As a content marketer, it is important to create content that will support SEO efforts and help boost your keywords. Of course, you can’t do this without writing engaging and relevant content that your audience will want to read. There are many tools on the market that can help marketers create interesting and share-worthy content. Here are 7 tools we recommend to help you create great content that will rank!
Google Trends
Before you write your content, you’ll need to first do research to find topics that are pertinent to your target market. An excellent tool to utilize in the research phase is Google Trends. Google Trends allows you to understand what is trending based on location and time period. If you are writing content for a health food brand, you would want to see which buzzwords are trending around ‘healthy foods’. For example, when looking at Google Trends, in the last month, “healthy banana bread recipe” has been trending. Google Trends will help spark ideas and give you a great jumping off point to then narrow down your broad topic ideas.
Keyword Tool.Io
Once you know the latest trends surrounding the industry you are writing content for you can move onto the next step, choosing keywords to focus on. A challenging aspect of content creation can be figuring out which topics to write about and which keywords to focus on. KeywordTool.io is an excellent resource when in the initial stages of topic creation.
Related: What Is Content Marketing?
What’s great about this tool is that you can put in a very broad topic and it will bring up a hundreds of keywords that are similar and connect with that first topic you searched. This tool is essential for marketers because it allows you to discover what your target audience is looking for.
SEMrush
Another great tool for the topic ideation stage is SEMrush. This software has multiple capabilities, and one of the favorites is it allows you to identify which keywords other websites are ranking for. If you are having a hard time thinking of a topic, you can simply input a URL of someone else in your industry and SEMrush will show you their keyword profile and rankings. Basically, SEMrush allows you to get insight into keywords that your competitors are ranking for. In addition, SEMrush will show you different keyword variations that are connected with certain words/topics. This lets you capture as many possible keyword terms your potential consumers are searching for and incorporate them into your content.
Google AdWords Keyword Planner
As all content marketers know, your keyword plan should be the core of your content strategy.Google AdWords Keyword Planner is the go to tool when determining which keywords to incorporate into your content. The Google AdWords Keyword Planner allows you to search keywords and it will, in turn, display the search volume of each keyword. While there is no perfect keyword search volume, you tend to want to go after keywords with higher volumes.
Related: Building an Integrated Content Marketing Strategy
But, depending on if your content topic is very niche, the keyword volume could be as low as 10, and that is perfectly fine. Google AdWords Keyword Planner also has the functionality to export the list of keywords you have picked which makes it easy to transfer into an excel document. In addition, just like KeywordTool.io, this keyword planner will give you other relevant keywords based on topics you search. Therefore, this tool will help you identify new keyword opportunities to include.
Moz Keyword Difficulty Tool
A key factor to consider when choosing your keywords is if you actually have a shot at ranking for them. The Moz Keyword Difficulty Tool allows you to see which websites are ranking on page one for the keywords you search. This tool will also show you the domain authority of each of the sites that are ranking for those keywords on page one.
Related: Contextual Content Marketing with Content Clusters
Generally, there is a possibility to rank for that keyword if you are within 10 DA positions away from three sites ranking on page one. This is definitely a tool that content marketers should utilize as it can directly help with creating high-quality content that ranks.
Market Muse
Whether you are optimizing site content or creating completely new content, Market Muse is a content marketer’s best friend. Market Muse has many different features, but the one feature that content marketers should be using on a regular basis is the content analyzer. All you have to do is paste in the body of your content, the focus topic, and title and this platform will compare your content to other relevant content with similar topics. It will then inform you of your content depth score, the average content score target, and best content score.
Related: The Importance of Content Marketing – Mapping Out Integrated Campaigns
On top of that it will provide you with keywords that the other pieces of content had that yours doesn’t include. This way you can incorporate those additional keywords to develop more comprehensive content. By creating relevant and important content, you can increase your organic rankings by being more relevant to the search query.
Grammarly
Last but not least, Grammarly is an absolute must to use as a content marketer. Everyone knows that it is hard to proofread your own work, and that is where Grammarly comes in. If you don’t have someone you can proofread your work, Grammarly is an excellent alternative. Even if you do have someone to proofread for you, it is a good idea to run your content through Grammarly to pick up any minor grammatical issues you may have missed. There is nothing worse than reading through your content once it has gone live only to find a few minor mistake that should have been caught.
If you are having a hard time creating compelling content that will rank, these 7 content marketing tools above can help you with just that. As a rule of thumb, content is about quality over quantity. Creating great content that is compatible with your target market’s wants and needs is crucial. During content creation, the most important question to ask is, is this content relevant? Even if your article is 2,000 words, it may not hit the nail on the head in terms of relevance. By using the 7 content marketing tools above, you can understand what is trending in your industry, determine a relevant topic, and discover keywords that you are within reach of ranking for.
Bonus Tool: If you want to make sure your meta description is perfect, use SEOmofo to preview how your meta description and title tag will look in the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs). SEOmofo simulates what the SERPS will look like so that you can ensure your meta description and title tag are not getting cut off!