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SEO work involves various elements, and understanding how each one functions is crucial for success. While many of the best all-in-one SEO tools come with a hefty price tag and require a monthly subscription, they are often only accessible to larger companies that can justify the expense. For smaller businesses, investing in an expensive SEO package can be challenging.

That’s why we’ve gathered a list of the best free SEO tools available today, including Prowly, which can help you enhance your search engine optimization efforts without breaking the bank. Start optimizing your website today by exploring the most effective free tools you can use right away.

Getting started with Prowly

As mentioned in my Demio review, the convenience of SaaS allows you to quickly use software through your browser. Signing up for Prowly is as simple as clicking the “Try it for free” button in the upper right corner of the site.

Prowly pricing

Prowly offers a 7-day free trial so users can try before they buy. Beyond that, they offer an Essential plan for smaller-scale users and a Professional plan for agencies.

The most basic form of the Essential plan starts at $119/mo, while the Professional plan starts at $189/mo. You can add features to your plan—including media monitoring and access to Prowly’s media contact database—for an additional cost.

What can Prowly do?

Remember that thing I said about customer experience? Prowly clearly got the memo, because as soon as you sign up, they invite you to schedule a meeting with them. This shows a real dedication to customer support that you don’t see every day. But since I’m only trying out the product for a review, I opted out.

Dashboard

Prowly’s dashboard maintains a simple, inviting design. This is especially helpful since the choices you’re presented with are a bit overwhelming. As someone with limited PR experience, the very idea of starting a press release feels daunting.

Still, front and center on your home page is a simple timeline you can use to wrap your head around Prowly. It breaks it down into four easy steps: creating press releases, finding media contacts, setting up a newsroom, and sending email pitches.

Let’s take a look at each of those features.

Making press releases with Prowly

Prowly has a wide array of options for crafting press releases. You can upload a .docx file, start from scratch, or choose from various templates like event announcements and new hires.

These templates are designed to get your mind jogging, rather than filling in the blanks Mad Libs-style. The text editor is fairly simple with limited font and formatting options. Still, you generally don’t want to get too wild with a press release.

Make sure not to hit “Publish” before it’s fully done, as you can’t go back and change it. 

Finding media contacts

Like with the press release tool, there are a few ways to get started with finding media contacts. You can import or manually add your existing contact list, but you can also peruse Prowly’s extensive database.

Media contacts range from entertainment to politics, business to beauty. They include some of the biggest names and publications in journalism. Just keep in mind, you’ll have to buy an upgraded plan to get access to the contact database.

If you just want to get started, importing existing contacts makes for much less hassle. At the bare minimum, you can put in a few emails and move on to the next step…

Creating a Prowly newsroom

A Prowly newsroom is a custom webpage designed to compile your brand’s content, press releases, and other news. While it’s less customizable than your own website, it allows your media contacts to easily find all of your content in one place.

This can be a useful tool for shaping your narrative. You can organize your PR output into tabs and categories, and customize the design to suit your brand. Still, I’d argue you could probably do better making a media tab on your own website.

Sending an email pitch

Finally, the main event. You’ve made your press release, your newsroom, and compiled all your contacts. Time to pitch!

You can choose to select certain recipients or email your whole contact list. Prowly gives you the tools you need to create an engaging email, with a dozen professional fonts and a bevy of text options.

Where the newsroom layout is fairly one-size-fits-all, you have much more customization options with your pitches. This makes sense since the email pitch is the thing that gets your media contacts hooked.

You can add images, tables, files, and links to your pitch, as well as additional press releases and a call-to-action button.

Like many CRMs, Prowly includes personalization tokens. These are variable text elements that can be tailored to specific recipients. For example, you can add a Greeting token that inputs different greetings for different recipients. Then, by applying values to people in your contact list, you can ensure they each get a greeting that’s specific to them.

After that, simply review your email and send it off! Prowly recommends you sort your emails into campaigns, which makes it easier to keep track of different releases and review their success.

Monitoring and reports

One of Prowly’s more impressive features is its media monitoring dashboard. Above and beyond keyword research, this tool includes widgets to track sentiment, reach, domain authority, and much more.

While easily sending out and keeping track of pitches is great, this tool makes Prowly worth your while. Every tool at your disposal from WordPress to Google Ads has some flavor of monitoring, but this is the rare dashboard that synthesizes every metric a PR agency needs. Just as important, the custom widgets also let you exclude the data you don’t need.

Prowly is teasing a forthcoming feature that lets you view stats on your campaigns through PR reports. As advertised, these reports go above and beyond, compiling data to show the complete picture of your PR work.

As it currently stands, the lack of specific stats on a campaign’s success is one area where Prowly could improve. For PR workers, the ability to compile deliverables makes a big difference, so I hope this feature gets rolled out sooner rather than later.

Is Prowly worth it?

For companies, agencies, and entrepreneurs working in PR, Prowly (wait a sec… PR owly!) promises an easier way. It highlights the ability to easily create, release, and track press releases online.

Prowly’s most impressive features are its media monitoring tools and contact database. I was somewhat less impressed with the press release tools themselves, but I acknowledge the utility of having a simple online dashboard to keep track of them.

Prowly is definitely a strong PR tool; the contacts and monitoring tools alone are enough to make it worthwhile. Still, it faces a common SaaS problem: how much ownership will you give up for convenience?

For that purpose, I like the fact that Prowly also lets you import releases, contact lists, and more. You can choose whether you want a convenient experience or a custom one, which is an attitude more SaaS programs should have.

Prowly is sort of the Canva of PR software. It’s shiny, accessible, and gets the job done, with a few impressive tools that put it over the top. But if you want something fully custom, you’ll still have to make it yourself.

Final rating: 7.9/10 ✅

Like what you see? Sign up for Prowly today.

On March 3, 2022, Oppo launched its first-generation Air Glass, a monocle-style Augmented Reality (AR) device designed to pair with Oppo smartphones. The Air Glass featured a lightweight design (just 30 grams), a microLED display with up to 1400 nits brightness, and supported functions like navigation, real-time translation, calendar reminders, and teleprompter mode. Despite its futuristic appeal, Oppo released it only in limited quantities within China, with no plans for international availability. Priced at 4,999 yuan (around $745), the Air Glass was more of a conceptual showcase than a consumer-ready product, aimed at demonstrating Oppo’s vision for assisted reality.

Main Features

While many AR experiments focus on pushing purely technical capability, the Oppo Air Glass accepts some clear hardware limitations to play with an exciting form factor. Adi Robertson of The Verge tested a set of glasses and a matching smartphone. Robertson found a design idea so obvious and still needs more improvement.  

Augment Reality is a spectrum, and the Air Glass is considered a “simple notification machine” aspect. It differs from those realistic holograms in products such as Microsoft HoloLens. 

Below are some of the noticeable features of Oppo Air Glass: 

• The device is a single lens with a microLED display. The display can have a staggering peak brightness of up to 1400 nits!
• The powerful Spark Micro Projector shows all the dual Sapphire crystal glass information.
• Oppo Air Glass is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wear 4100 SoC.
• This innovative device is equipped with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS with in-built speakers and microphone.
• This device can turn into a mini teleprompter. Since the teleprompter displays any text you want, you can use it more creatively.   
• Currently, automatic translation is still limited to English and Chinese.

When you pair the smart device over Bluetooth with a China-only Oppo smartphone, you’ll see a green heads-up display that covers a tiny but significant portion of your vision. But Robertson said she was amazed by the assumption behind Oppo’s design. It is because it’s a solid idea to offer lots of style options while mitigating the usual AR creepiness. 

Nine years ago, Google Glass conducted a similar experiment. They invented the expensive camera and projection system and let them wear them at all times. But it looked awkward.

Other Specs and Features

Oppo’s AR interface relies on widget-like applications in the form of “cards,” which the wearer can manage from the paired smartphone application. It can be controlled using a touchpad on its side. Hand gestures are also supported, as is the peculiar feature of using the motion of the head to control it. Moreover, voice control is also incorporated.

Meanwhile, the Air Glass looks like an earbud for your eyes. Oppo Air Glass weighs only 30 grams, making it incredibly lightweight to wear. Users can wear it over their frames, but only two specific sizes exist.

It’s a product that takes people’s concerns about privacy and distraction seriously instead of trying to hide what they’re worried about inside a smaller package. It also helps that this version of Air Glass doesn’t have to include a camera. But Oppo says it doesn’t rule the option out for future versions.

“Unfortunately, after my first few hours with the glasses, I became slightly motion-sick and developed a headache within minutes of putting them on. The discomfort seemed to improve over time, but my eyes still feel strained after wearing them”, says Robertson.

Since then, Oppo has continued refining its AR ambitions, culminating in the Air Glass 3 prototype revealed in 2024, which integrates AI capabilities and a more natural eyewear form factor.

About three decades ago, scientists at Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) worked with a group of human volunteers to try something never before done. They were tested for a prototype augmented reality system that allows them to engage with virtual objects that will be merged with the real world. The test subjects were asked to perform several tasks, including climbing an exoskeleton, pressing their faces against a vision system, and interacting manually with a blend of real and virtual objects.

This system cost around $1 million to build, but had become a resounding success. It only filled the room by half, demonstrating for the first time that AR technology works. It has been proven to enhance human performance in real-world functions. 

Then, a few years ago, the breakthrough was achieved in a research lab at Mojo Vision in Saratoga, California. It featured the achievements of the field over the past decades. This time, it’s about an augmented reality contact lens. The research was a genuine test of an AR contact lens that the users wear directly on the eyes.

Big in Power, Small in Space

Augmented reality contact lenses are a challenging endeavor, according to experts. People generally focus on the display technology when in fact, it is more than that. Putting a high-resolution display on a tiny, transparent lens is no small feat, but it is the most straightforward task. 

The more complicated part was making the tiny lens sit comfortably on the human eye. It also has to communicate wirelessly with the external devices without any kind of string attached. However hard it was, this was the exact result that Mojo Vision accomplished. 

Augmented Reality Contact Lenses

According to Mojo Vision, the contact lens called Mojo Lens has a 14,000 pixel-per-inch microLED display with a pixel pitch of 1.8 microns. Compared side-by-side with an iPhone 13, the Mojo Lens has 30 times its pixel density. The iPhone only has 460 pixels per inch with its Super Retina XDR Display.

Furthermore, the lens has an ARM processor, a 5GHz radio transmitter, an accelerometer, a gyroscope, and a magnetometer for eye movement monitoring. All these technologies will sit on the human eye.

But these aren’t the most intricate parts yet. The biggest challenge was how they would incorporate power into the lenses. Mojo Vision tells us that the Mojo Lens has medical-grade micro batteries. The company hasn’t given out details of the battery life yet, but they let us know that they aim to provide power management that enables users to wear the lenses throughout the day.

Augmented Reality is the Future

Indeed, this is a promising prospect, but one that will take more time to be fully developed. Making it as low-cost as possible for everyone to enjoy will be a long journey, but it is where it is headed. It is predicted that AR eyewear, from glasses to contacts, will take the place of mobile phones as the main interface of digital content within the next decade. 

This also means that AR technology will impact society significantly. It will change digital assets into seamless features of our physical surroundings. The past decades have shown us that life with augmented reality will become mainstream. People will soon get fitted for new contact lenses when they sign up for a mobile subscription. 

In addition, given the impressive innovations in engineering, it is reasonable to expect that AR will replace mobile phones as the new platform of our daily lives in the years to come. Currently, the prospects are still a matter of suggestions, and only time can tell.

And for other stories and news, read more here at Owner’s Mag!