Need help writing content that your audience wants to read and are searching for? Check out these resources to complete keyword research and planning for content, discover your industry’s top content, and learn what your competition is publishing.
- Ahrefs — Research your competitors and monitor your niche. This tool wants to be known as the “all-in-one SEO toolset.” This site includes: a site audit, a site explorer, a keyword explorer, a content tracker, and a rank tracker. These trackers, explorers, and audits can help you improve your website, discover more about what your customers are searching for, and evaluate your competitors.
- Answer The Public — Get raw search results and insights for content ideas, marketing, and customer feedback. A tool to discover what people are searching and asking about. This tool listens to autocomplete search engines and then takes the useful phrase and questions many people are asking within your keyword. This can help you get a better understanding of what people are looking for, which can allow you to provide useful content.
- BuzzSumo — Analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor. BuzzSumo can be used to search a keyword to find out what people are searching for and what is popular right now. As well as find out what content has been gaining the most in social engagement. This tool also can help you find influencers who can amplify your reach. Influencers within the same industry as you can provide more customer outreach.
- SEMrush — Competitive intelligence suite for online marketing, including SEO, PPC, social media and video advertising research. SEMrush offers tools not only for SEO, but also for content marketing, market research, advertising, and for social media. Find out what are the popular topics that your audience is interested in. Find out what marketing tactics that your competitors are using. And plan out your social media posts so you no longer have to stress about keeping up-to-date.
- Keywords Everywhere — Browser extension for Chrome & Firefox that shows the metrics of that keyword. This platform uses: search volume, the average of total searches people have looked for using a specific keyword; CPC (cost per click), the total amount that advertisers pay for one click; Competition, a specific number of advertisers running ads on Google with the specific keyword; and Trend Data, where they can look back at trend data from 2004 and 2008.
- KeywordTool.io — Google Keyword Planner alternative. This is a free version of Keyword Tool that can generate more than 750 long-tail keyword suggestions.
- Feedly — Connect all your website content and organize it into one easy-to-read location. Feedly uses a tool called Leo, who is your Ai research assistant, which can read all the feeds that you are interested in and filter out any articles that are not relevant or important. Then you can read what Leo left for you, and you can share to your colleagues.
- Scoop.it — Tool for researching and posting curated content. This tool is friendly to both individuals and businesses. Scoop.it for individuals can publish your topic page with curated content quickly and easily. You are able to distribute it automatically to your network and build your professional brand. As for business, you are able to curate, share, and read content on private hubs. You are given the opportunity to publish on your websites, blogs, newsletters, and social media.
- Moz — SEO tools, training, and analytics. Moz has site audits, where they go onto your site and discover technical SEO issues and then give you recommendations to improve the problems. They offer: rank tracking by tracking the performance of a large amount of traffic-driving keywords; a backlink analysis, which allows you to see metrics from any site; and a keyword research tool, which can allow you to find out what keywords are best to target your customers.
- Wordtracker — Free keyword research tool. Wordtracker can find related keywords to build stronger content. It provides SERP preview, which allows you to see the results and get a better understanding of the difficulty of the competition within the tool.