Hopefully by now you’ve discovered that content is the most important thing when it comes to engaging your readers on your website and improving your SEO for Google and other search engines. Unfortunately, by now you’ve also probably discovered that creating this engaging content that everyone talks so fondly about is not easy.
It can be incredibly difficult to come up with a content idea that hasn’t already been discussed somewhere online, and even when you do come up with an idea it’s up to you to put your own spin on the topic and offer something that your competitor’s haven’t yet offered. Only at this point are you ready to even begin actually writing something quality, and then comes revisions, testing headlines, creating social promotions for the content, and more. Moral of the story is that content marketing is an involved process, which is why using a content creation resource can be so crucial to success.
Content Creation Tools that Can Help You Get Your Strategy Started
Below are some of the top content creation tools out there that you can use for free to help improve your content strategy in all areas of content marketing—idea generation, keyword and audience research, grammar and writing improvements, headline analysis, and more.
This is a tool I tried because I was asked to write a review (which you can find here), and I have been using it ever since. Grammarly is a simple way to make sure that you’re not making any grammar mistakes when writing and publishing. Not only can grammarly help you identify any grammar mistakes or typos, but it will allow you to change your writing to the correct grammar with one easy click. The tool actually goes beyond just your writing, however, and works as a plugin to catch mistakes no matter what you’re writing—an email, a post on social media, a search on Google, and more.
According to HubSpot, only 62% of people who click into an article end up reading past the headline. With this in mind, it’s clear that headlines matter and should involve some testing before publishing. The Headline Analyzer tool comes from CoSchedule and helps score your headline quality and rates it’s ability to get social shares, traffic, and whether or not it’s optimized for SEO purposes. This shouldn’t be the end-all-be-all for your headlines, but it’s a great place to give your headline an initial check.
This is a very interesting tool for any of your content writers who write in Google Docs or if you have your content submitted through the Google Drive. You can actually search the web without ever having to leave your Drive window, which is great because it pulls up results right next to your content for easy comparisons. Many writers don’t mind switching from window to window or opening up two browser tabs and putting them side by side, but this is an easy tool to use and get used to if you’re looking to better optimize your content based on keywords used online and other competitor information. You can also use this to help find related articles to reference in the article you’re writing if you’re looking for a quick link.
You can find this tool by clicking Tools in the menu bar and then scrolling down to Research.
This is an older tool that hasn’t changed much over the years, but it works great when it comes to analyzing webpages. Your content strategy needs this because it’s important to be able to analyze the SEO and the data behind different website and pages so you know where to place your content, but it also helps give you a quick look at your own pages and SEO information.
This is another tool that doesn’t need to be your end-all-be-all for coming up with content ideas, but it’s a great place to go if you every have writers block and need a few fresh ideas. All you have to do is plug in a few keywords and the tool will generate five ideas for you. I find that this tool is very hit or miss and only gives me an idea I want to work with a small portion of the time, but it work wonderfully for sparking ideas that you’ll have on your own! Below shows step 1 on the left and the outcome on the right:
This is an excellent tool to help you up your image game. It allows you to upload images of your product or website (or photos you took on your own if you’re into photography) and insert them into the tool to create high-quality photo images. Small image downloads are free, so if you’re tired of paying for images for your content or you want to stand out if you’re extra creative, this is a great option.
Of course there are many more content resources out there, above are just the 6 that are most popular and well received in the online content writer community. For a list of even more tools, visit this article from Wordstream.
There’s a Tool for Everything in Marketing
In case you haven’t noticed, there are tools out there that can help you with just about any aspect of marketing (and some advanced tools that can help you with everything you need). Check out these three articles we’ve written in the past to learn about tools you may want to use for other aspects of your marketing and SEO initiatives:
Different Google Resources and Tools and How to Use Them to Your Advantage
How to Analyze a Competitor’s Website with SEO Tools to Help
Tools to Help You Recover from a Google Penalty
6 Tools to Use to See if Your Website is Mobile Friendly
Paid Tools to Help Bring Your SEO to the Next Level
As Hubspot added in their article mentioned above, while many other parts of business and marketing are becoming increasingly automated, content creation is still a very manual job (and most likely always will be). The sooner you can commit to a content creation tool, the better.
Do you have any content creation resources that you like to use? Let us know what we should add to the list in the comment section below.