Copywriting Tools

A simple but great tool for counting characters in your copy. This is a tool I use for writing meta descriptions, meta titles and ads. You can either write straight in the tool or copy and paste your content from elsewhere and at the top of the page it shows you the number of characters, words, sentences, paragraphs and whitespace.

Along the bottom of the page, it shows you how many times each word has been used, while this isn't too important for ads, meta titles and meta descriptions it's helpful when checking keyword density in a blog post or a service page.

I'm sure you've seen Grammarly advertising around the web or even heard about it from a friend or colleague but it's definitely a tool I use on a daily basis, not just at work but also at home. Grammarly is basically spell check x10, it checks everything from your spelling, punctuation, style and tone of voice.

While it doesn't suddenly turn you into Shakespeare it does stop you making silly mistakes in emails, blogs, social media and most other places thanks to their Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge extensions as well as native integrations for Microsoft Office, native Windows and Mac apps as well as a keyboard on Android.

Grammarly has got a free plan which is the one I use but if you do a lot of long form writing or are writing for a business it may be worth upgrading to a paid plan which starts at $11.66 per month when billed annually. They also have a business plan for teams from 3-149 people.

A useful tool for trying to find out what font is being used on a webpage, email, or other digital media. Simply take a screenshot and upload it to the site and it will tell you what font is being used. While it's not perfect and there are better ways of finding out what font is being used on a webpage, it is a quick, non-techy way of finding out and will help point you in the right direction.

Use this tool to check how easy your copy is to understand. This tool is great for content that is aimed at wide audiences such as your business service pages, news pieces or general lifestyle, day to day blogs as they are read by people with a wide range of reading comprehension skills, for example people whose first language isn't English, or students using your content as part of their learning.

To use it you can either input your text directly or use a URL and it will calculate the readability of your text. Your results are measured against common standards such as Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease Level, Gunning Fog Score, SMOG Index, Coleman Liau Index and Automated Readability Index and it also tells things such as the number of sentences, words, complex words and a few other useful statistics.

The SEMRush SEO Writing Assistant is a great tool for content writers, content marketers and all things content. The tool allows you to check basic things such as making sure you've included your target keywords as well as suggesting some new ones. It also gives you some quick readability statistics and a target word count based on similar content that's currently ranking.

While this isn't a tool for experienced SEO's or content creators it does allow you to optimise as you're going along and is a great start for people who aren't that well versed in SEO.

To use the tool you'll need to add it as an "Add On" for G Suite and because of that it only works in Google Docs. Once you've downloaded added it to your G Suite account you can then access it from the Add On's section on the toolbar in Google Docs. To get access to the SEO and readability section you can use a free SEMRush account however for the tone of voice and originality feature you will need a paid subscription.

The CoScheduel Headline Analyser allows you to check your headlines/titles for blogs, case studies and any other kind of content that needs to attract people to click and read your content.

Once you've written your content all you need to do is plug your headline into the tool and it will give you a general score as well as breaking down what can be improved to make your headline stronger. For example, my blog headline scores 60/100 and I can improve it by adding more emotional and powerful words, my headline is also a little short in terms of characters and also very short in terms of word count.

Some of the more interesting features are that it shows the first three and last three words together as people tend to skim read and only read these words as well as the sentiment of your headline with positive generally being better. It also saves each iteration from your headline so you can keep tweaking it to find the highest scoring headline.

The only negative about this tool is the fact you have to type in a name, email address, company name and company website the first time you use it however nothing is checked so you can just enter any rubbish and continue to the results

Topic Mojo allows you to do indepth topic research to find out what your customers are engaging with. This includes generating topic models, also asked questions and trending insights based on your keyword, brand or product.