The SEO Agent claims to automatically create a complete solution to SEO including article creation and scheduling. Here’s their promise: “We write the best quality articles in the category. Fact-checked with citations, images, internal links and AEO built in.” – sounds good to me.
So I jumped on the site, entered my email address, and was emailed a secure link to get access. I clicked that and was straight in with a trial subscription.
Here’s where it went somewhat differently from other solutions I had tried. Instead of being presented with a long list of options, The SEO Agent asked for my website address. This I loved – questions I don’t have to think about save a lot of time.
It then analysed my site and brought up a bunch more questions, which fortunately I also did not have to answer – it filled them all in for me based on what it found on my site. So before I’d even scratched the surface of what this software can actually do, I knew it was not going to cost me time.
(I once wrote a piece of software that had a thing called an Easy Button – it consisted of a bunch of options all categorised so you could choose what you wanted to do, and it then took you through a dedicated wizard until the task was complete – The SEO Agent is simpler than that – it does it all for you without needing to answer complicated questions, let alone a wizard)
Next it picked up image themes and my voice from the site (all editable – although I found it accurate enough I didn’t need to). Then it asked about how I’d heard of The SEO Agent – fair enough (if we’re in business, we need to know where our leads come from).
Disclosure – the CEO of The SEO Agent, Jeremy contacted me personally to see if I was interested in becoming an affiliate as he’d seen a review I had done for another AI tool. Fair enough again. I’ve run software businesses since 1985, so I know how hard it is to get traction. My most famous was Accountz, which sold well in the UK and Europe through Apple Stores, Curry’s, Staples, and Amazon, but we still managed to lose £3m over a decade. It’s not easy. Ha!
So, next up, it created, well, everything I could possibly need for the ClearARC website. Not only the articles, but a daily scheduler too. It had already figured out who my competitors were, and no doubt what their most popular articles were (I mean, that’s the point of SEO, optimise your content to outrank your competitors – that’s the simplistic view anyway – the cynical side of me says “surely you should be writing for your audience, not search engines?” but the business side says “provided every article answers the most pressing questions my audience has, then I’m fine helping search engines get it to the right people – after all, ClearARC is the best so I would be doing them a disservice not to” – whether ClearARC is the best is of course a matter of debate, which is why it comes with a 30 day trial).
The SEO Agent screen kept me updated with progress as it figured everything out, so I carried on with a shelf unit I was building for my new shed (which was installed last week and has survived the thunderstorms so far), and returned to see the progress. I am not sure how long it took, but it seemed only a few minutes. And there I was in front of the Content Planner section.
Here’s the screenshot:
It has outlined 30 days of articles, one a day, covering Explainer, Round up, and How to topics. It picked up on the most common things to help those new to writing fiction – three act structures, chapter planning, seven basic plots and so on. The only thing I found debatable was that it also decided a few articles on ‘best apps for writing’ would be a good thing – well, I guess so. It’s important that writers see what’s out there so they can make an informed decision, but that’s hard to swallow when you believe you have the best software! (I am often accused of being way too opinionated for which I humbly apologise).
Maybe I should buy every piece of software there is and compare it? The trouble is, the internet is full of these comparisons, and it becomes pretty obvious when they’re being manipulated to raise the profile of one over the rest. So let’s not do that!
Removing these planned articles was easy. I just clicked on them in the planning calendar, then clicked Remove and that was that.
And then I had an idea – why not click the generate button and see if these comparison articles would somehow be biased towards ClearARC – so I did. But just before I show you how it did, let’s jump back to The SEO Agent and the next moves it wants to make.
I hit the ‘Do this first’ button. You cannot get easier than that lol. It generates your first article based on what’s ranking on Google today. Remember, this is about keywords that have been identified as being useful in generating relevant traffic. It opens a dialogue box showing the next few days article titles – see the screenshot below:
The dialogue went through 3 steps explaining what it was doing – you could connect your CMS (eg. a WordPress website) and, I guess, have it autopublish it – but the dialogue explains it will never publish anything without your approval (and presumably edits – I’ll cover that when I get there).
I hit a snag at this point. You’ll remember I earlier decided to generate one of those comparison articles, what I didn’t know was I was limited to one article per day, so it politely told me I couldn’t generate another article today and would have to wait till tomorrow. Fair enough. The 30 article per month plan cannot be rushed into a single session. Probably a good thing. NOTE: There is only the one plan available at the time of this review.
Next thing was to connect the ClearARC site to The SEO Agent. That kind of looked complicated at first. This is because it uses what looks like a third party plugin to connect the site to a service I actually use myself already – DataForSEO (and have been using for around a decade now – they’re a good bunch of people).
Read the instructions carefuly. Make sure you’re logged into your site. You will notice an install plugin button on the bottom right. Do that, then activate it. Now you’ll need to copy/paste the activation key, then save settings within your WordPress site. At this point, I was able to change the publishing option to save as a draft (I don’t personally publish AI articles as is no matter what the claims are about voice – AI is getting really excellent, but my voice matters more to me than anything atm, so I always edit AI generated articles.)
IRONY: My own site, ClearARC (the site I am using to test The SEO Agent on) is called the ‘no AI app’. It is a book writing app. That means you and me have to actually write stuff ourselves (would you believe it!). If I was going to use AI to write books, you wouldn’t be reading this. I would be somewhere else being absolutely bored stiff. The point of writing fiction is to use our imagination. So every word has to be ours. Having said that, I have no problem with AI coming up with article ideas. It’s very good at that. And it knows what people want far better than any one individual could ever figure out, so that’s good. It’s what happens to that AI article afterwards that I care about. Unless it has my hand in its editing, it’s simply not me. With that said, let’s carry on.
So I now have my WordPress site connected to The SEO Agent successfully. I think a how to video on getting these two platforms setup would be helpful to anyone non-technical, but then again, would a non-technical person be interested in SEO? Perhaps.
The article I manually triggered to generate has been done in the meanwhile, and I got an email with a link direct to it to publish it. This is a useful set and forget feature, although it looks like you don’t even need to set it if you let the scheduler do it for you. It just means you take action when you see the email.
As you can see, the whole article has been drafted and viewable in WYSIWYG including images. So I hit the Edit button on the top right, and I can now edit it (also in WYSIWYG). This is exactly what I was looking for. The editor is comprehensive and a joy to use (far easier than editing in WordPress).
With the article now edited (I didn’t have to do very much at all), I can now connect it to my site and publish it. I expect this to be automatic in the future. When this article was generated I hadn’t completed the integration. I missed one step, which was the ‘Test Integration’ button. I just clicked that having used a new token, and the site is now connected (this is why a video of this step would be useful IMO).
I then connected my Google Search Console account to help The SEO Agent understand the traffic to my site. This was simple (a two step process, first allow The SEO Agent to connect to GSC, then when that completes, set the property you want to connect to).
It’s at this point I notice The SEO Agent has a dark mode option. I love dark mode. It’s so much better for my eyes – and it works perfectly here too as the screenshot shows.
So I hit the Publish button and it appears in draft mode on my site. Now I know I can edit these articles in The SEO Agent instead of waiting for them to be posted to the site, I can change the plugin to publish them immediately. You can see this first article here: https://cleararc.online/narrative-story-structure-explained-fiction-writers/
Being an SEO tool (at its core), it naturally exposes top keywords for your niche. And as you can see from the screenshot, The SEO Agent uses them intelligently for future content. This is obviously on-going as it interacts with Google Search Console and other back end tools to figure out the landscape.
Link configuration is also comprehensive. Because I had originally set The SEO Agent’s plugin on my site to save in draft mode, the link to my first article uses a query instead of the later updated permalink. This is not a problem I think, but it won’t happen again as I’ve now set it to publish instead of creating drafts.
The Article Settings page is also comprehensive. This is where you get control over many aspects of the AI from image settings to voice to outline structure to brand identity to… so many things are covered (including a good choice linking strategies).
The analytics are excellent too as you’d expect. All in all this is one helluva piece of software. There were no glitches during my 24 hour test whilst writing this review and the speed was great. I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a workable SEO solution that involves almost no work other than your own preference for editing AI generated content prior to publishing.
Full marks for The SEO Agent. You can use this link to check out The SEO Agent, which will pay me an affiliate commission. Thank you.
LITTLE KNOWN FACT: I was SEO Lead for the UK’s largest private hospital group (Circle Health) just after Covid. I helped them transition websites. The results were outstanding. SEO since AI has changed things, but the bottom line remains the same: content must fulfil users’ needs if they are to be of any value. The SEO Agent understands this very well.