SEO tools to include in your content process

If you’re doing it right, creating and maintaining content is a time-consuming job. And as with most things, if the final result seems effortless, the more time has gone into it. If you don’t have a great process, backed by useful tools, it will take even longer. Content process is a whole topic of its own, here we will focus on the tools.

Tools! Photo by Dan Cristian Pădureț.

Audience insights/seasonality

The content planning stage has the potential to include a lot of guesswork. This is a risk as getting this stage wrong will torpedo all of your content efforts as you’ll end up investing a lot of time and effort into content people probably don’t want or that does not truly reflect your brand, product or service.

Luckily, there are a host of tools available to help you know what your audience wants and when they want it–content marketing gold!

Google Trends. Unsurprisingly, Google has a wealth of knowledge about what people want and when. This makes Trends a great entry-level tool to start your content research. Go and play around with topics and themes and get a sense of their popularity. You’ll also be able to see peaks and dips in interest so you can start thinking about seasonality. Finally, you can adjust the time frame and location and see related topics.

Google Trends. Yoga peaked in May 2020, apparently.

Google Trends’ related topics and queries reports can be helpful for generating content ideas and for seeing how people’s minds work.

Google Keyword Planner gives you insights into the search terms people are using related to a topic. This will help you get a better sense of what your audience is interested in and the language they use to find it. If you have a running Google Ads account you can access “expert level” insights which gives you invaluable seasonality and volume data. You can also see if there has been an increase or decrease in interest at a keyword level.

Example of insights from Google’s Keyword Tool.

Competitors & landscape

Knowing who is creating content in your space, when, how often and whether it’s working for them can give you lots to work with when it comes to your own content strategy. These tools make it easier to get these insights without having to do painstaking individual brand research.

Semrush is expensive but can give you a competitive edge. The keyword tools are useful and give you some visibility into those pesky Google Analytics “not provided” keywords. But where Semrush also comes in very handy is looking at the current search landscape and seeing which domains and specific website pages are performing well. This enables you to do some deep competitor research to understand what search engines currently consider to be great content. You can also extrapolate the data to understand your site's own content gaps and opportunities; very handy for your annual content planning.

Speaking of competitors, Similarweb has powerful and free tools that give you lots of very insightful information about how your own domain is performing in organic results and also about your competitors. You can compare domains and see where you should be focusing your efforts to get that all-important market share. The free tool only lets you see the past month of data but it’s enough to give you some ideas for how you can adapt or grow your content strategy to get more traction.

Idea generation

Now you should know broadly what your audience wants and when it’s time to get to work and start thinking of some specific content ideas.

Answer the Public gives you 3 free searches per day which is fine for getting your brain into ideas-mode. Type in a theme or topic and you’ll get a very hard-to-read spiral containing lots of search-insights-driven content ideas, handily grouped into buckets according to their query type, e.g., “how, why, which, when.” These groupings will be especially familiar to anyone who has a toddler.

If you’re a fan of reading upside down, you’ll love Answer the Public.

Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator is a free tool and worth a mention. Its suggestions are just OK (see example below), but still good as a way to kick-start some content ideas.

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Non-SEO tool shoutouts

• SparkToro. If you want to know what your audience is up to on social, this tool is invaluable. It gives you insights into the social channels and specific accounts that audiences engage with on specific topics. You’ll find influential accounts, both obvious and hidden gems, as well as get a good picture of the media your audience engages with, from podcasts to press. This is very useful information for outreach and influencer :( marketing.
• Sprout Social. Free tools that find the best times for you to post on social, as well as free image resizing and social media templates.