So whether it is a formal reply to a client or a monthly report, we always look for ways to ensure a client better understands what we are trying to get across. We have to make sure that the content is correct, polite and easily readable. In this post we reveal 5+1 great free tools to assist you with improving your writing!

1.Hemingway– A fantastic editor to make corrections

Hemingway app is an online editor (a desktop App can be used also) to write better content.  You can paste your text into the editor and then improvement suggestions are made from the app. HemingwayApp emphasize on readability therefore you get notified when sentences are hard to read.  Apart from the readability score, you get useful information like the expected reading time, character count and word count.

2.ZenPen – Dedicated to writing!

Zenpen is an online text editor designed to offer minimum distraction, with a simple minimal design.  At first sight, you may find the concept too empty but Zenpen has all the essential stuff you need to concentrate.  Making your text bold, inserting a hyperlink and changing the background colour to black is just a click away.

You can make Zenpen your new text editor.  More words, less distraction.

3.Canva Font Combinations-Find the perfect font combination

Canva Font Combinations (formerly Typegenius) is another service with a minimalist design. You can start with a base font as a headline and then Canva will match your font with another font for the body text. For example, selecting my favourite Oswald font will result in pairing Oswald with Garamond Premier Pro. So now I know that this is a nice combination to use in my project.

4.LanguageTool– Discover grammar errors that are hard to find

LanguageTool.org provides grammar checks in 27 languages (even Chinese!). It’s even able to identify errors other programs cannot trace. LanguageTool can be downloaded in 5 different ways. Either as a browser add-on (Chrome, Firefox), a stand-alone program, as an OpenOffice plugin, as a Microsoft Word add-on and of course as an online service. We noticed that the tool does a good job identifying errors in many dialects too.

5.Grammarly – Awesome Grammar/Spelling Checker

Grammarly is a terrific writing app that improves your content for free by checking grammar and spelling errors. You can either upload your document in the tool’s interface or let it automatically run checks while you write your emails.  There is also an option to install Grammarly on Windows to allow proofreading on your Word documents. Grammarly also offers a premium plan featuring more corrections and better results.

Bonus: Headline analyzer-The ultimate tool for perfect headlines

An exceptional headline can drive more traffic to your website. There is so much research and data out there and the vast majority analyzes how the brain works and tries to identify which formula provides the best strategy to follow. But since we have Coschedule’s headline analyzer who cares? This awesome tool takes into account all the best strategies and then calculates a headline score. So if you are searching for an attractive title for your writing, input your current headline and press ‘Analyze Now’. You then get an analysis based on the types of words you used (emotional words, common words etc.), the length, the word count and even a Google SERP preview.

Want more actionable tips on writing killer headlines? Try these 6 tips JPP Marketing suggests:

1. Include a number in your title. Studies have shown that odd numbers receive 20% more traffic.
2. Question marks work as they increase curiosity and make the reader want to learn more.
3. Use buzzwords like ‘Free!’, ‘How to’, ‘Weird’, ‘Secret’.
4. The optimal length of a headline is 6+ words. Try making a headline of 7-8 words.
5. Now mix the above suggestions creating a title with a number, a buzzword, an adjective and your keyword.
6. Test your headline’s power with the Headline Analyzer or similar tools.

SEO Tools

1. Page Speed Insights

Page Speed Insights measures the performance of a page for mobile devices and desktop devices. It fetches the URL twice, once with a mobile user-agent, and once with a desktop user-agent. The Page Speed Optimization score ranges from 0 to 100 points. A higher score is better and a score of 85 or above indicates that the page is performing well. The Page Speed score is based in Chrome User Experience report data which uses aggregate real user measurements to calculate how fast a webpage loads. Please note that PageSpeed Insights is being continually improved and so the score will change as Google adds new rules or improves their analysis.

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

2. Mobile-Friendly Test

This test will analyze a URL and report if the page has a mobile-friendly design.

https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly

3. Global Market Finder

With Google Global Market Finder, you can find opportunities to reach over 1.9 billion customers around the world. Automatically translate keywords into your customers’ language. See where customers are searching for your product, from Albania to Zimbabwe or anywhere in between. Make the most out of your ad budget by comparing cost estimates across languages and locations.

https://marketfinder.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en/

4. Google Trends

The Google Trends tool uses real-time search data to help you gauge consumer search behaviours over time.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore

5. Keyword Planner

A tool that provides keyword ideas and traffic estimates to help you find the most demanded keywords in your industry.

https://ads.google.com/aw/keywordplanner/

6. SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb provides Web Analytics services to help you collect, measure and analyse user engagement with websites or mobile apps.

https://www.similarweb.com/

7. SEMrush

An online SEM tool which helps you with keyword research, business intelligence and online competitor analysis. SEMrush provides metrics that help you better understand your competition and industry in general.

https://www.semrush.com

8. Rank Checker

A free Firefox Rank Checker extension which allows you to easily monitor websites’ rankings in Google (international) and Bing search engines. Input the keywords you want to check rankings for and then the website URL, and the tool will show you the rankings of each keyword.

http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/

9. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the most commonly used Web Analytics service offered by Google which tracks and reports website traffic. It provides detailed data about user engagement and traffic reports for websites or mobile apps.

https://www.google.com/analytics/

10. Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free web service provided by Google for webmasters. It helps you monitor your website’s presence in Google’s search engine. Specifically, it allows you to check indexing status, optimize visibility of your websites and identify crawling errors.

https://search.google.com/search-console/about

11. Majestic

One of the best link intelligence tools, Majestic helps you to monitor websites’ link history. Majestic provides detailed information and helps you understand how websites are linking to each other.

https://majestic.com/

12. Moz’s Link Explorer

A prominent backlink analysis tool. Input a domain or a specific page and examine the inbound links, anchor text, spam score and more.

https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/

13. Keyword Tool

Keyword Tool is a free online keyword research instrument that uses Google Autocomplete to generate hundreds of relevant long-tail keywords.

https://keywordtool.io/

14. Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a free online keyword suggestion tool. With this tool you can easily get thousands of keyword ideas from real user queries in order to optimize your website.

http://ubersuggest.org/

15. Kparser

Keyword suggestion tool providing unlimited ideas from Google, Bing, YouTube, Amazon, DuckDuckGo, Yandex and more.

https://kparser.com/

16. SpyFu – SEO tool

SpyFu exposes the search marketing secret formula of your most successful competitors. Search for any domain and see every place they’ve shown up on Google: every keyword they’ve bought on Adwords, every organic rank, and every ad variation in the last 6 years. Great for research!

http://www.spyfu.com/

17. Screaming Frog – SEO Spider 

A program you can easily install locally on your computer which crawls websites’ links, images, CSS, scripts and aps from an SEO perspective. It allows you to crawl, analyse and audit a site from an onsite SEO point of view. Some of the data which Screaming Frog SEO Spider offers are error pages, redirects, external links, duplicate pages, page titles and descriptions and anchor text.

https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

18. Copyscape 

Copyscape helps you defend your site against the threats of online plagiarism. The free Copyscape service provides online copyright protection by allowing you to easily search for plagiarism and identify instances of content theft or duplicate content.

https://copyscape.com/

19. Bing Places for Business

Bing’s equivalent of Google My Business. Create and verify your profile and show your business details on Bing Maps and Bing Search. Please note that Bing Places is only available to 15 countries.

https://www.bingplaces.com/

20. Google My Business

Google My Business allows you to create your business listing in order for you to appear in Google Search and Maps when someone searches for your company.  Specifically, by adding your company into Google My Business, customers can find important information about you such as your business address, directions, working hours, telephone number where they can click to call and so on.

https://www.google.com/business/

21. Sh404 Joomla Plugin for SEO

sh404sef helps you improve your search engine rankings and get more traffic to your website. sh404SEF® is the most popular and longest developed Joomla SEO extension and it rewrites Joomla URLs to user and SEO-friendly format and provides a user friendly template for updating page titles & meta descriptions.

http://extensions.joomla.org/extension/sh404sef

22. WordPress Yoast plugin SEO

Yoast offers a free SEO plugin for WordPress which can help you easily manage your website’s SEO efforts. It helps you during the on-page optimisation process by helping you to focus on a target keyphrase and providing a user friendly template for creating your page titles, meta descriptions and content.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/

23. Valentin.app

Get localized search results. Check your rankings from any region and language in the world.

https://valentin.app/

24. BrightLocal’s local search results checker

Another handy tool to check local search results from any country and language. Also checks Google Maps rankings.

https://www.brightlocal.com/local-search-results-checker/

25. Facebook’s Sharing Debugger

See how your content appears when it is shared on Facebook. Check your Open Graph data tags.

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/

Google Updates:

1. Google Latest Updates

https://developers.google.com/search/updates

2. Google Algorithm Change History

 https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

Content Guidelines:

1. Google Quality Rater Guidelines

https://www.google.com/insidesearch/howsearchworks/assets/searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf

2. Introduction to Structured Data

Promote your content with structured data markup. “Structured data markup” is a standard way to annotate your content so machines can understand it. When your web pages include structured data markup, Google (and other search engines) can use that data to index your content better, present it more prominently in search results, and surface it in new experiences like voice answers, maps, and Google Now.

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/intro-structured-data

3. Schema Mark Up Vocabulary

https://schema.org/

4. Schema mark-up Testing Tool 

https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/

        Other Structured Data Validators:

http://linter.structured-data.org/

https://webmaster.yandex.com/tools/microtest/

https://www.bing.com/toolbox/markup-validator

5. Linked Data in HTML

RDFa is an extension in HTML5 that helps you markup things like People, Places, Events, Recipes and Reviews. Search Engines and Web Services use this markup to generate better search listings and give you better visibility on the Web, so that people can find your website more easily.

http://rdfa.info/

6. JSON-LD

https://json-ld.org/

Basic intro to JSON LD

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vioCbTo3C-4

       JSON-LD Examples – https://jsonld.com/

       7. Schema Generators

https://lxrmarketplace.com/structured-data-generator.html

https://kalicube.pro/schema-markup-generator-organization

https://technicalseo.com/seo-tools/schema-markup-generator/

https://webcode.tools/json-ld-generator

https://hallanalysis.com/json-ld-generator/

        8. Social Media Validators

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/

https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator

http://smo.knowem.com/

Page Speed Testing Tools

Google’s Pagespeed Insights is a great option, however, over the years other tools have become our top choice too. The following tools utilize features that Google’s Pagespeed Insight does not, like testing from different locations and using higher/lower speed connections.

https://www.webpagetest.org/

https://gtmetrix.com/

https://www.dareboost.com/

https://performance.sucuri.net/

https://tools.keycdn.com/speed

What do we need to know about SEO in 2015?

Traffic and Conversions
Organic traffic is growing year on year and is driving conversions at an exponential rate.  In fact, according to Search Engine Watch, ‘conversions from natural search – whether purchases at an online store, opening an account, or filling out a contact form – were up an impressive 27 percent compared to 2013’.

Mobile
Further, with practically everybody using mobile devices, websites no longer have any excuse to offer anything other than a mobile friendly experience.  So much so that Google’s anticipated changes to their SERPs for mobile friendliness will see the rankings of sites who don’t offer a good mobile experience punished.

Search
Even search engines themselves are changing.  They now want to answer your questions, not give you a list of websites to sift through for the answer. Google’s Hummingbird algorithm update exemplifies this. As KISSmetrics says, Hummingbird’s goal is to provide results that actually answer the question.
It’s clear that 2015 will see brands having to become more SEO conscious to meet their objectives when it comes to search engine marketing.
Our director, Julia Papageorgiou will be holding a one hour workshop on ‘Mastering SEO in 2015’, discussing some of these points in more detail at the Insights Conference which takes place on 28-29 March 2015 in Nicosia, Cyprus.

Julia will cover the basics of SEO, look at some of the key ranking factors for 2015 and provide some useful techniques and tools to helps startups to implement their SEO strategy.  To get your tickets for this great event for entrepreneurs in Cyprus, register now.