According to First Sage Page, B2B companies experience a 10.5% increase in traffic after 8 months of quality content production. By quality content, we mean a list of factors that include but aren’t limited to:

• relevance
• originality
• clarity
• accessibility
• keyword optimization

To make sure your content meets the quality standards of searchers and search engines, you can’t underestimate the role of tools and SEO writing checkers for content writers.

We interviewed 17 users to understand what article-writing tools they prefer. Here are tested examples that web content writers should add to their toolkits.

17 best tools for content writers you can’t afford to miss

Let’s start with Chrome extensions, as Jake Peterson has something to share with you.

#1 Jake Peterson, SEO Specialist at Atiba, software development and web design

“SEO Minion is the tool I would recommend for content writers. Although it’s an SEO tool, it does have some features for content writers. 

My favorite is how it can quickly extract questions from the People Also Ask box in the search results. If you’re trying to write an FAQ or info blog or content piece, it can quickly pull the top questions people are asking about that subject. This can help give you ideas about what to write and also provide some headers for your piece. 

You can do this by selecting the Copy dropdown on the menu and then copying the questions into an Excel document. We used this to write FAQ pages for our main service offerings. 

We found that oftentimes, our visitors thought they knew about a certain service but had a few more questions. 

We worked together with our sales staff and used this tool to come up with FAQs. This allowed us to send them to prospective clients and include some in our newsletters. They also help us kickstart some content ideas if we’re suffering from writer’s block or are having a hard time writing something down.” 

Adam Wood talks about a tool for all kinds of authors, including web content creators.

#2 Adam Wood, Co-Founder at RevenueGeeks, online seller tool reviews

“Scrivener is one of the greatest apps for writers. It helps me to conceive ideas, produce words, edit, organize, and output the work. 

It’s cheap, and I can use the software on any PC or iOS device, so it’s worth it. The app is jam-packed with things to discover.” 

Jimmy McMillan emphasizes the power of AI tools that you can’t miss out on these days.

#3 Jimmy McMillan, CMO at Heart Life Insurance, life insurance agency

“If you are not using AI in content creation then you will be left in the dust. I really like Outranking.io, it’s for artificial intelligence-assisted content creation. For current, recent, and time-sensitive blog posts Outranking.io gets the nod and it’s great for research. 

With the tool you can craft quality, original content in about one-fifth of the time it takes to write without this tool.”

Although Turnitin’s threshold for plagiarism is up to 25% similarity, content writers strive to keep this level even lower. Susan Smith recommends a tool to check for plagiarism and improve your content originality.

#4 Susan Smith, Marketing Manager at Velden Engineering, mechanical engineering

“Writing about a specific topic is not an easy task because you must deal with many challenges. Plagiarism is the most serious of all of them. 

To make his words more supportive, every writer must incorporate other works. However, if you copy and paste other information, you will have to deal with negative consequences for your platform’s growth. 

As a result, be sure your material is devoid of plagiarism. Using an online plagiarism checker is the easiest method to solve this problem. Check-plagiarism is a quick and accurate tool for thoroughly checking your content for duplications. You merely need to paste or upload your paper to check for plagiarism. 

The program will conduct a thorough search and identify exact parallels between your writings. It will go over your text line by line and give you a proportion of unique and plagiarised content, I believe.”

“Simplicity is the key to brilliance.” James Carson recommends a tool to make your web content smooth and easily readable.

#5 James Carson, Digital Marketing Specialist at Epic Marketing, marketing solutions

“Hemingway Editor is a very helpful tool for content writers. Content loses value when it gets too “full” and complicated. As writers sometimes we add fluff without even realizing it. And that can hurt the impact our writing has. Hemingway helps you cut out all the extra verbiage that is not needed. 

More often than not your writing comes out a lot stronger after. It highlights sentences that are either too complex or too dense to show where you can trim the fat in your piece. Hemingway also helps simplify and strengthen your word choice in your writing. It picks out adverbs and weaker phrases and suggests stronger alternatives that help give your writing more presence. 

The Hemingway editor is an essential tool for content writers and I would recommend it to anyone who asked.”

You probably know that the average American has a reading level equivalent to a 7th or 8th grader. Matic Broz recommends another tool that helps keep your sentences short and your words simple (but not trivial!).

#6 Matic Broz, Founder & Main Content Editor at Photutorial, photography reviews

“Readable can analyze URLs, entire websites, or local texts. While it does fix your grammatical errors, it’s not as thorough as Grammarly. 

It excels at helping you improve sentences, such as suggesting easier words or warning you about long sentences. It uses several reading indices to check your texts. 

I first write a text, then I let Grammarly fix my mistakes. In the end, I read the whole thing with the help of Readable.”

Some experts believe that you should use your target keyword 1–2 times per 100 words. Others believe that level is too high and might be considered keyword stuffing. John Ross recommends a tool to automatically check your content density.

#7 John Ross, CMO at Test Prep Insight, course, book, & study material reviews

“One of the biggest ongoing dangers when it comes to written content online is keyword stuffing. Not only will this lead your content to get hammered by Google, but it also greatly sacrifices C/X. 

So to avoid keyword stuffing and the negative consequences, my favorite tool is the keyword density checker from Copywritely. If you’re a serious content writer, you MUST use this tool. 

We’ve done A/B testing with pages that are stuffed with keywords to get pulled into as many SERPs as possible, and cleaner pages that have been run through this keyword stuffing checker tool from Copywritely. 

Across 100 URLs we analyzed, the pages that were checked for keyword stuffing ranked 2.4 positions higher on Google. That is why I caution content writers to avoid over-optimizing their pages for SEO and focus on the reader by using this tool.”

What Marie Lamonde recommends is for the post-writing stage, but it should be on this list of the best tools for content writers.

#8 Marie Lamonde, Content Marketing Specialist at DashThis, marketing reporting dashboards

“One of the tools I use most often is Zest because one of the most difficult tasks in content marketing is definitely content promotion. 

If your blog isn’t read, did you even write one at all? Zest has a tab that helps marketers discover new marketing content, all contributed by a community of marketers. So it’s a tool that not only helps you promote your content but also to find new content. You can search by keywords, tags, and topics so it’s easy to find what you are looking for.

You can enter your article into Zest’s submissions and they will add them to their database after inspecting it. Zest not only helped me find new topics but also helped my content be seen, which ended up in trials and sales of our tool.”

Alex Tucker shows a few ways to get the most out of Google search.

#9 Alex Tucker, Owner/Digital Marketer at LoverFighterWriter, marketing agency

“I think the #1 tool for content writers depends on the type of content. But if we’re talking SEO content then my most recommended tool is Google search. I’m sure that almost all content writers already use Google search, but most of them do not recognize the possibilities it presents. 

Two examples of what I’m talking about are SERP features and refined searches. With just those two tactics, you can get Google to give you all of the information you need to plan an article. A lot of that information will be available right on the search results pages! 

While there are great tools such as AI copywriters, grammar software, proper understanding of Google search is crucial to success.”

Amber Badger recommends another Chrome extension that gives you related and long-tail keyword ideas in a few clicks.

#10 Amber Badger, Lead Copywriter at The Wild Wordsmith, soulful stories for free-spirited brands

“My main tool is a plugin called Keywords Everywhere. It’s a great way to easily build SEO into your content, without knowing the technical side of it. 

The plugin works by showing you search volume, cost per click, competition, and trend data for certain keywords and keyphrases. Since using Keywords Everywhere, I’ve been able to improve the searchability of my blog content for clients. A huge deal has achieved featured snippet status on Google, with page views averaging between 4 – 10,000 a month.”

Sebastian Schaeffer’s recommendation is one of the best tools for content writers in terms of SEO.

#11 Sebastian Schaeffer, CTO and Owner of dofollow.io, SEO agency

“It’s a well-known one, but a vital one, and that’s Yoast SEO. It’s one of the more common plugins for WordPress, but it is a must-have when writing website content and blog articles. It helps you perfect your readability score and ensure you are tailoring your content for SEO. 

It helps to ensure you are following best practices when it comes to sentence length, passive voice, keyword use, and H1, 2, and 3 headers. If you’re trying to optimize content for SEO, Yoast SEO is essential.”

Writing on a topic that is losing its popularity is a waste of resources. Here’s what Jeff Webster suggests.

#12 Jeff Webster, Operations Manager at Clicks Marketing, digital marketing agency

“When I am creating content, the first thing that I do is pop the seed topic into Google Trends and set the period for the last 5 years. The first thing that I look for is if the interest in the topic is declining, growing, or remaining the same. 

Obviously, I don’t want to create content for a topic that is on the decline. The next things that I look at are the related topics and related queries. This helps me to flesh out my topic clusters and identify any shoulder topics/niches that I may want to expand into. The best thing about Google Trends is that it is one of the free tools for content writing.”

If you come across an interesting idea but don’t know how to paraphrase it, Matthew Ramirez has a solution for you.

#13 Matthew Ramirez, Entrepreneur and Investor, Board Member at Mathpix

“I recommend a free service, Paraphrasing Tool with 15 paraphrasing modes in 100+ languages, options for content creators to simplify, clarify, smooth, and correct errors in their writing. 

Additionally, authors can choose to make their writing more diplomatic, academic, or formal according to their needs. I use this every day for all my writing, as it cuts my regular revision time by about 90%.”

Scott McAndrew recommends a tool that will make your content more credible, engaging, and linkable. Here it is.

#14 Scott McAndrew, Owner at Zuziko, website about WordPress, Shopify, and web development

“One tool I would recommend is Typeform. Content can be not only more engaging but also more authentic with both statical content and quotes. The biggest barrier to getting this content is usually not getting the visibility or finding respondents, but engagement – or more specifically form completion. 

Typeform allows you to capture both by creating low friction, progressive forms, and quizzes that can be embedded on websites. It’s easy to use when creating a form, and moving through them feels like second nature for those answering the questions. 

We used Typeform for a contract client preparing an industry survey. It’s hard to know, but we feel like the information gathering completion rate was at least 25%, maybe 50% higher than using other form solutions we’d tried. We also gathered good long-form quotes even though those questions were towards the form’s end.”

Want to know what questions searchers ask the search engines? Sara Smith recommends a simple, free, and not yet well-known tool.

#15 Sara Smith, Digital Content Manager at Conklin Media, business growth strategy

“A tool I’ve been using is Google’s Question Hub which is essentially where all the unanswered queries on Google end up. It’s a great place to get some content ideas, as you can find what people are searching for that hasn’t been answered yet. 

Your next piece of content could be the answer they’re looking for, and it will rank quicker since there’s not a lot of competing content. I’ve been able to use it to come up with blog topics for clients. It’s also a great way to find long-tail keywords to include in a frequently asked questions section of a post or page.”

Gerrid Smith’s recommendation is for content and SEO teams who want to collaborate, edit docs together, and promote productive teamwork.

#16 Gerrid Smith, CEO and Founder at Property Tax Loan Pros, property tax loans

“If you are looking for one of the best tools for content writers bit.ai is what I would suggest to you. It is a new, sophisticated yet easy editor. The capacity to collaborate with peers on writing projects is a key feature of Bit’s editor. 

Several individuals can work on a Bit document at the same time. When working on a single project, you can invite other authors or friends to the doc for comments. Your team may then remark, highlight changes, and even communicate with you without leaving the paper. 

The editor is what makes an excellent writing tool. Bit’s clever, simple editor is ideal for writing. This means no more confusing word-style tabs and buttons. Simply start typing on a blank canvas. 

To format text, simply highlight the word, sentence, or paragraph to reveal a hidden collection of formatting options! Bit is a contemporary editor that makes writing enjoyable and distraction-free.”

Productive, professional authors go beyond using writing and research tools. Content writers use management tools as well. Ahmed Elnaggar talks about a similar solution.

#17 Ahmed Elnaggar, Founder and Editor at Set the Record Player, audiophile and record player

“Dynalist is the most important tool I use to help in my creative process, boost my productivity and writing speed. 

I use Dynalist to create detailed outlines of an article and each of its sections. Though this can be done using many other tools, Dynalist is superior in its flexibility, how dynamic it is, and its ease of use to anything else out there. 

In addition, you can use it for creating other lists, including content strategies, release plans, daily & weekly planners, to-do lists. Moreover, the tool is completely free which is a huge plus. Writer or not, I recommend Dynalist for every content creator out there.”

Conclusion

The list of the best tools for content writers is not static. New solutions emerge every year, while older solutions become more sophisticated.

However, as a content writer, it’s overwhelming to try new tools all the time and switch from one to another. With Outranking.io, you can combine the features of many tools and make sure you won’t need to pay for multiple subscriptions. If you still haven’t tried our solution yet, now is the best time to refresh your toolkit.