Part 1: Keyword and Content Audit Tools

Google Alerts – This handy research tool will alert you to specific topics, keywords, or brands that appear on the search engine’s results. Creating an alert will trigger an email containing the information that you are looking to discover as it is published in real time. This can be particularly handy if you’re looking for breaking news, or recent articles to inspire new content from.

Google Keyword Planner – This tool will show trends and keyword data to help you plan what kind of content you want to produce, and how difficult it will be to attact traffic for it. It provides the number of searches for certain keywords and the cost per click if buying ads. This can be useful if you’re gearing up content centered around an event, or have a lot of competition surrounding a certain topic.

iSpionage – This 3rd party tool is great to search competitor data. You can uncover information about your competitors such as, what keywords they are targeting,  see if they are spending money on paid search, plus even see their advertising copy.

Spyfu – This is another useful tool that provides more insights into competitor content and strategies. Like many other of these tools, Spyfu is a subscription-based model and the number of tools and features you can access will depend on the membership level you have.

Part 2: Content Generation Tools

We also have a handful of writing tools we like to use when creating content.

Feedly – You choose the topics you’re targeting, and Feedly builds feeds based on those topics. You can find related and fresh content with this tool, helping you generate ideas not only for your assignment in hand but for future planning as well.

Hubspot – This is a tool that can help by automatically generating a week’s worth of ideas for blog posts. It is simple to use – simply inputting a few nouns, the tool produces topics almost instantly.

Grammarly – This is a wonderful tool for proofreading your content. You can either sign into the website and copy and paste your content, or you can download the Chrome extension, which integrates with Gmail, and tons of other apps for seamless on-the-go editing.

Yoast SEO – This is a plugin for websites that indicates whether or not your post content is properly optimized.

Part 3: Promoting and Measuring Content Effectiveness

We have a couple of favorite tools to promote and measure our content.

CoSchedule – This tool is amazing at scheduling content to go to social media pages, blogs, or emails. You can create campaigns within the dashboard itself, assign tasks to team members, and even create an approval process within your team.

Google Analytics – This tool is both free and is priceless. You can gather great insights from the data it provides. We use this tool all the time. You can see which pages convert the best, and provide new forms of content to complement what’s already working for your business.