Content marketing is no longer solely about content. While content is and always will be the most important aspect of your content marketing campaign, there is actually a whole lot more work that goes into it beyond simply creating the content.

Below are seven of our favorite SEO tools that will help you improve your content marketing efforts and grow your business. We break these down by tool type and offer our suggestion on the best service to get each tool from.

1. Organization – Trello

A solid organizational tool is a must for an effective content marketing campaign. One of our favorites is Trello. The application serves as an idea board and content calendar so you can organize your thoughts in an intuitive manner. It’s a great tool for storing information related to potential blog posts, interesting links, user comments, and more.

2. Keyword Research – Squirrly

Perhaps our favorite keyword research tool is Squirrly. A WordPress SEO Plugin, it allows you to perform keyword research from WordPress’s post editor. The best thing about Squirrly is that it actually lets you measure the success of your optimized content in addition to optimizing it in the first place.

Though the Plugin has a number of different sub-tools, the most useful by far is the Keyword Research Tool. It helps you find the most relevant keywords for your blog posts.

3. Keyword Planner – Google Keyword Planner Tool

Google Keyword Planner is one of the most unique SEO tools offered by the service. It’s chief benefits for content marketers include searching for new keyword ideas, finding search volume for a selected list of keywords, and multiplying keyword lists to find brand-new keyword ideas.

4. Search Popularity – Google Trends

Google Trends is another very useful SEO tool provided by the folks at Google. As its name implies, it simply breaks down the popularity of specific search terms over a period of time. In addition, it shows you how often these terms are searched for and what part of the world they are coming from.

So what does this mean for you? Google Trends can help you tailor your content strategy to specific keywords and even to specific regions of the world. A number of other useful features the tool offers include Trending Searches, Trending on YouTube, Top Charts, Google Correlate, and Explore.

5. Content Explorer – Ahrefs Content Explorer

Few things are more helpful to creating an effective content marketing campaign than finding out what others in your niche are doing, especially those websites and businesses that are the most successful. Ahrefs Content Explorer helps you do just this.

Ahrefs makes it easy to explore the highest-performing content in your niche. This content is ranked in terms of social sharing. The tool allows you to see what keywords your competitors are using. Many content marketers also use it to create similar content, as far as topics are concerned, for their own websites.

6. Measure ROI – Google Analytics

Few SEO tools top Google Analytics. Every content marketer needs to invest time in this tool. It helps you look at the content you’ve created to see if you’re bringing in a reasonable ROI.

Google Analytics measures the ROI of your website’s content so you can decide if you want to keep going in the same direction or switch things up. The tool also helps you accomplish many other tasks including targeting, optimization, testing, and idea generation.

7. Competitor Research – Quick Sprout

Quick Sprout has several useful features. These include measuring SEO and site speed. Yet the top benefit for content marketers is undoubtedly its competitor research feature.

The Quick Sprout competitor research tools lets you analyze your competitor’s overall website and individual blog posts. It simply shows you which content receives the most social shares. Once again, this helps you tailor your own content to increase its appeal.

There you have it – our top seven SEO tools for content marketing. Naturally, there are dozens more, these are simply the ones we believe the vast majority of people will find effective.