The entire Internet is content-based – websites, blogs, forums, social media platforms, emails, texts, advertisements, games, journals, news outlets, media, data, etc.

And in this huge ocean, how does a content creator produce and publish remarkable content that is engaging, will be noticed, shared, and, even more importantly, “picked up” by search engines as valuable and worthy of good rankings?

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Quantity Vs. Quality

Content marketers are often focused on producing as much as possible and publishing it as often as possible on any platform possible, hoping that if they throw enough of it out there, some of it will “stick.”

Quality, on the other hand, is a focus on crafting content that provides true value to a target audience – solutions to their problems, education, engagement, entertainment, and even inspiration. And it is delivered on those platforms where that audience hangs out and is more apt to actually see it, absorb it, and share it.

Finding the right balance between quantity and quality is always a challenge.

But the bigger challenge, which is often ignored, is to develop a strategic plan for analyzing how all of that content is actually resonating.

After all, if certain types and platforms, or simply the way in which the content is composed, is not attractive or viewed as valuable by a target audience, then it should never have been produced.

The Solution? A Content Audit

Just like in the financial industry, a content audit is a regularly scheduled review of everything that a brand publishes, to determine what is working and what is not.

The goal is to work more productively and efficiently and to ultimately get those conversions and a much better ROI.

Analyze all the elements of content effectiveness may seem to be a daunting task at first. But, fortunately, technology has provided tools that can do this expertly and provide the data an audit requires.

So, let’s take a look at seven of the tools that should provide all the data you need to make good decisions about your content.

Blaze

Main slogan: Meet the cloud-based content audit platform made for content strategy. Inventory, audit, and analyze your online content. Identify gaps. Map your strategy. Keep your business goals and customer experience on the right path.

Overview:

Here is a content audit tool that can be personalized to exactly what you want to be audited. Its comprehensive audit includes metadata and analytics from sites, blogs, and even microsites. The process is clear and direct:

• Enter a URL address – Identify what you want to be analyzed and what you want to skip.
• Blaze will then crawl through the content you have selected and conduct the audit
• Once you get your results, you can sort the data in multiple ways
• Recommendations for improvement are made
• The audit results are reported on a single screen for easy browsing
• User has an option to work with a Blaze expert throughout the audit and recommendation process

Features:

• Centralize your content
• Analyze and audit content
• Launch a plan of action
• Create an inventory
• Plug in analytics
• Share the results
• Audit all the things

Who is it for:

• Agencies and consultants
• In-house web teams

Other departments and resources: blog, guides.

Online reviews:

• Cusperra: 43 reviews, 4/5

About: 4211 Glass Road, North East Suite A, Cedar Rapids, IA 52402, United States. A product of Atlantic BT.

BuzzSumo

Main slogan: Find the content that performs best. Collaborate with the influencers who matter. Use our content insights to generate ideas, create high-performing content, monitor your performance and identify influencers.

Features:

• Content discovery
• Content research
• Find influencers
• Monitoring
• Chrome extension
• API

Content discovery: Infinite ideas at your fingertips. Spark content ideas by browsing topics, trends and forums. BuzzSumo shows you what’s going down and what’s rising up.

• Keyword tool: generate thousands of relevant keywords, monthly search volume, cost per click, search trends, full insights
• Trends: Access real-time views of viral trends for any topic, domain or location, predict viral hits, rela-time results, geograohic filtering, custom feeds
• Topics: Related topics alongside real content examples kickstart your research, identify keywords, content examples, dig deeper, think different
• Questions: Search millions of forum posts, Amazon, Reddit, Quora and Q&A sites, genuine questions, Reddit search, forum search, customer voice

Content research: scan billions of articles and social posts so you can harvest meaningful insights.

• Data-powered content: 5 billion articles, identify top formats, competitive benchmarking, years of data
• Backlinks: Peek at the websites linking to key domains and competitor sites, social engagement, instant alerts, realtime updates, export

Find influencers: Look past vanity metrics to uncover truly influential leaders. Identify authors and creators with engaged audiences and genuine authority on Instagram, Twitter and the web.

• Twitter: meaningful metrics, millions of profiles, competitor analysis, power shares
• Authors with authority: engagement first, search by size, language filter, domain analysis

Chrome extension: Research content as you go. 20,000+ marketers have used the free BuzzSumo Chrome Extension to instantly reveal the social shares, links and influence of content

• Get the measure of your competitors in an instant
• Save tons of time on content research
• Pocket great content to discuss with your team later
• Examine any piece of content that exists online

Other departments: 

• Use cases: competitor intelligence, content strategy, crisis alerting, digital PR, influencer marketing, video marketing
• Resources: research and insights
• Blog
• Testimonials
• API docs
• Webinars
• Help

Plans:

• Pro: $99/mo or $79/mo billed yearly
• Plus: $179/mo or $139/mo billed yearly
• Large: $299/mo or $239/mo billed yearly
• Enterprise: $499+ custom plans tailored to you

Online reviews:

• G2: 80 reviews, 4.5/5
• Capterra: 123 reviews, 4.5/5
• TrustRadius: 57 votes, 8.9/10
• GetApp: 123 votes, 4.5/5
• SoftwareAdvice: 122 reviews, 4.5/5

Overview:

This great tool is primarily for research, but it has several other benefits too. Here is what you can do with Buzzsumo.

• Pop in a few of the major keywords/topics in your niche and find out which is the most popular content right now.
• Enter your niche and learn who are the biggest influencers and where you can find them, as well as what types of content they like to share and recommend from others. This gets you started on developing relationships with them
• Enter your own content and see how well it is doing in terms of social sharing
• Discover the most popular content in related niches, and see if you might be able to use some of those topics in your own content pieces

In short, if you want to know what content in your niche is going viral, even on social media, you will want to be using Buzzsumo.

About: BuzzSumo Ltd. Sovereign House, Church Street, Brighton, BN1 1UJ | Company number: 11796969 | VAT number: 316 140 051.

GoogleAnalytics

Main slogan: Get to know your customers. Get a deeper understanding of your customers. Google Analytics gives you the free tools you need to analyze data for your business in one place.

Benefits: Whatever your industry – travel, automotive, healthcare, or beyond – Analytics helps you get a deeper understanding of your customers so you can deliver better experiences and drive results.

• Build a complete picture

• Get insights only Google can give.

• Connect your insights to results.

• Make your data work for you.

Features:

• Analytics Intelligence: answers to your questions, proactive insights, user and conversion modeling

• Reporting: audience, advertising, acquisition, behavior, conversion, real-time, user flow, data freshness, unsampled, roll-up

• Data Analysis and Visualization: data access, filtering and manipulation, funnel analysis, segmentation, visualization and monitoring, custom funnels, advanced analysis

• Data Collection and Management: collection APIs, tag management support, configuration APIs, custom variables, data import, user access controls, custom tables, BigQuery export

• Data Activation: Intelligence and Anomaly Detection, Predictive Analysis, app notifications and remote configs, audience demographics

• Integrations: GoogleAds, display & video 360, search ads 360, surveys 360, optimize 360, Google AdSense, Google Cloud, SalesForce marketing, data studio, Google Ad Manager, Google Search Console

Other departments and resources: blog, support, analytics academy, Skillshop, Google Primer, partners, analytics for developers, Think with Google, business solutions, Google Workspace.

Online reviews:

• G2: 5,100 reviews, 4.5/5
• Capterra: Rating: 4.7 · ‎5,545 reviews
• TrustRadius: Rating: 8.6/10 · ‎2,730 votes
• Gartner: Rating: 4.4 · ‎34 reviews
• GetApp: Rating: 4.7 · ‎5,552 votes
• SoftwareSuggest: Rating: 4.6 · ‎24 reviews
• SourceForge: Rating: 4.5 · ‎25 reviews

Overview:

This is probably the most powerful and most comprehensive analysis tool you can use. The other big benefit is it is so easy to use and read, when the reports are provided. 

Here is a brief listing of all that it will do for you:

• You will see if your traffic is increasing or decreasing and by how much
• You will learn which channels and platforms are getting the most “play.”
• You’ll see which pages of your site are getting the most interest and staying power
• You can set specific conversion goals and see the rates you are getting

Google Analytics will not give you suggestions or recommendations, but the information you get is detailed and really valuable. You’ll know just what to work on to bring about the improvements you want.

About: Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

YoastSEO

Main slogan: the #1 WordPress SEO plugin. Get more visitors from Google and Bing. Attract more visitors from social media. Increase your readers’ engagement.

Features & Benefits:

• Optimize for keywords, keyphrases, synonyms, related keywords, and all word forms of those

• Optimize for related keywords as well (premium)

• Find high-performing keywords right in Yoast SEO

• Full access to all Yoast SEO academy courses (premium)

• Internal linking suggestions (Premium)

• Tell Google exactly what your page is about

• Preview of your page in Google

• Preview your page social posts (Premium)

• Improve the readability of your posts and pages

• Structured data blocks

• Internal linking blocks (Premium)

• Full control over your breadcrumbs

• Avoid confusing Google by using canonicals

• Working in every WordPress editor

• Takes care of technical stuff in the background

• Gain insight into your content (Premium)

• Prevent your visitors from ending up on a dead link with the redirect manager (Premium) 

• Export your focus keyword list (Premium)

• Always updated for Google’s algorithm

• 1 year of 24/7 support (Premium)

• Ad-free (Premium)

Plans:

• €89/year

Other departments and resources: work at Yoast, community, YoastCon, developer portal, knowledge base, local SEO, video SEO, newsSEO, WooCommerce SEO, blog, academy, help, shop.

Online reviews:

• G2: Rating: 4.6 · ‎43 reviews
• TrustRadius: Rating: 8.7/10 · ‎229 votes
• SourceForge: Rating: 4.5 · ‎4 reviews

Overview:

If you use WordPress, you have access to this amazing tool for content analysis. While it has a lot of features that help with your website structure and can fix technical issues you may have, you will be especially interested in the help with optimizing your content.

• You can get an audit of your writing and its SEO value, including optimizing keywords and meta descriptions, which have become increasingly important to search engines.
• There’s a lot of customization you can do, such as categorization, page topics, media file storage, blog headers, and more
• It analyzes your writing, no matter how often you publish, so that quality is maintained

About:  Our team consists of about 140 people. We have around 100 people working in Wijchen, The Netherlands, and the rest of the Yoasters are based all over the globe.

The board of Yoast consists of 5 partners: Marieke van de Rakt (CEO), Joost de Valk (Founder and CPO), Chaya Oosterbroek (COO), Omar Reiss (CTO) and Thijs de Valk (CCO). Get to know them a bit better!

ONLY THE BEST

Keyword Research Tools

Keyword, market, and competition research. Niche research. SEO. Domains. Link building. Content ideas. Rank tracking. Site crawling. Local marketing. Advertising, social media, content marketing. Site audit. Management. Webmaster tools. Toolbars, extensions. Various checkers. Training, support, and help. Academies.

PLUS comparison charts

Grammarly

Main slogan: Great Writing, Simplified. Compose bold, clear, mistake-free writing with Grammarly’s AI-powered writing assistant. Beyond Grammar and Spelling. From grammar and spelling to style and tone, Grammarly helps you eliminate errors and find the perfect words to express yourself.

Grammar check features:

• Check grammatical errors
• Incorrect punctuation
• Spelling errors
• Misused words
• Enhace your writing

Works on:

• Emails and messages: gmail, outlook, messenger, yahoo, and more
• Documents and projects: slack, google docs, jira, salesforce, and more
• Social media: medium, facebook, twitter, linkedin, and more

Plans:

• Free: Basic writing suggestions, spelling, grammar, punctuation
• Premium: starting at $11.66/mo – Style, clarity improvements, and additional advanced corrections. All in free plus clarity-focused sentence rewrites, tone adjustments, inclusive language, word choice, formality level, fluency, additional advanced suggestions
• Business for teams: starting at $12.50/member/mo – All in premium plus style guide, admin panel, centralized billing, priority email support, SAML SSO (for accounts with 50+ users)

Other departments and resources: @edu, desktop apps, keyboard, for MS Office, product feature news, tone detector, plagiarism checker, help center, security, careers and culture, blog, tech blog, press.

Online reviews:

• TrustPilot: 2,300+ 4.3/5
• SiteJabber: 877 reviews, 3.9/5
• Capterra: 2,800+ reviews, 4.7/5
• G2: 939 reviews, 4.6/5
• TrustRadius: 44 votes, 9.2/10

Overview:

You never know who may be reading your content. And when it contains grammar and sentence structure errors, it can be a real “turn off” to readers. There are levels of subscriptions to this app, but, if you have any concerns about your writing skills, potential plagiarism, and want recommendations for fixing issues, this is a “must-have” tool.

About: Every day, 30 million people around the world use our AI-powered product to strengthen their writing and say what they really mean. 400+ team members, 2,000+ institutions and enterprise clients, 30M+ daily active users. Max Lytvyn, Alex Shevchenko, and Dmytro Lider founded Grammarly in 2009 with the goal of helping people communicate more effectively.

Hemingway Editor

Main slogan: Hemingway App makes your writing bold and clear.

Features:

• Cuts the dead weight from your writing.
• Highlights wordy sentences in yellow and more egregious ones in red.
• Helps you write with power and clarity by highlighting adverbs, passive voice, and dull, complicated words
• Use Hemingway Editor wherever you write
• Whether you want bold, italics, headlines, or bullets, Hemingway handles all your text formatting needs with the click of a button
• One-click integrations with Medium and any WordPress blog
• HTML headings, formatting and links 
• Export to Microsoft Word or other editors
• Send Hemingway highlights to colleagues

Plans:

• $19.99

Online reviews:

• G2: Rating: 4.9 · ‎4 reviews
• ProductHunt: Rating: 5 · ‎5 reviews

Overview:

American students all read The Old Man and the Sea in school, a classic novel by Ernest Hemingway. This tool has been named for him, because of his simple and direct writing style.

Most experts agree that content writing must be simple and direct too. In fact, it should be at a reading level of a young adolescent and should contain as few complex sentence structures as possible.

If content writers use this tool, they can paste their pieces into the app and have it thoroughly analyzed for reading level and simplistic style, using active voice, and making suggestions to simplify the language and style.

About: a trademark of Hemingway Ltd., used under exclusive license through Fashion Licensing of America, Inc., New York, NY 10001.

200+

Business & Marketing Tools Collection

Work management, tracking, organizing, payments, accounting, Google, keyword, market, and competition research, SEO, analytics, and related, marketing & advertising, web development, website monitoring, domains & website hosting, coding, and related, design & multimedia, marketplaces, entrepreneurial communities, hiring & outsourcing.

ahrefs

Main slogan: With Ahrefs, you don’t have to be an SEO pro to rank higher and get more traffic.

Features:

• Keyword research
• Site explorer
• Site audit
• Rank tracker
• Content explorer

More Tools:

• Webmaster tools, backlink checker, broken link checker
• Website/authority checker, keyword generator, YouTube keyword tool
• Amazon keyword tool, Bing keyword tool, SERP checker
• SEO toolbar, WordPress plugin, keyword rank checker
• Keyword difficulty checker, website checker, domain comparison
• Batch analysis, link intersect, content gap
• Email alerts, SEO checker
• Word count, website traffic checker

Other departments and resources: help center, academy, SEO blog, tech blog.

Plans: 

• Starter: free
• Lite: $99/mo
• Standard: $179/mo
• Advanced: $399/mo
• Agency: $999/mo

There’s a 7-day trial for $7. You can cancel at any time.

Online reviews:

• G2: Rating: 4.6 · ‎277 reviews
• Capterra: Rating: 4.8 · ‎263 reviews
• TrustRadius: Rating: 9/10 · ‎164 votes
• TrustPilot: Rating: 4.1 · ‎80 reviews
• GetApp: Rating: 4.8 · ‎263 votes
• CrozDesk: Rating: 4.5 · ‎358 votes

Overview:

This tool gives content writers some of the most valuable information they can get. It will analyze everything from a domain, to each page, to backlinks, and will even track your Seo ranking.

In addition to this, Ahrefs will provide reports on the top pages in a niche – yours and your competitors’, as well as the keywords your competitors are ranking for but which you may not be.

The information you get from Ahrefs is invaluable as you analyze how you are comparing to other brands in your niche for content effectiveness.

About: a multinational team headquartered in Singapore. Our CEO, Dmitry, built his first document search engine when he was only 15. His interest in search engines never waned and in 2007, he revisited his work on search engines for documents and files. This led to the birth of our backlinks index in 2010, which in turn became the source of data for Ahrefs’ first version of Site Explorer.

These Seven…

Content audits are not optional. Without them, content writers have no way to know if their pieces, if their channels or platforms, if their styles, voice, tones, keywords, etc. are actually reaching their audiences.

And not only reaching their audiences but are those pieces of the quality that cause search engines to take notice and to index and rank them well?

When there are so many good tools to use to analyze content, there is absolutely no excuse for not conducting content audits on a regular basis.

These seven tools offer a variety of analysis methods, but certainly, there are others that you may find better for your needs.

Explore all of your options.