Moz Open Site Explorer
This is a great free tool that can help webmasters to check on their page and domain authorities, in addition to seeing how many links are directing to their website, and from where. Webmasters can also keep track of their competitors to see how they compare. The free version provides you with three reports per day, and the paid version offers unlimited reports on all of your keywords, links, and competitors.
Google Keyword Planner
The Google Keyword Planner is a must-use tool that can help you create a keyword strategy. By entering your main keyword into the planner, you will be provided with a list of similar keywords that you can utilise in your content marketing strategy. The Google Keyword Planner also provides information about the competitiveness of your keyword, which is very useful if you are planning on doing any PPC marketing.
Google Trends
It can sometimes be hard to come up with interesting topics for blog posts and guest posts, and this is where Google Trends can help. By entering in your targeted keywords, you can find out which stories are currently hot in your industry. Find out which topics are being discussed on social media, what people are searching for in the search engines, and see the traffic data for a specific website. The best thing about Google Trends is that it’s updated every hour, so you can get a regular snapshot of what is trending in your niche.
Hootsuite
Once you have written a blog post for your website, you’re going to want to share it via social media in order to get engagement. However, it’s no good just tweeting a link to your post and not doing anything else. Instead, you’ll want to share numerous links to your post in order to maximise on traffic. In the olden days you had to do this manually, however now you can use tools like Hootsuite to do this job for you. You can view the streams of multiple networks, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, and schedule updates to post even when you’re not online. It saves a lot of time, and is the number one social media planning tool out there.
Content marketing does take a long time to do, but it is possible to maximise your time and your budget. The above four tools should be used by all businesses, both big and small alike.
