7 Best Content Research Tools to Come Up with Brilliant Ideas
Reading Time: 5 minutes Whether it is a company blog or your own, you need to add new content to it on a regular basis. Both Google and readers like it when there is fresh and useful information on your website they can hardly find somewhere else.
And if you manage to provide them with it, you get more traffic, increase your visibility and develop better relationships with your target audience.
However, if it were that easy, the Internet would not be flooded with tons of rewritten texts. It is really difficult to come up with interesting ideas.
On the one hand, you have to offer something more or less unique, and on the other hand, you are limited by your niche and must maintain your tone and voice. So there is no much wiggle room unless you can always generate new information by yourself.
In case you cannot, but still, need to crank out brilliant ideas for your posts as frequently as possible, you should know how to dig through a large body of data and look at trendy topics from different points of view.
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There are many places on the web to look for both popular and undercovered topics. You can go to the industry experts’ blogs, join relevant Facebook groups or forums, look for inspiration on Q&A platforms, or visit websites with educational content.
However, such activities take much time that could be spent on developing and polishing your posts.
The alternative option is to use content research tools that can supply you with the most relevant and trendy articles and topics, so you can think up ideas that will resonate with your readers.
Table of Contents
ContentGems
ContentGems’ name speaks for itself, providing you with precious suggestions after scanning thousands of new articles. It monitors new content on a daily basis, so you get only blossoming ideas either on-demand or via an email digest.
It enables you to choose whether you want to get data from all top websites and Twitter or just from the ones you pick by yourself.
There are many filters available to rule out unnecessary results – by a post type, social signals, popularity score, word count of the title and body, etc. Websites you do not want to get data from can be easily blocked.
What is great about ContentGems is that it also suggests what keywords can give you the best results in your niche.
Scoop.it
With Scoop.it Content Director, you can collect content that supports your requirements and needs precisely. The tool crawls more than 20 million websites a day, but it does not mean you will drown in the information flow – irrelevant content types can be easily disabled with several filters.
Scoop.it also offers a free option for one account with one topic to be monitored, so you can get a feel for how it performs.
The tool is able to make conclusions based on your search history and preferences, and with time, it lifts up the content that receives the most of your attention.
Like ContentGems, it can also give you tips on using keywords to achieve the best content performance.
Social Animal
Social Animal aims at giving you as much information about content as possible since only with a full picture you can make well-balanced and data-driven decisions.
It helps you separate the wheat from the chaff, providing you with best-performing articles, along with stats on their length, used keywords and so on.
Social Animal positions itself as a good analyzing tool and it really is. For instance, it can compare two articles by keywords, word count, and shares, so you can find patterns applicable within your own content strategy. With this tool, you can also analyze headlines to master ideating your own.
As for additional possibilities provided by Social Animal, there are features allowing you to monitor different keywords’ performance over a finite period of time and get suggestions on the best article length, publication time and preferable headlines.
Ahrefs Content Explorer
Ahrefs Content Explorer can help find the most popular publications defined by several performance metrics. It enables you to evaluate articles based on how viral they are, how much traffic they drive, what sites link to them, and when they are published before developing your content plan.
What you will definitely like is the possibility to monitor your competitors’ content that gets the most shares on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter and attracts the most visitors.
With more than 2 million items in its index, Ahrefs can offer you a slew of posts regardless of a topic.
And if you find a content piece that is worth your attention, you can look in “Details” to find out how it performs over time, how it can be found on the web, how many and what sites refer to it and what anchors they use.
Answer the Public
What is so great about this keyword tool besides it is free? Answer The Public is a keyword research tool but can be successfully used for generating new topics. It will definitely inspire you the moment you visit its unique home page.
The process is simple – you put a seed keyword into the search bar and get plenty of thematic keywords from Google Suggest and AdWords Keyword Planner that you can extend to original topics.
Long-tail keywords are usually the most suitable for such conversion. The results are divided into three categories: Questions (what, where, why, which, how), Prepositions (with, to, for, like) and Alphabetical. All of them are nicely visualized and can be downloaded as a CSV file.
Cyfe
To be one step ahead of your competitors you should know what they do to do even more. Cyfe can make this easier in terms of spying on their content.
It is a dashboard platform that helps track your competitors’ posts with RSS widgets and get data from sources like Twitter as well so you can keep abreast with new trends.
All reports can be accessed via email and SMS and downloaded in PNG, JPEG, PDF, and CSV formats.
To test this tool, you can choose their free plan, which offers 1 user per account and 5 widgets.
Buzzsumo
All lists of content research tools should have a spot for Buzzsumo. It shows you the most popular content and key influencers in a particular industry, as well as the most shareable posts of your competitors.
It offers a number of useful features. For instance, you can set time frames to discover the best-performing content for the last 24 hours or the whole year, and review the average share on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Buzzsumo also makes possible to find out what content types resonate the most with your target audience.
They have 4 plans and each of them includes a free 7day trial, so you can see how user-friendly this tool is.
Summing up
Considering the pace at which new publications appear, you definitely need to streamline your content creation process. Without tools that can automate your work at least partially it is impossible to stay afloat.
Content research tools can help you with skimming the cream off the most trending content. It is better to try all of them to find out which ones fit your needs the most.
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