tools exist to do the same thing – so the devil is in the details.

You can generally divide WriterZen into five main tools.

• The Topic Discovery tool.
• The Keyword Explorer and Planning tool.
• The Domain Analysis tool.
• The Content Creation tool.
• The Plagiarism Checker tool.

They divide their keyword tool up into a few different core features, and they list team management as another “product” in their heading, but these are the four main focuses of the platform.

Topic Discovery with WriterZen

The topic discovery platform is a fairly powerful workflow for content creation and planning. Essentially, you plug in a keyword and a geographic location, and it gives you a whole array of useful information to help you plan one or more pieces of content around that topic.

• Core topic ideas that you can use as pillar posts.
• Secondary topic ideas that you can use to support the pillar posts.
• Sub-keywords with their volume and information.
• Google trends and insights that can give you more ideas.
• Possible headlines you might consider for your content.

All of this is based around the SEO idea of content clustering, something that is very important to modern SEO and content marketing.

A good portion of the features in the Topic Discovery section are data pulled from the keyword discovery and exploration tools, so it’s all interconnected.

Suggested headlines and sub-keywords can be very useful, but I have noticed that some of them can be a little irrelevant. It’s easy enough to filter out bad headline options and refine your exploration, though, so it’s useful nevertheless.

It’s worth noting that a lot of the data they use is really just pulled from Google’s top search results for the keywords you use. They say as much in their FAQ:

“What is the algorithm behind Topic Discovery? The search results are generated with an algorithm that crawls through the top Google search results from both the Google Search and Google Suggestions databases that are most relevant to your topic keyword seed.”

If you already use a Google scraper to gather data, you might find the results to be fairly similar. That’s not a knock on WriterZen; it’s just a reality of how a lot of marketing research is done these days.

Keyword Exploration with WriterZen

There are a few different keyword-focused features in WriterZen.

First is the Keyword Explorer. This tool digs deep into information about a specific keyword. You plug in a keyword, location, and language (or a domain instead of a keyword) and click to explore it. It will generate a page of results that include things like:

• The keyword’s search volume over time.
• The estimated CPC for the keyword.
• The keyword difficulty estimated by different factors and sources.
• A review of the domains and pages ranking for the keyword.
• Historical search volume and trends for the keyword.
• Related keyword suggestions with similar data for each.

To help you comb through all of the data, you can use filters, including something WriterZen calls the Golden Filter. This is a unique filter developed by WriterZen to help find keywords that linger in the sweet spot where competition is relatively low but interest and search volume are relatively high. Basically, it’s a filter that does what you would do with the manual filters anyway.

They also have a forecast button. It lets you target a search rank for that keyword and gives you an idea of the traffic and sales volume you could get with it. Personally, I find this to be basically meaningless fiction – there are too many factors surrounding content quality, search intent, CRO, and more to make an easy prediction – but it can be nice to look at, I suppose.

The keyword explorer also links into the topic explorer to let you cluster keywords manually and import them into your topic research.

The second portion of their keyword system is the keyword planner. This is basically “part two” of the keyword research process using WriterZen. You choose keywords or keyword clusters, and it helps you figure out how to organize, sort, and prioritize them. It can then use AI to generate a content brief for the keyword group you’ve chosen.

This AI-generated brief gives you a short paragraph summary of an angle you can take to cover the keywords, as well as basic information like what audience, expert perspective, content format, and tone you can take with it. I don’t personally find this useful – I never have trouble coming up with those ideas myself – but I could see it being helpful for people who struggle with the conversion of keywords into writing ideas.

Domain Analysis with WriterZen

The WriterZen platform also allows you to plug in a domain and analyze it. It pulls data like Domain Authority, search and traffic volumes, keyword ranking lists, and trending information. It also gives you some analysis of whether or not they think the domain has a “weak point” you could target to undercut them with some coverage.

You can also select multiple domains and compare them simultaneously, focused around primary keywords.

How reliable is this information? I can’t really tell you. A lot of what they display comes from other reliable sources, but even the most reliable sources for some kinds of information are still just estimates, so you have to be careful how you rely on them.

Personally, I’d stick with Moz or Ahrefs to analyze a domain, but having the tool right there alongside the keyword information can be handy.

Content Creation with WriterZen

Tying into the previous endpoints, WriterZen also has full AI-powered content creation.

You have the content brief with a target audience, a format, a perspective, and a tone, as well as a primary and some secondary keywords. You can then just click to have their AI assistant do one of two things:

• Write the title, description, and an outline for the article.
• Write the whole article for you using one of 60+ templates.

I find the outline to be a lot more useful than the whole generation. For one thing, LLM-generated content often has a lot of problems, needs deep human review, and can be pretty easily detected by GPT-checking bots. It can lose you trust and authority, especially if published uncritically.

While this is slowly being addressed with more sophisticated LLMs, WriterZen’s AI assistant uses GPT 3.5, which is already outdated.

I will say that if you want to use WriterZen’s platform to write your content directly in it, some of their AI suggestions can be handy. It’s sort of like a Temu version of some of the huge SEO platforms like MarketMuse and Clearscope.

Checking for Plagiarism with WriterZen

This is really simple and is meant to address a common concern with LLM-generated content, which is that it can make output that sounds extremely familiar and rote because that’s what it was designed to do. In some cases, the input signals are so strong that the output is basically identical. This is even more likely when a topic has relatively little information about it available online. With less to draw from, the output is more similar.

So, WriterZen implemented a built-in plagiarism check. It just checks each line of a piece of content to see if it’s found anywhere else in Google’s index. It’s not really any more sophisticated than Copyscape, so if you already pay for that, you don’t really need this feature. Consider it a handy add-on, at most.

How Much Does WriterZen Cost?

Pricing is where things get interesting. They have three pricing tiers plus add-ons.

The first thing to know is that their tiers are not monthly payments; they’re one-time fees to access the platform. So, the longer you can get use out of WriterZen, the more cost-effective it becomes.

The Keyword Research plan is $135. It gives you 50,000 keyword credits, 10,000 keyword clustering credits, and up to 50 keyword lists. You can look up 50 keywords, use the golden filter, and the revenue forecast. The AI writing features are absent, as is the plagiarism detector and, crucially, the topic discovery. I believe this is basically the plan that includes the non-AI features because it doesn’t pay for itself using the GPT API.

The All-In-One Basic plan is a one-time fee of $270. It’s the same as the Keyword Research plan, except you also get the plagiarism check, the AI writing for up to 50 articles per month, and access to the topic discovery tool.

Finally, the All-In-One Advanced plan is $405. It doubles the other limits to 100k keyword credits, 20k clusters, 100 keyword lists, and 100 posts per month on the AI writer. It also bumps you to unlimited keywords for the keyword explorer lookup.

One thing you might have noticed is that they have credits. But how does a credit system work with a one-time fee to purchase access? Well, you either run out and stop using the platform, or you buy more. So, when they tout no recurring fees, it’s in the same “well you can cancel any time” idea, just without the recurring payments out the gate.

Keyword credits, used for the Golden Filter and for clustering, come in at $19 for 10,000 or scale up to $99 for 100,000, so $1-2 per thousand depending on how bulk buy you want to get.

Google NLP credits, used for the NLP analysis, are a lot more expensive — $19 for 60, up to $149 for 600, but you use a lot less of them, so it works out.

You can also buy extra seats for team collaboration at $9 per seat per month. No recurring fees! Except for the fees that recur if you want to use the platform with a second person or for a longer term. You know how it goes. I do find it a little disingenuous when they have a pricing comparison with tools like Semrush, Surfer, and Keyword Insights, where they list the “Highest Plan” pricing for each and use their own lowest pricing for their entry.

Is WriterZen Worth Using?

In my mind, you can entirely disregard the AI writing assistant features from WriterZen. There are a lot of other ways to get more updated or unique LLM access than GPT 3.5 if you’re insistent on using it at all.

When it comes to keyword research and clustering, though, I’d say it’s a compelling option. A one-time fee, even if it does have a credit limit, is a fairly solid way to explore what it has to offer, and if you get decent use out of it, then great.

Keyword clustering is important, and I’m glad to see more keyword research tools working it into their defaults. It’s not necessarily the best keyword clustering tool available, but at least it can get you started with the concept.

Does it provide the best possible data, the most accurate results, and the best suggestions? No, probably not. But does it do a good job for its price point? Sure. I would say give WriterZen a try and see if you like it. With a 15-day free trial, you can dig around and see if it works.

Alternatively, you can give Topicfinder a look. One of the features of WriterZen is topic and headline ideas; what if you took that, cranked it up to 100, and made a whole platform about it? That’s kind of a short version of what Topicfinder is. It, too, has a free trial, and I think you’ll like what you find.

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