Some content creators believe that writing to please your audience and impress search engines puts them between a rock and a hard place.
But successful content marketers understand that writing for your audience is no different than writing for search engines. It’s all about creating valuable, consumable content and helping your audience discover it.
To help you achieve both, I’ve put together a list of 13 tools divided into SEO and writing sections, but all designed to help you create valuable content that will be discovered and consumed by your target audience.
SEO tools to help audiences discover your content
These search engine optimization tools provide useful analytics for keywords, competitors, search engine results pages, and more.
1. SpyFu
SpyFu does what its name suggests – it allows you to spy on your content competition. By typing your competitor’s website into the search box, you can gain insight into relevant data such as traffic volume, inbound links, and profitable keywords in organic content and paid search campaigns.
SpyFu shows you what works in your field, including:
- Key words
- Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns
- Backlinks
- Competitors’ keywords, ranking, ad test history
Pricing: Free with limited features; Paid plans start at $33/month
2. Semrush
Semrush is the all-in-one SEO content writing tool for every marketer. With Semrush, you can perform detailed keyword research, SEO, competitive analysis, performance testing, campaign tracking, and content analysis.
Semrush also has a wide range of features, including:
- Search by keyword for the most profitable search terms
- On-page and local search engine optimization
- competitive analysis
- Track the daily order of target keyword changes
- Social media management and analytics
Pricing: Free with limited features; Paid plans start at $119.95 per month
Use Semrush to do detailed keyword research, #SEO, competitive analysis, performance testing, campaign tracking, and content analysis, says Sally Ofuonyebi via CMIContent. Click to tweet
3. Clearscope
Clearscope enables you to create curable, traffic-worthy and relevant posts. It compiles an in-depth list of relevant semantic keywords to include in your content for a target keyword.
Clearscope suggests content ranking requirements, such as word count and readability score, and awards an SEO score in relation to the competition. It also helps you discover keyword gaps.
Pricing: Plans start at $170 per month.
4. Keywords are everywhere
Keywords Everywhere is a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that displays search metrics and keywords on search engine results pages.
The SEO tool analyzes your search term on multiple websites and shows you relevant, semantic, and long-tail keywords. It also displays your keyword’s advertising cost, trend pattern, and competition data with powerful features such as:
- Search in the chart of interest (from Google and YouTube data)
- Keyword Tools to recommend long tail keywords and search volumes
- Keyword Tool People Are Also Looking For And Related Searches On Google
- Competitor Gap Analysis
- CPC and volume data
- Website analytics, including Moz domain authority score, monthly organic traffic volume, keyword ranking, spam ranking, referring domains and links.
Pricing: Free with limited features; Paid plans start at $10 per year.
5. The phrase
Frase helps you create valuable articles that are keyword rich and optimized for search intent. Accelerate your content creation workflow by creating detailed content summaries in minutes.
Frase provides a basic summary of the web’s best information in one place, providing:
- Well-Researched Content Summaries
- Custom brief templates to simplify your content workflow
- Optimize content and compare it to the top search results
- Exploring the content gap
- SEO Content Analysis
Pricing: Plans start at $44.99 per month.
@fraseHQ accelerates your #ContentCreation workflow by creating detailed content summaries in minutes, says Sally Ofuonyebi via CMIContent. # SEO Click to tweet
6. LongTailPro
LongTailPro is another tool where the name says what it does. Detects profitable long tail keyword phrases for your target keyword.
You can find keywords with low competition and high CPC by:
- Keyword profitability ranking
- Daily keyword tracking
- Domain name finder
- competitive research
Pricing: Plans start at $37 a month
Writing tools to help your content
You can search for your keywords, target phrases, etc., so that your content will be noticed in the search results. But you also have to pay special attention to the words, phrases, and sentences that come together to create your content. Here are some tools to help:
7. Grammar works
Grammarly Business analyzes your content for readability, clarity, plagiarism, spelling, and grammar. This tool helps you communicate your message effectively by delivering error-free, readable and clear content to your readers by:
- Sentence rewriting suggestions
- Tone detection and adjustment
- Plagiarism detection
- advanced suggestions
- word choice
Pricing: Starting at $12.50 per month
8. Hemingway’s Editor
Another writing tool to help make your content readable and clear is the Hemingway Editor. With this editing app, you can track and correct grammatical errors on a single page.
With color-coded highlights, you determine what works and what can be improved. It also includes:
- Readability scores
- word suggestions
- Format features
- Writing and editing modes
Pricing: Free via online search; The app is $19.99.
9. Vulgar researcher
To help your content’s readability (and originality), avoid overused words and phrases that are hard to hear or read. Cliche Finder can help you identify them and suggest alternatives to those words that don’t make sense. Simply copy and paste your content into the provided box and click Find Duplicates.
Pricing: free
#ClicheFinder can help you identify and replace overused words and phrases, and it’s free, says Sally Ofuonyebi via CMIContent. #ContentCreation #Tools Click to tweet
10. Specialized language terms
Similar to cliches, terms should have a limited (or no) presence in your content. Jargon Grader is a simple tool to help you create content that is clear and easy to understand.
Identifies and provides fixes for linguistic terms in your content. It also highlights complex words or terms that are often confusing and unintelligible until you can remove them.
Pricing: free
11. RhymeZone
RhymeZone is a library of rhymes to create captivating and memorable content. to hand in:
- Comprehensive list of rhymes with syllables or letters
- Ratings and rhyme analysis
- Reorder and filter boxes
- Rhyming suggestions based on lyrics, poems, and novels
Pricing: free
12. Read
You want your audience to consume your content, but they won’t if it’s too difficult. Read can help. This analysis tool tests and scores your content’s readability, checks for grammatical errors, and makes necessary suggestions for content improvement.
Among the Readable features:
- Color highlights to indicate grammar issues
- Readability test for texts, files, emails, and URLs
- File export and download functions
- Text stats
- Flesch-Kincaid . grade level equivalent score
- Readability score
- access analysis
Pricing: Free with limited features; Paid plans start at $4 per month.
13. Plagiarism Checker
Plagiarism checker with small SEO tools detects potential plagiarism in your content. It searches through billions of documents online to ensure that your content is authentic.
Its features include:
- URL integration
- Upload documents from your computer, Dropbox or Google Drive
- Detailed plagiarism report
- Shareable and downloadable options
Pricing: Free with limited features; Paid plans start at $9.80 per month
#PlagiarismChecker by @smallseotools1 reveals potential plagiarism in #content, says Sally Ofuonyebi via CMIContent. #ContentCreation #Tools Click to tweet
Create content that is relevant to search and audience
By using these tools, you can better put your content in good order and thus attract more readers. And when they come to your content, they will find it free of errors, jargon, cliched words and ready to consume with ease.
All tools mentioned in the article were selected by the author. If you have a tool to suggest, feel free to add it in the comments.
Cover photo by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute