There are many free marketing tools available for small business owners but many underutilize word cloud generators in their marketing strategy. Generally overlooked as just a tool to create visual marketing content, word clouds can also be used to evaluate your brand identity, optimize blogs and marketing content for search engines, and research your competitor’s SEO strategy. This article will show you how to use cloud generators to tackle your marketing challenges and further your content and SEO strategy.
What is a Word Cloud?
Word cloud generators create graphics that resemble “clouds” made of words of different sizes, fonts, and colors. They visually represent a block of text, whether the content is pulled from online or offline sources, emphasizing and enlarging words that appear most frequently within the text. The clouds synthesize and succinctly represent content in a way that people grasp an understanding of it with just a glance.
How does Word Cloud Generators Work?
Most word cloud generators are free and easy to use, with very little variation in how they function. We recommend both Wordle and Tagxedo as two of the best word cloud generators to use. If you don’t have Java, you can also check out Tagul and Word It Out as additional options. Most word cloud generators are simple to use and only necessitate a few steps to produce an interesting graphic. Select the text content that you want to represent visually, either by copying and pasting the text into a text box or by entering in the URL of your website.
Different cloud generators will give you customization option for changing colors, fonts, sizing, orientation of text, shape of cloud, etc. Many will also give you different options on how you want to save or share your image.
Related: Local SEO Guide
How to Use a Word Cloud for Marketing
Word Clouds for Marketing Content
The most obvious use for word cloud generators is to create visual marketing content. Looking for images to accompany your blog or social media posts can be time consuming, but word clouds generators are great standby marketing tools for creating powerful visual content.
Marketing research shows that posts with images garner more engagement on social media networks than posts with just text. This means more likes, more re-tweets, more shares and a higher likelihood that your content will go viral. You can also generate word clouds for eBooks, webinars, or any other type of marketing literature. The possibilities are endless. What makes word clouds great for creating marketing content is how easily and quickly they convey a message creatively. It’s a fun and powerful way to spread your message or reuse old content.
Evaluating Your Business with Word Clouds
Going beyond using word cloud generators just to create marketing content, there are several applications of cloud generators for evaluating how effectively you are conveying your brand messaging. Assess your brand identity by plugging in your business’s website and social media URLs and see which words are more prominent. Are the words you’re targeting for SEO showing up? What about industry buzzwords? Do the words have positive or negative connotations? Cloud generators like Tagxedo allow you to input your Twitter and social media feeds. Use them to evaluate the value of the content you’re publishing or posting. Look at the themes that are occurring most regularly, are them in line with what you’re selling?
You can also analyze your Linkedin profile in the cloud generator. Is your profile description conveying a professional tone? And are you using the right words to describe your work experience?
If your business has a Yelp page, see what words your customers are using to describe their experience with you. Are they mostly positive or negative? Is there a product or service that stands out?
Word Clouds and Competitive Research
We showed you how to use word clouds to evaluate how well your marketing content is portraying your business. Using the same tools, get to know your competitors and see what keywords they’re targeting for their SEO strategy. Give it a go and plug in your competitor’s URL in a word cloud generator.
Word Clouds and SEO
Word clouds are especially helpful in analyzing how well your blog or marketing content is optimized for search engines. Although optimizing for SEO involves more than just “keyword stuffing”, a cloud analysis of your blog post is a good indication of how search engines will view your content. It’s worth your time to input your blog post to see visualize how well it’s optimized for the keywords you’re targeting or how relevant it is to your business.
Best Free Word Cloud Generators
Check out our list of top free word cloud generators. Keep in mind that although all cloud generators have similar functionality, they all come with varying levels of customization. Test out a few to find one that has the functionality that best fits your marketing needs.
2 Comments
Word Cloud sounds like a great visual marketing tool. Thank you for posting free generators, should be very helpful, thank you, Susan.