A Brief Guide to Online tools for Content Marketing

Content marketing is a multi-faceted approach that requires a lot of effort to maintain and improve. Nowadays, in the online world, there is a ton of work that you have to do just for the SEO of your website.

Naturally, considering the number of tasks that you have to take care of, you have to take assistance from online tools.

Consider keyword research as an example.

It’s a very vital element for SEO (which, in turn, is a major branch of content marketing). But, it’s not something that you can do on your own.

You have to find various types of metrics and insights about the keywords that you want to include in your strategy. You also have to get suggestions for secondary and LSI keywords. And this is not possible unless you use a reliable keyword research tool.

In this post, our discussion is going to be about various online tools that you can use for getting help in your content marketing endeavors.

Let’s get started.

Five Online Tools for Content Marketing

As we mentioned just now, there are a lot of different tasks that you have to deal with in content marketing. So, while mentioning the tools below, we’ll try and cover a wide variety that can be useful for multiple purposes…rather than just one.

1. Keyword Research Tools

In content marketing, writing and publishing SEO-optimized content is one of the most important steps that you have to incorporate into your strategy. And one of the most necessary elements of SEO-optimized content is keywords.

Keywords essentially help to define your website to the search engine so that the latter knows where to rank it in the SERPs. When choosing keywords for your content, you have to make sure that you pick the right ones i.e., the ones that are related to your niche.

You should also take care to select such keywords that are within your capacity to work with. In other words, you should not go for such popular short-tail keywords that you cannot easily rank for.

There are a lot of keyword research tools online. Quite a few of them are available for free as well, but they can only be used in a limited capacity. Premium tools like Ahrefs are preferable since they give you a free run to conduct various types of analyses and find necessary information about your required keywords.

With these tools, you can basically perform some of the following functions:

• Find relevant short-tail and long-tail keywords for your website
• Find the ranking difficulty for a particular keyword
• Find the websites that rank highest for a keyword
• Find the click-through rate and search volume of a keyword

And so on.

When using keyword research tools for conducting analyses, there are a couple of different rules and tips that you have to abide by. While a lot of these rules are figured out by SEO experts as they go along, there are a couple of main ones that we can point out right now.

To begin with, when you’re using a keyword research tool, you have to make sure that you select the results for the country in which you are trying your website to rank. In other words, if you are trying to make your website visible to users in the USA, you should look for keywords and search phrases that have a higher volume in that particular region.

Here, take a lot at this screenshot of the global search volume stats given by a keyword research tool:

As you can see, there is a large disparity in the numbers given in front of the different countries. While there is a number of factors that can contribute to this, one of the main reasons is that the same type of words and phrases are not colloquially used in various countries. It can also be due to the difference in the language styles.

The word would be ‘coloring books’ in America and ‘colouring books’ in places like the UK and the land Down Under. Get the idea?

2. Plagiarism Checking Tools

When you want to do some content marketing, you basically have to make sure that the content you use is impeccable. Now, with search engines, ‘impeccable’ means that the content should be free from imperfections such as high readability, grammatical mistakes and, of course, plagiarism.

Plagiarism can be heavily penalized by search engines. The mild penalty that a search engine can mete out to a website that is caught plagiarizing content is a reduction in the SERP rank. But, if the offence is serious, the site can even get delisted.

By using a plagiarism checker for scanning your content, you will be able to make sure that you don’t accidentally duplicate any existing material. Plagiarism checkers are available in abundance online, and you can use them easily to ensure your content’s uniqueness.

When selecting a plagiarism checker, you should try and look for one that has all, or most, of the following features:

• It should be free to use (if not totally, then at least to some capacity)
• It should provide accurate results (this can be determined by doing some test runs)
• It should have a sufficient word limit for your content
• It should provide the exact URLs for the copied sources
• It should be easy to use

Let’s understand these features a little more in detail.

Unless you have a recurring and frequent need for using plagiarism checkers, investing in a paid one is not worth it. If your content marketing strategy revolves a lot around blogging and guest posting, then buying a premium plagiarism detector will obviously be necessary.

On the other hand, if your strategy is more reliant on emails and newsletters etc., then you can make do even with free ones.

Moving on, if you want to pick a good tool to use for checking plagiarism in your content, then you should make sure that the results it provides are accurate. There are a number of different ways in which you can try this.

To begin with, you can try putting in some text by deliberately taking it from an existing online source. If the results come back showing that the text is plagiarized, then it means that the tool is worth its salt. You can even take this a step further and interlace some copied content with a little bit of your own unique work to see if the tool spots it or not.

Then, the tool that you should pick should also have a good word limit. In most tools, free users can enter up to 1,000 words. This can be enough if you regularly work with short-form articles and blog posts. But, if you need to enter content longer than this, then it is advisable to purchase a paid plan.

While it is possible and feasible to break up a long article into pieces and then check it, it’s too much of a hassle. It’s far easier and quicker to just enter it in one go.

3. Paraphrasing Tools

Paraphrasing tools can also be helpful in content marketing. We mentioned in the previous heading that one of the imperfections that can be troublesome for online readers is low readability.

Even if a particular reader has the ability to understand complex and complicated words and sentences, it’s not something that they will like to do if they are reading a blog post or a newsletter. To gain and retain a large readership, you should focus on making your content easily readable and digestible.

Paraphrasing tools can essentially help us with that.

You can use a paraphraser if you ever find that a particular piece of content is too difficult or confusing to read. Take a look at the screenshot above. The content we used doesn’t make much sense, but it does help us illustrate our point.

There are a couple of different things that paraphrasers do to the provided text. For example, a paraphraser will:

• Change words with their synonyms
• Change the sentence structures
• Change the phrases

To show you how this can help to improve the readability of your content, we’ll actually do a quick demo here.

In this screenshot, the tool does a really good job of simplifying the needlessly complicated sentence. In this same way, you can fix readability issues in your content by using paraphrasers.

Apart from helping with making convoluted and difficult-to-understand sentences (much like this one) easy to understand, paraphrasers can also help in removing repetition.

If there is, for example, a particular paragraph in which the same word is repeated seven times, you can try and use a paraphrasing tool to make it look less…weird.

Here, you can see this in the screenshot below as well.

In the input text, the word ‘drew’ is used six times and in three different meanings. But the tool worked fairly well to remove the repetition.

4. Article Rewriter Tools

Article rewriters can also play an assistive role in content marketing.

To the untrained eye, the working of an article rewriter and a paraphraser tool could look well nigh the same. However, there is a fine difference between them…which is pretty much why we’ve made this separate heading.

Paraphrasing tools are useful when you want to change small bits of text for purposes such as improving clarity. On the other hand, article rewriters can be useful when you want to rewrite a whole article or a blog post for removing plagiarism from it or for giving it a different look.

This can be useful for content marketers who have to upload blog posts on a regular basis. If they ever feel stuck or uncreative, they can rewrite some of their old posts to get new ideas on the same topic.

But, it should be borne in mind that these tools should only be used on one own content. Taking someone else’s content and then running it through an article rewriter is not at all ethical.

Let’s come back to the point.

Removing plagiarism is something that you may be required to do a lot. Whenever you have to publish any text on your website or any post on your blog, you have to make sure that it is completely free from plagiarism. While there is a toleration limit on search engines, it’s better to be safe and eliminate all vestiges of duplication before finalizing the content.

This is something that article rewriters can help you out with. Since these tools can alter the content by changing the words and phrases, as well as modifying the sentence structures, they can remove the identical matches that it picks up from other sources.

5. Grammar Checkers

Last but definitely not least, we have grammar checkers.

Grammar checkers are one of the most essential and important tools that content marketers have to (and should) use.

In content marketing, the focus is on the formation and projection of a brand name using written content. This involves blogs, emails, newsletters and so on. (This is basic stuff, but we’re reiterating it for a point.)

Since the very crux of content marketing is content itself, it has to be free from all types of errors and imperfections. If not all, then it should at least not contain the elementary mistakes related to grammar and spelling etc.

Grammar checkers are basically the tools that content marketers use to ensure this. There are a lot of grammar checkers available online that can scan the entered content and point out errors and mistakes in it.

One point to note about grammar checkers is that while the name says “grammar”, they usually check errors related to spelling and punctuation as well. In other words, if there are any issues related to spelling and punctuation in your content, they will get pointed out collectively by the tool.

Another thing that you should keep in mind about grammar checkers is that while they can be very helpful and assistive in removing errors from your content, they should not be trusted…blindly.

After all, they are just tools, so you have to use them like it. When correcting any error, you should first check it to see whether it makes sense or not. Sometimes, these types of tools can go wrong with understanding the context in which the text is written.

Similarly, once you run your content through a grammar-checking tool, you should give it a read yourself. Just as these types of tools can go wrong in correcting an error, they can also miss out on some altogether.

Other Necessary Tools for Content Marketing

Apart from the ones we’ve mentioned above, there are a number of other tools that you can use for taking help in your content marketing endeavors.

While we won’t go into a lot of detail regarding those tools, we will mention them one by one along with their uses.

1. Readability Checkers

We did mention in the post above how you can use paraphrasing tools for improving the readability of your content. However, apart from difficult words and repetitions, there are a number of other factors that can make content hard to read. Some examples of such factors include:

• Excessive use of passive voice
• Excessive use of adverbs
• Overly long sentences

These types of issues can be detected with the help of readability checkers.

2. DAPA Checkers

Publishing guest posts is a content marketing technique that entails reaching out to websites and having them publish some of your content. The main purpose of guest posting is to build your website’s link profile in order to boost its rank in the SERPs.

However, prior to getting in touch with a webmaster and talking about publishing a post, you have to ascertain whether their website is trustworthy and authoritative or not. One good way to do that is to find out the domain authority.

Domain authority is a metric created by Moz. It’s not an official Google ranking factor, but it is a good yardstick to measure how reliable a certain website is. You can find out the DA of a site by using a DA checker. If you want to narrow the results down to a particular web page, you can use a PA (page authority) checker instead.

3. Graphic Designing Tools

Good graphics are necessary for good content, especially in content marketing techniques like blogging and email marketing.

Content without color can look dull and boring to the readers. In order to make your blog posts and emails interesting and engaging, you have to add proper graphics and images to them by using design tools. A popular name in this field is Canva, which is a popular choice for many due to its free access.

Conclusion

Content marketers can take the help of various tools online for making their tasks easier, such as creating content and optimizing it.

In this post, we looked at five such tools that can be used for this purpose.

If you incorporate the use of these tools in your content marketing strategy, you will be able to create content that contains the right keywords and is properly optimized for your readers and search engines.

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