Top 8 Content Analysis Tools and How They Differ

Content analysis tools are incredibly important for your marketing campaign. Not only can they help you understand how your content is currently performing, but they can also help you create a stronger content plan for the future. Unfortunately, with so many tools available to you, it’s difficult to know which one is the best for your business. That’s why it’s crucial to look at some of the most popular ones and the different services they offer. But guess what? We already did that for you.

8 Content Analysis Tools

Here are eight content analysis tools you can use for your business and the benefits they offer:

1. Moz Competitive Research

Moz currently offers a competitive research tool for users that they can access through a Moz subscription. It also offers users 10 free queries a month if they want to see what the software offers before paying for it. The tool first compares your website and its content with other sites and generates a list of potential competitors. You can then select three competitors and compare their performance to your own. That comparison summarizes your and your competitors’ websites, listing the keyword rankings, page authority, and domain authority. 

You can also see the ranking distribution, showing you how many of your pages or content rank in different percentages on search engines compared to the competition. It also breaks down possible keywords for you to improve and the top-ranking keywords of your competitors.

Using this information, you can build an effective strategy to find and fill gaps in your content marketing strategy. See what your competitors rank for and how they structure their content. What can you offer that they don’t? Do you have more expertise in those topics? Is there something missing from their blogs or articles? See what you can do to boost your domain or page authority and how you can soar above the competition.

2. MarketMuse

MarketMuse is a program that focuses mostly on content research and creation. The tool allows you to develop content using its research, questions, and competitive tools. This helps you see how the competition is creating its content, the keywords or topics they cover, and the questions people are asking about your chosen topic. 

The program also provides a place for you to optimize your content and improve its ranking with a live editor that compares your writing to the top-ranking posts. The connect feature then enables you to optimize further by suggesting links both internally and externally to help you improve your ranking and direct people to other places on your site.

Using these tools and services, you can plan and write your content straight in MarketMuse to create a more efficient content creation process. Depending on the size of your marketing team, the program provides different tools for a marketing campaign. If you’re a content writer, you can use it to optimize your content and improve readability. If you’re a content researcher, you can use the research functions to discover better keywords and topics to target.

3. BuzzSumo

Sometimes content analysis tools tell you their main focus from their name – and BuzzSumo is a great example of that. The program focuses on the “buzz” your content or brand creates, specifically on social media. BuzzSumo allows you to generate content ideas through its tools, such as the trending content feature and keyword analysis. 

It also helps you analyze content throughout the web, seeing what topics received the most engagement depending on the social site, including Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Pinterest. You can then use the tool to connect with influencers to see which ones might be most beneficial for a content syndication campaign.

These functions can help you develop stronger content for social media and target trends to generate more views and engagement. But outside of social media, the tool doesn’t have a ton of information on your current website’s analytics or your top competitors. Though it’s a powerhouse for social media marketing campaigns, it might not be able to help you much with other content writing strategies, like blogs, articles, or eBooks.

4. Frase

Frase is a marketing tool that helps you generate a larger audience with strong content creation and convert them into customers with the help of chatbots and AI. Through its content creation and AI tools, you can research different keyword topics, which Frase uses to pull data from the top search results. From there, the tool delivers a report on what main topics the top-ranking content talks about and what you should target to reach the top of the search engine results page (SERP). 

The AI writer can even rewrite sections of a competitor’s article to make it original for your website. You can then place these sections directly into your content, with some minor tweaks or adjustments. These tools can help you develop content you know your target audience will want to read. Not only does it help you see what other websites are doing with those topics, but it also allows you to identify potential gaps in their content marketing strategies that you can exploit. 

However, Frase does offer some challenges as well. For starters, though AI writers have come a long way in the last few years, they still aren’t perfect. The writer can sometimes create paragraphs with no logic to their structure, causing additional rewrites and adding more time to your editing process.

5. Surfer SEO

Much like BuzzSumo, Surfer SEO tells you exactly what its focus is: search engine optimization. That becomes even more clear as you explore its tools, such as the content planner, content editor, auditor, and SERP analyzer. These tools give businesses the opportunity to create excellent pieces of content around specific keywords. The audit and content editor tools, specifically, can scan your content and provide you with a score to show you how it might perform on search engines and with your target audience.

This can help you develop more powerful content for your SEO marketing strategies that really resonate with your target audience and soar to the top of the SERPs. You can also use the content planner to find the best keyword opportunities for your business. However, where the program shines with individual pieces of content and keyword analysis, it lacks any big-picture views of your overall website and its performance. 

The audit tool gives an in-depth analysis of a single webpage and the keywords it targets, but it doesn’t tell you which pieces of content are currently performing the best and why that is. Sure, you could scan webpages individually, but it becomes even trickier with the limited number of audits you get depending on your subscription package.

6. Ryte

Ryte is a powerhouse for data collection and analysis for your current website and content. It pairs directly with Google Search Console to retrieve and display information on your site’s performance and even calculate potential clicks, searches, and rankings based on previous data. The program also helps you identify potential issues with your sites, such as broken pages, broken redirects, and orphaned pages. These things can contribute to poor user experience and lower your ranking on search engines.

Next to its beneficial website auditing, Ryte also provides a few tools for content research and optimization. Its content editor helps you identify ways to improve your written content based on the keyword you input, while its analysis tool helps you find potential keyword opportunities to target for your marketing campaign. 

However, compared to other programs, like Market Muse, Ryte doesn’t provide nearly the same amount of information on the analyzed keyword. It provides a few suggestions on other keywords to target and some brief analyses of your competitors. But this isn’t where its strength lies. The major benefit of using Ryte is to gain access to its real-time data retrieval and analysis of your website and how your visitors interact with it.

7. Content Harmony

Content Harmony is a content research and creation program. It allows you to develop different projects and analyze sets of keywords for each one. These analyses include reports on competitor content matching the keyword, overlapping keywords, popular questions related to the keyword, and potential sources to cite for your content writing. One of the unique things that Content Harmony offers, though, is search intent. The analysis provides some of the most popular reasons someone might search for a specific keyword, with reasons ranging from research and answer-seeking to video or news.

The program also includes a content grader, which analyzes your content as you write it to see how it might resonate with your target audience. These tools are excellent for creating content plans within verticals to attract a specific audience. You can create different projects for each content vertical and target specific keywords within each. 

This, along with its data on search intent, helps to create really effective content that can easily reach your target audience. But it’s missing some other key pieces to a content marketing strategy. That includes a full breakdown and analysis of your current content and website, as well as further tools to help your content promotion, like link building and content syndication.

8. Clearscope

Clearscope is another program that focuses on keyword research and content creation. The program has a set of tools to help you build a content plan that targets the right keywords for your audience. This includes a powerful editor that compares your written content with high-ranking competitors. It also helps you quickly research and develop content briefs to share with your production team. These briefs help you relay the target keywords and crucial information on the content’s outline to help your writers and editors work more efficiently.

Finally, Clearscope can easily integrate with your workflow through Google Docs and WordPress to help you publish your content. You can use these tools to develop your content marketing strategy and understand the best blogs or articles to create. But just like Content Harmony, Clearscope lacks other necessary tools to help you analyze and understand your current content marketing strategy.

If you’re starting a brand new content marketing campaign, Clearscope might not be a terrible choice. But if you’re trying to understand how you can improve your current content marketing strategy, it’s helpful to have other insightful data. That includes how your current content is performing and gaps you could fill to improve it.

Final Thoughts

Though there are a lot of benefits and drawbacks to each piece of software, it all comes down to what you need for your company. The biggest thing you want to be careful of is the siren effect. In your research of content analysis tools, you might find some that not only look great but come with tools and features that, on the surface, sound really cool. Maybe they’re offering an AI writer or a well-designed dashboard of trending keywords in your industry. But no AI writer is perfect and most marketing campaigns can’t survive on trending content alone.

It’s possible to get sucked into a product or service that looks amazing on the outside but doesn’t offer a ton of real benefits underneath. That’s why it’s helpful to create a checklist of things you absolutely need your content analysis tool to do. Then use that checklist in your research. Does one piece of software check all your boxes? If not, can your company live without one of those services? Maybe the software or company provides that service differently? Have you looked?

If you’re not sure about certain features or tools, most software provides free trials or demos that can help you understand all they offer. That, along with helpful comparisons and analyses, like this article, can help you ignore those siren songs and keep your marketing campaign from crashing into the rocks.

“CopyPress gives us the ability to work with more dealership groups. We are able to provide unique and fresh content for an ever growing customer base. We know that when we need an influx of content to keep our clients ahead of the game in the automotive landscape, CopyPress can handle these requests with ease.”

Kevin Doory

Director of SEO at Auto Revo

Christy Walters

CopyPress writer

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