In this post, we’ll be looking at some of the best free and paid tools for content marketing you can use to help you optimize your content strategy.
We’ll cover both tools that will help you write content, as well as tools that will help you promote it once it’s been published.
If you’re just getting started with content marketing, or if you’ve been doing it for a while but want to learn more about how you can use these tools effectively in your business, then keep reading!
Seo Tools For Content
Google uses a complex algorithm with hundreds of weighted factors to index and rank web pages according to their relevance to any given keyword. Digital marketers use empirical testing to learn about Google’s algorithm and understand how to create content that ranks. Based on this understanding, they create and follow best practices for writing content that is more likely to rank highly on Google search results. This process is known as search engine optimization (SEO), and it’s an essential part of every digital marketer’s toolkit.
Without the best content writing tools for SEO, writing optimized content can be a lengthy and tedious task. To help you save a lot of time and labor, we’re publishing our list of the ten best content writing tools for SEO. These tools fit in at different stages of the content creation process, but each one has the potential to positively impact your business by saving you time and effort and improving your engagement with readers.
Why You Need Content Writing Tools for SEO
Take a look at our on-page SEO checklist and you’ll see just how many different on-page factors can influence search engine optimization.
Digital marketers need to make data-driven decisions about which keywords to target, how long each blog post should be, and what should be included in the content. In addition to spelling and grammar, content needs to be accessible to its target audience, easy to trust and easy to find. That means optimizing things like URLs and meta-tags.
With the right content writing tools for SEO, digital marketers can automate many of these requirements. In other cases, SEO tools can significantly cut down on the amount of time it takes to perform optimization tasks.
Here’s our top-ten list of tools and how they can fit into your content creation process.
10 Best Content Writing Tools for SEO
Google Search Console
The Google Search Console is Google’s own tool that helps you improve your rankings in the search engine results pages. The console includes tools that measure the performance of your website, including page load times that impact SEO. You can monitor your website’s position on Google search results, including which of your pages are ranking for specific keywords. You can also see how many impressions and how many clicks your pages have gotten in the search engine results pages.
Google Search Console is a critical tool for all webmasters. It provides much-needed transparency into how your pages are performing and can help determine which content you should optimize or what keywords you should target next.
Pricing: Free for all website owners.
Google Keyword Planner
Most digital marketers use either the Google Keyword Planner or a paid version with better features for keyword research. Still, this is one of the best free tools for doing basic keyword targeting research. The keyword planner offers two main features:
- Discover new or related keywords – You can type in any keyword to see a list of related keywords along with their search volume and other related metrics. This makes it easy to find new keywords to target for SEO.
- Get search volume and forecasts – You can monitor trends to identify search terms or keywords that are becoming more popular.
Pricing: Free for anyone with a Google Ads account. If you need a quick guide, you can check out this resource: How to Create a Google Ads Account.
WordStream
WordStream offers a stripped-down version of Google’s keyword planner that’s free and easy to use. Just type in a keyword of your choice, pick an industry and type in your location. Then click the big orange button and you’ll get a list of keywords along with their search volumes on Google and Bing, and the average CPC for each keyword on each ad network.
Pricing: WordStream’s keyword research tool is free to use.
SEMrush
SEMrush is one of the most popular and useful tools for digital marketers of all stripes. Their monthly subscription package includes 40 different tools that help with SEO, PPC and social media management. Marketers can use SEMrush to analyze backlinks, conduct keyword research, analyze the performance and traffic of their own website or those of their competitors and discover new markets, niches and opportunities. There’s also a site auditing utility that can help with some of the more technical aspects of website SEO.
Pricing: Some features available for free, paid subscriptions start at $99.95 monthly.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is an analytical tool that helps marketers find out what kind of content people are sharing across many different platforms. You can enter a website to easily identify their most successful pieces of content. You can analyze trends over the past day, the past month, or the past year. You can filter by author or by platform and Buzz Sumo even supports negative keywords to help you pinpoint the data you’re looking for.
BuzzSumo helps you efficiently analyze and benchmark your content against the competition while staying on top of new trends.
Pricing: Starts at $79 per month for unlimited searches.
Answer the Public
Type any keyword into this free online tool and you’ll get an extensive visualization of questions people have asked on Google using your keyword. This tool connects with one of the biggest recent additions to the Google search pages: Snippets.
On some search results pages, Google now displays Snippets. A snippet is a tab near the top of the page that highlights a common question related to the target keyword. When a user clicks on the snippet, Google connects them to a web page that answers that question explicitly. Being featured in a Snippet is a great way to generate organic traffic because Snippets are always near the top of the page.
With Answer the Public, marketers can write highly targeted articles that directly address questions that they know are being typed into search. This makes it more likely that their articles will be featured in Google Snippets.
Pricing: Three searches per day for free, unlimited searches starting at $99 monthly.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a WordPress plug-in that gives you real-time feedback as you optimize your blog posts using WordPress. The plug-in acts like a built-in checklist tool that prompts you to complete on-page SEO tasks for each blog post that you create. Yoast SEO provides feedback on your page optimizations in real-time, makes suggestions for improvement and helps you manage all the details when doing on-page SEO with WordPress.
Image Source: https://kinsta.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/yoast-seo-configuration-wizard.png
Pricing: The basic version of Yoast SEO is free. Yoast SEO premium starts at $89 monthly for a single-website license, but you can save money by purchasing multiple licenses for multiple sites at the same time.
Keyword Density Checker
Keyword density is an important factor that search engines like Google use to rank web pages. Digital marketers know that the Google Search algorithm looks at the density of keywords to understand the relevance of each piece of content. For each blog post, it is important to ensure that the target keyword is mentioned a sufficient number of times within the text. At the same time, excessive mentions of the keyword (a practice known as keyword stuffing) are discouraged.
This simple keyword density checker makes it easy to figure out how many times each keyword is mentioned in your article. You can paste in the text of your article and you’ll receive a list of the most frequently occurring one-word, two-word and three-word keywords in your article. For most content pieces, digital marketers aim for a keyword density of 2-5% for the target keyword.
Pricing: The keyword density checker is just one of over 75 free SEO tools offered by the team at PrePostSEO. Visitors to the website can perform a total of 500 queries per month across all tools. To unlock more searches, users can purchase a premium plan starting at $50/year for 50,000 annual searches.
Read-Able
Read-able is a useful tool for ensuring that your content is accessible for your target audience. When you paste your article into Read-able, it uses a proprietary algorithm to assign your content a grade level that corresponds to how easy it is to read and understand.
The average North American reads at an around an eighth-grade level, so if that’s your target audience, Read-Able will help you write clear and concise sentences that are easier for a wide range of readers to understand. If your target audience is college-educated, it’s okay to use longer words and complex sentences to convey meaning. Read-Able is all about matching the level of your writing with the reading level of your target audience to provide the best experience for readers.
Pricing: Read-able offers a free version of its tool that checks reading level, grammar and spelling. The PRO version is available starting at $4/month and includes features like edit suggestions, error highlighting, additional reports and the ability to score emails and additional file formats.
Grammarly Premium
Google checks your website for spelling and grammar. A website whose content contains many spelling errors is less likely to rank highly on search engines. Grammarly makes it easy to create content that is grammatically correct and free of spelling errors. You can add the tool to your browser and use it when composing emails, social media updates or a blog post.
Pricing: Grammarly Premium starts at just $11.66 per month when you purchase a one-year subscription. The premium version offers more corrections and an anti-plagiarism feature to help ensure your content is truly unique.
Summary
From keyword research to checking spelling and grammar, our 10 best content writing tools cover every step in the content creation process. We hope you can put some of these tools to work and start saving time and effort when you’re writing content for organic search. If you’re in need of additional assistance, our SaaS SEO agency can help you scale your content. Book an intro call today to see how.
best free seo tools
1. Answer The Public
Find 150+ keyword ideas in seconds.
Most SEO tools get their data from the same place: The Google Keyword Planner.
Answer the Public is different.
This awesome tool finds questions that people ask on forums, blogs and on social media.
And it turns those questions into awesome keywords:
Best Feature: “Vs. Keywords”
You’d be surprised how many people search for “X vs. Y” keywords in Google.
(For example: “iPhone vs. Android” or “SEMRush vs. Ahrefs”.)
And Answer the Public has a section of the results dedicated to “Vs. Keywords”.
This brings us to the 2nd tool on our list…
2. Woorank’s SEO & Website Analysis Tool
Get a list of SEO improvements in seconds.
This is a very handy Chrome extension.
First, you get an overall SEO score.
Then, the tool shows you EXACTLY how to improve your site’s on-page and off-page SEO.
Best Feature: “Marketing Checklist”
Most SEO tools only tell you about problems… not solutions.
But with Woorank you get a detailed SEO checklist that you can use to fix any issues that you run into.
And now it’s time for our next free SEO tool…
3. Animalz Revive
Improve and update old content.
Animalz Revive helps you find older content on your site that needs an update, an upgrade… or both.
Before this tool, you had to manually comb through your Google Analytics account to find these pages.Which was a giant pain.
Fortunately, this tool tells you exactly which articles on your site need the most attention.
Best Feature: “Traffic Loss Since Peak (Views)”
This feature lets you know exactly how many visitors that a piece of outdated content is costing you.
4. CanIRank
Quickly answer the question: “Can I rank for this keyword?”.
CanIRank is a super-detailed keyword difficulty tool.
And unlike most free SEO tools, CanIRank doesn’t give you generic advice like:
“This keyword is really competitive”
Or
“This keyword has low competition”
Instead, it tells you whether or not YOU can rank for that keyword.
Very cool.
Best Feature: “How can you better target this keyword?”
CanIRank isn’t just for sizing up the first-page competition.
It also gives you suggestions that can help you rank for a specific term.
5. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
Get your site ready for Google’s Mobile-first Indexing.
You might have heard that Google recently made a big change to its algorithm.
(This change is officially called “Mobile-First Indexing”.)
The bottom line is this:
If your site isn’t optimized for mobile devices, you’re in big trouble.
Fortunately, you don’t need a full-time developer to make your site mobile-friendly. All you need to do is run your site through the Mobile-Friendly Test tool.
And it tells you whether or not Google considers your site mobile-friendly.
Best Feature: “Page loading issues”
This feature shows you how you can improve your site’s code. That way, Google’s mobile crawler can find and index all of the resources on your site.
6. Seed Keywords
Find completely fresh keyword ideas.
Most keyword research tools work the exact same way:
- Enter a seed keyword into the tool.
- Get a list of closely-related terms.
The problem with this approach is this:
Everyone types the same seed keywords into these tools.
Well, Seed Keywords takes a completely different approach.
Instead of pulling seed keywords out of thin air, you ask your customers how they’d search for you online.
Then, type those seed keywords into your favorite keyword research tool.
Best Feature: “Submit Query”
Once the results come in, you can use SeedKeywords to do a Google search for the keywords that people gave you.
That way you can quickly scan the search results… and see how competitive those keywords are.
7. Exploding Topics
Find popular keywords before they get competitive.
This free SEO tool does one simple thing:
It bubbles up topics that are just starting to trend.
That way, you can create content around these emerging trends (or optimize your old content around a new keyword).
The tool currently has about 2k topics in its database. And they’re adding more every week.
Best Feature: Categories
Categories let you drill down to a specific topic category that’s important to your business.
For example, let’s say you run marketing for a skincare brand. Well, you’d hit “beauty” and get a list of emerging topics in that space.
Nice.
8. Seobility
Get a deep-dive SEO site analysis.
SEObility crawls your entire site and lets you know about search engine optimization issues like:
- Slow loading pages
- Blocked pages
- Sitemap problems
- Technical SEO issues
- Lots more
You usually only get this type of stuff from paid SEO tools. So it’s really nice that Seobility gives you this data for free.
Best Feature: Content Report
This report hands you a list of pages that have content-related SEO issues.
(Things like: thin content, missing meta titles, keyword stuffing, and duplicate content.)
9. Ubersuggest
Get keyword suggestions and competition data.
Ubersuggest has a lot of features that are usually only found in premium SEO tools.
But it’s 100% free.
To use it, type in a keyword that you want to rank for (or a competing website that you want to rank above).
And Ubersuggest will give you detailed data on keyword difficulty, monthly search volume, and more.
Plus, you get a list of suggested keywords that are based on the keyword you typed in.
Best Feature: “Comparisons”
This feature shows you “X vs. Y” keywords.
In my experience, X vs. Y keywords are super untapped.
Sure, they may not get as many searches as traditional keywords. But they’re SUPER targeted and high-converting.
And to my knowledge Ubersuggest is the only tool that specifically bubbles up X vs. Y keywords.
10. BROWSEO
See your site through the eyes of a search engine.
As it turns out, search engines see your site VERY differently than you do.
And BROWSEO gives you the type of x-ray vision that search engines have.
Best Feature: SERP Preview
Get a sweet preview of how your page appears in the search results:
This is helpful for figuring out if your title and description tag are SEO-friendly (or too long). And optimizing your title and description can also help you get more organic clicks.
Conclusion
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