Some content creators think writing to satisfy your audience and impress search engines put them between a rock and a hard place.
But successful content marketers recognize writing for your audience isn’t different from 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 compiled a list of 13 tools divided into SEO and writing sections, but all designed to help you create valuable content that will get discovered and consumed by your target audience.
SEO tools to help audiences discover your content
These search engine optimization tools provide helpful analyses on keywords, competitors, search engine result pages, and more.
1. SpyFu
SpyFu does what its name implies – it allows you to spy on your content competitors. By typing your competitor’s website in the search box, you gain insight into relevant data such as traffic volume, inbound links, and profitable keywords in their organic content and paid search campaigns.
SpyFu shows you what’s working in your industry, including:
- Keywords
- Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns
- Backlinks
- Competitors’ keywords, ranking, and ad test history
Pricing: Free with limited features; paid plans start at $33/month
2. Semrush
Semrush is an all-in-one SEO content writing tool for every marketer. With Semrush, you can perform detailed keyword research, SEO, competitive analysis, performance tests, campaign tracking, and content analysis.
Semrush also has an extensive suite of features, including:
- Keyword research for the most profitable search terms
- On-page and local SEO
- Competitive analysis
- Daily rank tracking for target keyword changes
- Social media management and analytics
Pricing: Free with limited features; paid plans start at $119.95/month
3. Clearscope
Clearscope empowers you to create rankable, 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 gives an SEO grade in relation to the competition. It also helps you discover keyword gaps.
Pricing: Plans start at $170/month.
4. Keywords Everywhere
Keywords Everywhere is a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that displays search and keyword metrics on search engine result pages.
This SEO tool analyzes your search term on multiple websites and shows you relevant trending, semantic and long-tail keywords. It also displays the ad cost of your keyword, its trend pattern, and competition data through powerful features like:
- Search interest chart (from Google and YouTube data)
- Keyword widgets for long-tail keywords recommendation and search volumes
- Google’s “people also search for” and “related searches” keyword widget
- Competitor gap analysis
- Cost-per-click (CPC) and volume data
- Website analytics, including Moz domain authority score, monthly organic traffic volume, ranking keywords, spam rating, and referring domains and links.
Pricing: Free with limited features; paid plans start at $10/year.
5. Frase
Frase helps you create valuable, keyword-rich, and search-intent-optimized articles. It speeds up your content creation workflow by generating detailed content briefs in minutes.
Frase gives a core summary of the web’s best information in one place, providing:
- Well-researched content briefs
- Custom brief templates to streamline your content workflow
- Content optimization and comparison to top search results
- Content gap discovery
- SEO content analysis
Pricing: Plans start at $44.99/month.
6. LongTailPro
LongTailPro is another tool where the name says what it does. It discovers profitable long-tail key phrases of your target keyword.
You can find low competition and high-paying CPC keywords through its:
- Keyword profitability ranking
- Daily keyword tracking
- Domain name finder
- Competitive research
Pricing: Plans start at $37/month
Writing tools to help your content
You can research your keywords, target phrases, etc., so your content will get noticed in search results. But you also need to take special care of the words, phrases, and sentences that come together to create your content. Here are some tools to help:
7. Grammarly Business
Grammarly Business analyzes your content for readability, clarity, plagiarism, spelling, and grammar. This tool helps you effectively communicate your message by delivering error-free, readable, and clear content to your readers through:
- Sentence rewrite suggestions
- Tone detection and adjustments
- Plagiarism detection
- Advanced suggestions
- Word choice
Pricing: Starting at $12.50/month
8. Hemingway Editor
Another writing tool to help make your content readable and clear is Hemingway Editor. With this editing app, you can track and correct grammar errors on a single page.
Through color-coded highlights, it identifies what works and what can be improved. It also includes:
- Readability grading
- Word suggestions
- Formatting features
- Write and edit modes
Pricing: Free via an online search; app is $19.99.
9. Cliche Finder
To help your content readability (and originality), avoid overused words and phrases that are a bore to hear or read. Cliche Finder can help you identify those and suggest replacements for those stale words. Just copy and paste your content into the available box and click “Find Cliches.”
Pricing: Free
10. Jargon Grader
Similar to cliches, jargon should have a limited (or no) presence in your content. Jargon Grader is a simple tool to help you create clear and easy-to-understand content.
It identifies and offers fixes for jargon in your content. It also highlights complex words or terminology that are often confusing and incomprehensible so you can remove them.
Pricing: Free
11. RhymeZone
RhymeZone is a library of rhymes to create more captivating and memorable content. It delivers:
- Comprehensive list of rhymes by syllables or letters
- Rhyme ratings and analysis
- Re-rank and filter boxes
- Rhyme suggestions according to lyrics, poems, and novels
Pricing: Free
12. Readable
You want your audience to consume your content, but they won’t if it’s too difficult. Readable can help. This analysis tool tests and scores your content’s readability, checks for grammar errors, and gives necessary suggestions for content improvement.
Among Readable’s features are:
- Colored highlights to denote grammar issues
- Readability testing for texts, files, emails, and website URLs
- Export and download file functions
- Text statistics
- Flesch-Kincaid grade level equivalent score
- Readability score
- Reach analysis
Pricing: Free with limited features; paid plans start at $4/month.
13. Plagiarism Checker
Plagiarism Checker by Small SEO Tools detects potential plagiarism in your content. It searches billions of documents online to ensure your content is original.
Its features include:
- URL integration
- Document uploading from your computer, Dropbox, or Google Drive
- Detailed plagiarism report
- Sharable and downloadable options
Pricing: Free with limited features; paid plans start at $9.80/month
Create content that works for search and your audience
With these tools, you better position your content to rank well, so it attracts more readers. And when they get to your content, they’ll find it free of errors, jargon, and cliches and ready to be easily consumed.
All tools mentioned in this article were suggested by the author. If you’d like to suggest a tool, share the article on social media with a comment.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
