It’s common knowledge that creating consistent and engaging content helps increase rankings and, as a byproduct, revenue.
But how about analyzing those efforts?
The key is a consistent analysis of your content, whether it’s a blog, service page, white paper, video, or whatever. This analysis helps recognize threats and discover opportunities—and this process is vital for strong SEO.
Auditing your current content is no longer an option—it’s an absolute must to achieve the most ROI from your content creation efforts. Even if you’ve created the most valuable piece of content possible and it receives major engagement, you can’t afford to sit idle and expect the digital frenzy to continue.
The solution for content to constantly perform at top levels resides in studying some good old data.
A. Charles Thomas, General Motors’ first-ever Chief Data and Analytics Officer (CDAO), shared his valuable insights as a keynote at the recent Wharton Customer Analytics conference, Successful Applications of Analytics. He said: “The person who understands data and can explain it to the business? That’s the unicorn. That’s the hardest skill to hire for.”
Imagine, for a second, scaling down millions and millions of data into a handful of numbers to make informed decisions. It’s not an easy task.
You can have a data scientist on the job digging deeper to collect, assess, and interpret massive pools of data and information. That’s not a reality for most, and easier said than done. But data analysis is a must.
Many technicalities are involved in extracting the data, understanding it, and establishing the relevant patterns. We can go on and on to explain the enormity of this job – data science. Thankfully the following tools make it much simpler for us within the world of digital marketing.
First – What is Data Analysis?
Data analysis is the process of extracting, filtering, evaluating, and interpreting raw data into comprehensible information to aid crucial business decision-making. This data can be in any form – text, images, video, or even animation.
As per academic researchers, “Data Analysis is the process of systematically applying statistical and/or logical techniques to describe and illustrate, condense and recap, and evaluate data.”
Data is the life-saving fuel for our digital economy to not just survive but thrive against insurmountable challenges across industry verticals. Having a few advanced tools can simplify the process for digital marketers.
These data analysis tools include but are not limited to proofreading software, plagiarism checkers, grammar/spellcheckers, content audit tools, and many more.
Each one alone offers some value, but when combined, you’ll achieve better results – all that may be achieved without spending loads of time, effort, and, of course, money.
The following are the top 11 data-driven tools that can take your content to the next level. Most are free with the option of a paid premium version.
1. Google Analytics – Free
Google Analytics (GA) is an in-house tool from the behemoth Google itself. Having a sophisticated, user-friendly interface, and bundled with many key features and stunning reporting schemes, you can effortlessly track, measure, and manage your website performance.
All you have to do is make your business account and enjoy mind-numbing data from exceptional features that aid your business intelligence and assure measured results.
For instance, take an example of Google Analytics Standard Ecommerce that provides granular transactional and impressions data to give you future insights.
You get detailed reports on:
- Shopping behavior
- Checkout
- Product performance
- Sales performance
- Product list performance
- Marketing data
This is just tips of the proverbial iceberg. You can find much more valuable information about user behavior on your website.
2. SE Ranking – Premium
SE Ranking is an all-in-one SEO tool designed for an extensive competitor and organic research, as well as ongoing analytics for your website.
One area webmasters will benefit from is the Website Audit tool, which runs through dozens of technical parameters ranging from website security to URL status codes.
Its keyword research tool is as sophisticated as Moz’s or SEMrush’s, and its ongoing keyword tracker helps you track keywords over time to monitor your progress.
What truly makes SE ranking all-in-one is its intuitive Marketing Planning software and title research tools. Together, these tools help writers create their own content calendar and everyday SEOs to optimize their websites for search, step-by-step.
SE Ranking also offers other features, including:
- An on-page SEO checker
- Content marketing research tools
- Backlink monitoring
- Competitor research
- Google Search Console data
- Traffic analytics
- Website snippet data
- Social media analytics
- Report builders
- A SERP analyzer
In total, SE ranking is one of the only SEO tools you’ll ever need. It has helped us tremendously with clients.
3. SEMrush – Free & Premium Versions
SEMrush is a ContentMender favorite. From keyword research to competitor analysis to auditing to creating white-label reporting, you can achieve profound results that provide insights into the relevance or competitiveness of website content.
Its main features include:
- Analytics reports
- Paid Ads research
- Display advertising
- Backlinks
- Keyword research
- Product listing ads
- Website traffic analytics
- Keyword tools
- Website audit
- Social media tracker
Enjoy a seven-day free trial or subscribe for $99.95/month to start with for extended benefits.
4. Google Search Console – Free
Yet another tool from Google itself, Google Search Console (GSC) is handy for webmasters to ascertain any crawling and indexing errors on your website. Discover potential reasons why your website is underperforming against competitors based on the behavior of google bots/crawlers.
Its main features include:
- Search analytics
- Crawl errors
- HTML fixes
- Sitemap and robots.txt errors
- Fetch
Get detailed reports on your organic traffic and performance for troubleshooting. Create an account for your business website to fully benefit from GSC.
5. Screaming Frog – Free
Screaming Frog is an incredible tool to crawl website URLs for technical and onsite SEO at scale without compromising on performance.
Its main features include:
- List mode (limited to 500 URLs without a license)
- Redirects audit
- Crawl path report
- AJAX crawling scheme
- SERP snippet emulator
- SERP mode
- XML Sitemap Auditing
- Canonical errors
Screaming Frog saves much time when doing optimization of elements like title tags, meta descriptions, or headline tags. The tool downloads into an Excel file, and you can delete what columns are needed – it eases project management tremendously.
6. DYNO Mapper – Free & Premium Versions
Keeping a close tab on what’s affecting your on-page SEO is a must for websites. DYNO Mapper’s content auditing tool allows you to easily monitor the current health status of your on-page elements.
With DYNO Mapper, you can schedule a content audit every week and acquire crucial information that’s affecting your website performance. You’ll get detailed reports and notifications about documented issues affecting its performance and ruining the user experience.
Its key features include:
- Sitemap generator
- Content inventory
- Content audit
- Content analysis tool
- Visual sitemap generator
Configure your content strategy with real-time data and information about your website content architecture.
Enjoy a 14-day free trial or subscribe for $40/month to start with for extended benefits.
7. MOZ Keyword Explorer: Premium
This is another industry-loved tool that simplifies your keyword research.
In the words of MOZ founder Rand Fishkin, the tool “takes you all the way through the keyword research process—from discovering keyword ideas to getting metrics to building a list, filtering the keywords on it, and prioritizing which ones to target based on the numbers that matter.”
Let’s take an example, you’ve searched for a keyword, say – striped shirts:
Give a close look into the report, and you will notice the metrics – volume, difficulty, etc – to help you decide where to direct your content efforts. You can also have access to SERP (Search Engine Results Page) analysis and additional keyword recommendations from Moz for fresh ideas.
Typically, it’s a free-of-cost service, but you can enjoy extra benefits with Moz Pro starting at $99 per year.
8. Ahrefs – Free & Premium Versions
Wondering why a content piece gets more links or why it has ranked better than yours? All you need is Ahrefs keyword explorer. From digging more information for new topics, discovering link opportunities to determine SEO/Social Media Metrics, there’s so much to explore to polish your content strategy.
Determine what’s buzzing online with key information to discover opportunities for guest blogging and expand your outreach to various social media platforms.
Enjoy a seven-day trial for $7 or opt for monthly subscription starting at $99/month (personal) and $999/month (agency).
9. Click Flow – Free & Premium Versions
Posting consistent and frequent content on your website is a recommended practice. But sometimes the results simply aren’t there. Call it poor content strategy or blame it on unpredictable user behavior. Regardless, you must dig out useful information to optimize your content for organic traffic.
ClickFlow digs deeper into your site’s content and provides actionable recommendations on popular content with an impressive impression rate but inadvertently low CTR. That’s worth pondering over for content creators and strategists to determine the possible fixes to get back on track.
Discover more opportunities to expand your content marketing strategies with some key metrics providing insight into the existing deficiencies on your website.
Enjoy a 21-day free trial or subscribe for $99/month to start with for extended benefits.
10. Blaze – Free & Premium Versions
Content audit adds life to your old and often-standard strategies. This subscription-based tool crawls your important pages to create an inventory, audit, and analyze content for gaps and provide workable recommendations.
From creating a central content repository to thorough audits, you get viable recommendations to optimize your efforts to improve and attain business goals.
Enjoy a 14-days free trial or subscribe for $99/month to start with for extended benefits.
11. SimilarWeb – Free & Premium Versions
Not knowing your market competitors can be a setback you may never recover from. Welcome to SimilarWeb, which allows you to get a peek into vital metrics – organic traffic, rankings, etc. This will help you:
- Know your market well
- Discover your competitor’s analytics
- Discover your industry’s benchmark standards
- Predict future trends and discover more business opportunities
- Anticipate new players
Make business decisions based on valuable metrics that govern your current strategies and forge the path for future content ideas.
Enjoy the free version or subscribe for cost $199 per month to start with for extended benefits.
Concluding Thoughts
Let’s remember what John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, has to say about content analysis:
“From my point of view, if you’re aware of low-quality pages on your website, then that’s something I’d try to fix and find a solution to, be that either removing those pages if you really can’t change them or, in the best case, finding a way to make them less low-quality and actually making them useful, good pages on your site.”
These content analysis tools help achieve that.
This blog has chosen 11 tools that can support content strategists, marketers, webmasters, and agencies to weigh their efforts against the ugly warfare across digital space.
Every step matters when amping websites to perform their best. Content analysis is a lifeline for websites to determine where they stand and where to go.
Although automated tools can help you sort the colossal amount of data and information, it’s no replacement for common sense and manual inspection.
Never edit, eliminate or redirect any content piece unless the value is truly there. In simple terms, automated suggestions are not encrypted on a tombstone—always listen to your market instincts.
