One vital facet of your content marketing strategy is optimizing your content at all levels from the idea phase, research, creation to promotion. This can be very daunting and time-consuming. Here are 8 essential SEO tools that will make your work easier:
1. Preliminary phase
At the outset, optimizing content should begin with the identification of great keywords that can help your content to rank high in search engine results. Here are some helpful tools at this stage:a) Google Adwords Keyword Tool
This is a rather obvious keyword research tool. It however is very beneficial in marketing strategies. All you need to do is key in a topic. It will give results with the suggested keyword phrases. To make the best choice among them, copy them onto an excel spreadsheet and sort them by their search volume. Take the top results and brainstorm the topics that you can write about them. This will help you in optimizing content. Moreover, you will have enough ideas for content for some time.b) The Blog Topic Generator by Hubspot
This tool helps you come up with titles for some of the keywords that you may have chosen from Google AdWords. All you need to do is key in the keywords and the tool provides titles which you can use for your content. The tool can produce over 200 titles. This again gives you enough ideas to work with for some time.2. Research phase
After you have brainstormed the ideas for your content, you can now begin doing some research that will add up to your final content. One of the things you need to consider here is your competitors. You also need to look at the type of content and what areas result in maximal user engagement and backlinks. This will help you estimate the length of your content and the areas to cover. This is especially crucial in YouTube Marketing, where you have to capture the attention of your audience within the first few seconds, and deliver a powerful message that will move them. Here are useful SEO tools for this content marketing phase:a) BuzzSumo
This tool allows you to see the top content on a specific topic. Top content is usually based on social sharing volume. It also allows you to see the backlinks and the sharers buttons. You are therefore able to see specific backlinks from other content, and even the users that have shared it on social media. This will be profitable when it comes to promoting content.b) Impactana
This tool helps you see the views, comments as well as backlinks that a piece of content has received. Some content may have many shares, links and comments, but with no traffic. If this is the case, there is a high likelihood that the links have been bought. The content therefore is not popular, and should be avoided.3. The creation phase
It is now time to create your content. You already have an idea of how you are going to package it, whether it will be a blog post, infographic or You Tube video. Better still, you have the keywords that can help you to optimize it as well as the titles that you can choose.During creation, ensure that the content is fully optimized for search engines and users too. Here are 2 SEO tools to help incorporate in your content marketing strategy:
a) Grammarly
This works for written content. If you do not have an editor to check your content, you can use it. It offers in-depth checking of errors. This tool can be configured to look for specific issues based on particular types of content. You can also choose the specific issues to be detected. When you use this tool, you will not lose links and shares due to avoidable grammatical errors.b) WordPress SEO
This tool is ideal if you are creating content on WordPress or even on your own domain. It helps in the configuration of SEO settings for content. It also helps in analyzing content for keyword optimization. For details on how to improve keyword optimization for your content, open the Page Analysis tab on WordPress or on your site. If your site does not have this plugin, install it on your WordPress site. When you need to analyze SEO, save your content as a draft, and a run a copy of it run on WordPress where you have installed the plugin.4. The promotion phase
After creating great content, one cannot look down upon this facet of content marketing. Let us look at the SEO tools that you can use here:a) Sendible
This is a social management tool. It helps you to share content with a number of social networks. It also allows you to review the analytics for every share. You can also repost the content to different or even the same networks to increase the opportunity for visibility, sharing and conversion. It is a significant aspect of your YouTube Marketing.b) BuzzBundle
This tool allows you to search questions that are related to your content. You can search on blogs, social media, and forums. All you need to do is enter your keyword phrase. The results will show all the posts that are related to your content. If you see people asking questions that your content can answer, give them a link to it. This way, you will be providing value for them.c) GTmetrix
This is more of an overall tool, though it linked with your content and YouTube marketing strategies. It measures the speed of your webpages and offers suggestions for improvement. It will be senseless to create great content and promote it widely only for your visitors to come to your site and get disappointed. Load time is pivotal. It makes the difference between your visitor opting for your competitor’s website or not. This tool is thorough and user-friendly. Other tools that you can use to measure site speed are Pingdom, Google PageSpeed Insights, and WebPagetest.Conclusion
As we have discussed, you must optimize your content at all levels- from the idea phase, research, creation to promotion. It can be very daunting. The above SEO tools needs to form part of your content marketing strategy. They could also come in handy in your YouTube marketing strategy.
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