Bessel beams have nondiffraction and self-healing properties in the propagation direction and are widely used in particle optical manipulation and optical microscopy. Bessel beams can be generated by axicons or spatial light modulators, which can produce a zero-order or high-order Bessel beam with different parameters depending on the specific application. The modulation of Bessel beams achieved in the spatial spectrum domain by optimization algorithms has a low light energy utilization rate due to the small effective modulation region. We propose a Bessel-like beam phase generation algorithm based on an improved iterative optimization algorithm directly in the spatial domain to achieve a tunable modulation of the beam’s length and the axial center position. The optimization time is reduced from minutes to seconds relative to the genetic algorithm, providing a new means of modulation for different applications in various fields. © 2022 Optica Publishing Group