Christy Moore is a popular Irish ballad singer who is well known for his amazing songs and lyrics.  One of his songs is called, ‘Don’t forget your shovel if you want to go to work’, and it’s very apt for this article!

When you’re blogging, you need tools.  Tools help you to work out what to write about, how to rank on Google, help you promote your content and much more.

So, if you’re on your way to work, don’t forget your blogging tools!  Here are 7 cool tools for a blog:

1.  HitTail

HitTail analyzes your Google Webmaster Tools account to see which keywords are driving traffic to your site, and it then suggests blog posts you could write based on these.  The most relevant keywords are those that have the potential to drive good traffic to your site.

If Google is sending you relevant traffic for particular keywords and you have not written a post based on these words or phrases, it makes sense that writing a blog post specifically based around them will get you even more traffic.

Here’s a screenshot from HitTail, which shows you a range of keyword combinations and their star ratings.  The ones with the higher star ratings are what you should focus on, as these have the best chance of getting you the most traffic.

2.  Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer

Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer analyzes the title of your blog post and scores it out of 100%.  The higher the emotional appeal to the user, the higher the score.    If you can reach your reader on an emotional level, it’s likely your title will be more enticing.  The tool has a dictionary of terms it will compare your title against, and it awards a score based on the words you use.

Copyblogger are masters of good headlines.  I took the following headline from them and analyzed it – it got a rating of 81.82%.  When you are entering the headline, you also enter a category so I used ‘Business and Professional Services’.

81.82% is very hard to beat.   I tested it out to see what would end up with a lower score: 13 Ways to be Pretty Damn Happy You are a Freelancer gets a score of 72.73%, suggesting that ‘euphoric’ gets more of a emotional impact than ‘happy’ does.

Sometimes, we talk about ‘power words’ in a title.  For example, using ‘irresistible’ instead of ‘good’ generally captures the attention.  Try out the indicator and see how you get on.

3. Seologies – Content Analysis and Content Optimization

Google is getting smarter and smarter at analyzing your content to understand what it is really about.  Years ago, you could include the keywords you wanted to rank for many times within your blog post and this helped it to rank higher.  But now, Google analyzes all your content to figure out what it is really about.  It’s becoming more important to have related terms within your content, and it’s not just about focussing exclusively on particular, strict keywords.

Seologies analyzes your content and gives you a percentage rating based on the keywords you want to rank for.  It then suggests ‘expert vocabulary’ that you should include in your content that will help improve the relevance in relation to the keywords in question.

This is a really interesting tool so I tried it on some posts – it did help the posts to move up the rankings within Google.

4. SEMRush – Keyword Research

SEMRush is one of my favorite tools for keyword research.  It crawls through Google search results to find out where your competitors are ranking for keywords, and this can give you great ideas for content.

If your competitor is ranking for particular keywords, why not write content based around those keywords and try to get some of their traffic?

In the above example, you can see the list of the top keywords socialmediatoday.com gets traffic for.  It shows the following in the table:

• Keyword – the top keywords they are ranking for
• Position – where they rank for these keywords on Google
• Search volume – the total average search volume for these keywords per month for the country you are researching. In this case we are analyzing US results
• CPC – the average cost per click if you were going to target these keywords in advertisements
• URL – the page on their website that is ranking for these keywords
• Traffic % – the estimated percentage of traffic that this site gets for these keywords.

This is a powerful tool that is well worth checking out.

5.  Google Keyword Planner for Keyword Research

Google Keyword Planner provides you with an estimate of the number of monthly searches for particular keywords in particular countries, or globally.  This is not 100% accurate, but it will generally give you a good indicator if there is organic traffic for any particular keyword combinations.

There are many keyword research tools and, although you may use more than one, you will generally end up still using Google Keyword Planner.

Check out our Ultimate Guide to the Google Keyword Planner.

6. Keywordtool.io for Keyword Research and Content Ideas

Another really useful keyword research tool is keywordtool.io.  When you enter keywords into this tool, it will show you hundreds of different, related, keyword combinations.  It will show what Google thinks are related keywords and then it will show you long-tail keyword combinations based on them (i.e. adding more keywords on to the existing keyword combination).

Here’s an example, based on the keywords ‘sports equipment’.

As well as giving you ideas for related keywords you should include in your content, it also gives you tons of inspiration for new content.

7. Raven Tools

If you want to take it a step further and invest in an SEO tool, Raven Tools is a compilation of SEO and social media tools all under one platform.

Check out this detailed post on Raven tools.

Summary

There are many tools to choose from that will help you with blog traffic, but one thing is for sure: there are some that will make a significant difference to your blogging.

Which tools do you use for blogging?  Would you use any of the above?

I’d love to hear from you!

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