By now, most businesses know that adding a blog to their website is a brilliant way to connect with new and potential customers. They understand it’s one of the best ways to strengthen their brand and a cost-effective solution to broadening their reach and becoming known as the go-to provider for what their readers are looking for.
What they’re not so sure about is writing it. That’s when business blog writing services can be just what the search engines ordered. If you’re writing business blog posts for SMBs, you also know how challenging it can be to consistently come up with good ideas, catchy titles, and consistently engaging content.
To help you out, here are 10 great tools to help make the process easier.
Top Tools for Business Blog Writing
Two well-known and two lesser known tools for writing are a good place to start.
- The Hemingway App promises to make your writing bold and clear. Since the goal of content writing is to be clear and concise, use this app to identify redundancy and run-on sentences. The different color highlights make it easy to figure out your “weak points” as a business blog writer.
- For checking contextual spelling and grammar rules, nothing beats Grammarly. The popular app scans content for common and complex mistakes including modifier placement, article use, and subject-verb agreement. One nice feature: there are detailed explanations for suggested changes which over time can improve your writing skills.
- The Writer’s Diet takes the objectivity out of reading your own writing and shows you whether your content is “flabby or fit.” The free online tool evaluates your use of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions and points out how any or all of them may be making sentences too complex and difficult for readers to understand.
- Copy and paste content into Tone Analyzer to learn if your writing is engaging. Developed by IBM, the service relies on linguistic analysis to detect different emotions like joy, anger, confidence, and fear in written documents. Based on feedback, you can then edit your content to improve readability.
Top Tools for Business Blog Editing
Most writers are familiar with Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, and Thesaurus, but there are three others worth using.
- AP Stylebook is often called the journalist’s bible but is a must-have reference for all types of writers. It provides invaluable guidance on language, usage, spelling, punctuation, and style. The app is not free ($26), but can be well worth it, especially when the writing instructions include “AP style, please.”
- If you typically come up with headlines, CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer helps you create ones that drive traffic, shares, and search results. It’s also great for composing email subject lines, press release headlines, and white paper titles. Particularly helpful is the tool’s ability to give tips on individual components of the title – it even shows you how the headline will appear in search results.
- Many content writers find themselves falling back on familiar ways to say things. The problem is, hundreds of other writers are using the same phrases. One of the most non-fussy tools available, Cliché Finder is just that – a way to rid your writing of overused sayings.
Top Tools for Business Blog SEO
The best way to optimize blog posts for better search engine optimization is by doing your research before you start writing. To ensure more natural prose, vary the way you use results throughout your post, including them in the title, headlines, sub-headlines, content body, and hyperlinks. In addition to the well-known (#8) Google Keyword Planner, try:
- The free version of Keyword Tool gives you over 700 long-tail keyword suggestions for every search term you enter. The results are based on Google’s autocomplete search suggestions, so it’s a good idea to use this tool in conjunction with one of the others listed here.
- Not as familiar a term as most others, latent semantic indexing, or LSI, is used by search engines like Google to identify context and synonyms. LSIGraph generates LSI keywords that help search engines better understand your content. For example, if you’re writing about the new Microsoft Surface, you want to include enough words and phrases that let Google know you’re talking about a computer, not another type of surface, like flooring or countertops.
The Bottom Line
All tools, whether they’re for business blog writing services or another content-related purpose, have their pros and cons. Choose the ones that work best for the way you work!
