SEO and content marketing are different marketing channels. But you don’t have to choose between them. They’re complementary.

In fact, you should combine them for greater effectiveness in your marketing.

1. Content marketing and SEO are like peanut butter and jelly—they work well together

• It tells you what your audience cares about — If you know what they’re searching on Google, you can create the type of content they want to see. This is known as keyword research, a key aspect of SEO.
• It creates predictable distribution — Sparktoro’s study showed that 63.41% of all US web traffic referrals come from Google. Most of our blog traffic comes from search engines too.

SEO is the process of improving a website’s visibility in search engines to get more traffic.

Here’s how content marketing helps SEO:

• It helps you get more search traffic — If you want more search traffic, you need to rank for more keywords, which requires you to make more content.
• It makes SEO more effective — Thought leadership content acquires backlinks, gated content generates leads, and sales enablement converts traffic into sales.

2. The same amount of investment in effort, money, and time can generate results for both content marketing and SEO

We’re the perfect example. Our content ranks high on Google and generates hundreds of thousands of monthly search visitors:

It also attracts links and shares on social media because we make sure each piece is unique and not just regurgitation or “AI content”.

Finally, each piece of content introduces visitors to our product and educates them on how to use it to solve their problems. (Keep on reading and you’ll see it in action too!)

It hits all content marketing and SEO goals at once:

• Acquires search traffic ✅
• Builds thought leadership ✅
• Attracts links ✅
• Generates sales (over the long-term) ✅

The easiest way to find these keywords is to use a keyword tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer:

1. Go to Keywords Explorer
2. Enter a few broad keywords related to your site or niche
3. Go to the Matching terms report
4. Filter for keywords with traffic potential (TP)

Go through the report and pick out the keywords that are relevant to your site. For example, if I were an ecommerce store selling coffee equipment, this could be a potential keyword to target:

A keyword’s business potential is how easy it will be to pitch your product while covering a certain topic. It’s our ‘trade secret’—it’s why we can easily introduce our product and its features in every piece of content we create.

Here’s how to score a topic’s business potential:

So, taking the above example, the topic “best coffee grinder” would score a “3” (provided we sell coffee grinders) whereas a topic like “does decaf coffee have caffeine” would score a “1” or even a “0”.

You should prioritize topics that score high on business potential, i.e. a “2” or a “3”.

Search-focused

Given that Google’s goal is to always rank the most relevant content, we can look at the search engine results (SERPs) to uncover search intent. Take your target keyword, enter it into Keywords Explorer, scroll down to SERP Overview, and click Identify intents:

So, we can see that searchers looking for the keyword “best coffee grinders” want detailed reviews and expert recommendations on the best coffee grinders. Not only that, we can also see that searchers want a list that is fresh.

If we’re targeting this topic, making it search-focused means matching this search intent—we’ll need to create a list of the best coffee grinders for the current year.

Product-led

For example, I recently covered the topic “SEO specialist”. It had a business potential of “1” and was tough to include a product pitch. Fortunately, I noticed that some job listings asked for experience with different SEO toolsets (including us.) It was the perfect segue to introduce our product and certification course.

High-quality

something i always look for when assessing the credibility of writing:

could/should/did

~ could: most writers talk about things you, the reader, could do. theoretical. abstract. based on no firsthand experience. should probably be disregarded. prime “content marketing”…

— Ryan Law (@thinking_slow) December 6, 2023

Final thoughts

Website traffic data normally looks like this:

Ups and downs, peaks and troughs.

If we’re doing our job properly, we generally expect traffic to trend upwards over time, but in any given month, it’s difficult to say whether a peak or a trough is worth paying attention to.

Did we do something great and trigger a new phase of growth? Did we benefit from a new Google update? Or is it just normal variation, part of the natural ebb and flow of people finding our website?

Or suppose you make a change to your content process—you pruned and redirected a bunch of old content—and then traffic dropped the next month. Was that drop caused by the change, or was it just a coincidence?

I’ve been experimenting with a simple statistical tool designed to help answer these questions: XmR charts, also known as process control charts.

Here’s an XmR chart:

XmR charts are designed to tell you whether any single data point from a time series is likely to be caused by normal fluctuation (“routine variation”) or a sign that something happened and needs to be investigated (“exceptional variation”).

XmR charts consist of an X plot (named after the x-value, the “thing” we care about—like widgets produced or sales closed)…

…and an MR plot (named after the moving range, basically the “gap” between each data point):

In its simplest use, if you plot your data on the chart and it wiggles up and down around the central line, without crossing the upper and lower bounds—no problem! These ups and downs likely represent normal variation.

But any points that appear outside the upper or lower bounds (shown in red) should be treated as anomalies that need to be investigated.

In the X plot above, the time series seems to show routine variation until January 16th, when the first red out-of-bounds point appears.

The XmR chart suggests that something happened on the 16th to mess with our production process (for better or for worse). Our job is to investigate why.

Sidenote.

The line in the middle is the average value of the dataset; the upper and lower bounds represent 3-standard deviations away from the average (known as three-sigma). Any point that falls outside of these upper and lower bounds is very likely to be an anomaly, and not part of the original probability distribution.

There are other “signals” that the XmR chart can show you (like eight consecutive points on one side of the average line representing another type of exceptional variation)—but I will leave you to investigate those on your own time.

Here’s two years of monthly organic traffic data for the Ahrefs blog, pulled from Site Explorer and plotted on an XmR chart:

Now… this is not particularly useful.

There are tons of data points outside the expected range (red), with very few sitting nearer the center line than the quartile limits (orange).

The XmR chart is supposed to show exceptional variation in a consistent process—but in this image, almost all of the data points suggest exceptional variation. What gives?

Process charts were designed around simple manufacturing processes, and they work very well when the expected output of a process is constant.

If your goal is manufacturing 10,000 widgets each and every week, an XmR chart will help you work out if that 5,600-widget month was a normal “blip” in routine operation, or caused by a real problem that needs to be investigated.

Website traffic is more complicated. There are tons of variables that impact traffic:

• the fluctuating search volume of each topic,
• individual ranking positions,
• new competing articles,
• search features,
• seasonality,
• publishing frequency,
• Google algorithm updates…

That means that running an XmR analysis on a long series of traffic data probably won’t be very helpful. Your “blogging process” is not likely to remain stable for very long.

In my case, this particular two-year snapshot of data probably doesn’t come from a single, stable process—there may be multiple probability distributions hidden in there.

If we work on the assumption that something happened to our blog process around this time—likely a change to traffic caused by the Google update—we can add a divider to our XmR chart.

Instead of trying to analyze our traffic as a single process, we can treat it as two processes, and calculate XmR charts separately:

Now the first process looks stable (all black dots). The second process shows less extreme variation (red) too, but there’s still too much moderate variation (orange) to look stable. There may be another process lurking within.

And per a rule of thumb for analyzing XmR charts: “the duration of an XmR chart needs to be revisited when a ‘long-run’ of data remains above or below the Average line.” This trend begins in late summer (which is also around the time that Google announced another core update):

We can add another divider at the start of this “long-run” of data to create three separate XmR analyses:

In doing so, all three analyses seem stable, with no points of extreme variance. In other words, we seem to have done a good job at capturing three distinct processes happening within our traffic data.

From this analysis, there seems to be a good chance that our traffic was impacted by external factors around the time of two major Google updates.

Now… this is basically a post-hoc data torturing exercise. We can’t infer any causation from this analysis, and it’s entirely possible that other arbitrary divisions would yield similar results.

But that’s okay. These charts can’t give you definitive, concrete reasons why your traffic changed, but they can tell you where to look, and help you work out whether troubleshooting a traffic dip or spike is a good use of your time.

The ultimate measure of a model’s usefulness is its ability to help you predict things. Will XmR charts help me do a better job running the Ahrefs blog in the future?

I think yes.

Assuming my “blog process” remains relatively stable—I publish at the same frequency, target the same topics, compete with the same competitors—I now have a set of “stable” data that I can use to provide extra context for future traffic numbers:

In the months that follow, I can work out whether dips or spikes in our traffic are likely the result of normal variance, or whether something has changed that requires my attention—like a Google update.

If, for example, my traffic does this next month… 

…I know that—given this distribution—that traffic drop could well be normal, unexciting variance.

But if it does this…

…there’s probably something else at work.

With extreme traffic changes you can usually “eyeball” traffic charts and guess what happened. But XmR charts are useful for more subtle variations, and there’s a chance I will be able to identify and act on just a single month’s worth of data. That’s pretty cool.

Final thoughts

Are you certain that the content you’re publishing on your website is 100% original?

Steering clear of plagiarism is a top priority for content creators, educators, businesses, and others in order to maintain credibility and avoid legal issues – among other things.

While Copyscape has long been one of the most well-known and popular options for plagiarism checking, the range of available tools has expanded significantly, with various features designed to meet people’s unique needs.

In this article, we will cover the basics of plagiarism – what it is, why you should check for it, how to check, and what to do if someone plagiarizes your content – before highlighting some of the top alternatives to Copyscape, helping you keep your content unique and valuable.

What Is Plagiarism? 

Plagiarism is when you use someone else’s work, whether words or ideas, and present it as your own without proper attribution.

Plagiarism can range from directly copying someone’s work to closely paraphrasing something without acknowledging the source. Sometimes, it’s purposeful, while other times, the perpetrator might not even realize they’re doing it.

Regardless of intent, plagiarism is a widespread problem that is difficult to combat – but the first step is detecting it.

Why It’s Important To Check For Plagiarism

The consequences of plagiarism can be severe – you can lose credibility, harm your reputation, and even face legal repercussions.

Here are a few reasons why it’s essential to check for (and avoid) plagiarism:

• Prevent legal problems. Engaging in plagiarism or copyright infringement can expose you to a range of potential legal issues.
• Maintain your reputation. Trust is vital. But why should audiences trust you if you’re stealing somebody else’s work? Checking for plagiarism is crucial to preserving your reputation and trust with your audience or customers.
• Preserve your SEO efforts. Google and other search engines are actively trying to crack down on plagiarism and will penalize any plagiarized content. This can hurt your website’s ranking and visibility.

How You Can Check For Plagiarism

There are a handful of different ways to check for plagiarism, including:

• Manual checks. This is precisely what it sounds like: manually reviewing content for plagiarism by cross-checking text using search engines and academic databases. If you’re examining a small chunk of text, this can work, but it can get unwieldy fast.
• Use alerts. It’s possible to create your own plagiarism checker by setting up Google Alerts. Simply enter your content into the search query field and let Google know how frequently you want it to alert you of copied content. While not a totally accurate or complete method, it can be effective at times.
• Monitoring services. You can use existing tools that help flag unauthorized use of your content. They do so by scanning the internet and leveraging algorithms to detect plagiarized content.
• Online plagiarism checker tools. Software and tools designed specifically to analyze content and run a comprehensive check for plagiarism.

While checking text for direct plagiarism is one thing, identifying paraphrased content or ideas is much more complicated.

And while we will highlight many useful tools in this article, it’s worth remembering that no tool is perfect.

With the sheer amount of content available and more being produced and published every second, it’s nearly impossible to complete a full check. Hence, why plagiarism is an ongoing issue.

What To Do If Someone Plagiarized Your Content

So, what do you do if you discover that somebody else has plagiarized your content? Here are a few steps you can take:

• Collect evidence. Take screenshots, make notes, and save any URLs as proof of the offense.
• Contact the perpetrator. As we mentioned earlier, sometimes, plagiarism can be an innocent mistake. No matter the situation, we recommend contacting the offending party and requesting that they either remove your content or label it with the proper attribution.
• File a complaint. If that doesn’t work, you can file a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown complaint, which will send notice to the service provider (e.g., Google or web hosting companies) to remove the content or face legal liability.
• Seek legal advice. If the case is particularly egregious, or the above steps fail, you can consider speaking with a legal professional.

Top 11 Plagiarism-Checking Alternative Tools To Copyscape

1. Grammarly

While most people know Grammarly for its spelling and grammar check capabilities, it also offers a useful plagiarism checker tool.

Grammarly’s free plagiarism checker will compare your text (up to 10,000 characters) against academic databases and billions of webpages, then give you an immediate report that lets you know whether it found any plagiarized content.

As a helpful bonus, it will also flag if it finds problems with grammar, spelling, punctuation, conciseness, readability, word choice, or other writing issues.

If you want to take it a step further, Grammarly offers a Premium version of the tool with more advanced capabilities. The paid version will highlight specific sentences of concern, include source information, give you deeper writing feedback, and even allocate your text an “overall originality score.”

Cost

• Free version available with limited plagiarism detection as well as basic grammar, spelling, etc. checks.
• Premium Grammarly membership starts at $12/month and includes advanced plagiarism detection.

2. Plagiarisma

Screenshot from Plagiarisma.net, June 2024

If you’re looking for a plagiarism checker that works in several languages, look no further than Plagiarisma. It supports 190+ languages and offers both free and paid versions.

Users can enter text into Plagiarisma in a variety of ways, including uploading documents, entering URLs, or pasting text directly into the tool. Once you’ve shared your copy, it will check it against sources like books, websites (you can choose between Google and Bing as your search engine of choice), and academic papers.

With the free version, users can run plagiarism checks up to three times in one day. You can also upgrade to a Premium membership for access to more features, including a Synonymizer (which helps you leverage synonyms to recreate sentences), a Similarity Checker (which compares documents for similarity), and unlimited access to plagiarism checks.

Cost

• Free version with up to three plagiarism checks per day.
• Premium membership starts at $5/month and offers unlimited plagiarism checks and more advanced features.

3. ProWritingAid

Screenshot from ProWritingAid.com, June 2024

Similar to Grammarly, ProWritingAid is an AI-powered writing assistant tool that analyzes your copy and suggests areas for improvement. It also offers a helpful plagiarism checker – and while there is no free version, it’s still reasonably affordable.

According to ProWritingAid, its plagiarism detection tool can compare your text (up to 2,000 words) against billions of sources, both online and offline, including databases, periodicals, and websites.

It will flag directly copied content and give similarity percentages to show areas needing improved paraphrasing or citation.

You can use ProWritingAid’s online editing tool to conduct your check or leverage its Microsoft Word Add-In.

Unlike some other tools, you pay for ProWritingAid based on the number of checks you want to conduct versus a monthly or yearly subscription – so that is worth noting, and might be a benefit if you only have a specific number of documents you need to look at.

Cost

• No free version.
• Pricing starts at $10 for 10 checks, $40 for 100 checks, $120 for 500 checks, and $200 for 1,000 checks.

4. Plagiarism Checker

Screenshot from Plagiarism-Checker.me, June 2024

Plagiarism Checker is a fairly straightforward plagiarism detection tool that’s both free and easy to use. If you need a quick and simple option, this is worth checking out.

It boasts a simple user interface and allows users to insert their text directly into the web-based editor, share a URL, or upload a document. You can even denote a URL you want it to exclude, which is a helpful feature if there are particular pages on your site that you want to ignore for now.

Plagiarism Checker scans your text against blogs, websites, and academic papers to detect plagiarism, which it delivers as a percentage. It’s compatible with Mac, Windows, and Android, and supports multiple file formats, including .rtf, .pdf., .docx, .odt, and txt.

Note that there is a limit of 1,000 words per check. The tool also includes a grammar checker and word counter, and you can download the reports it gives you.

Cost

5. CopyGator

Screenshot from CopyGator.com, June 2024

CopyGator is a free service designed to help bloggers and content creators monitor and detect duplicate versions of their content on other blogs or websites.

It works by monitoring your website’s RSS feed to see whether content has been republished elsewhere – and automatically notifying you if it finds plagiarism or quotations.

There are two different options for using CopyGator:

• Image badge: By copying and pasting some code into your site, you can add a CopyGator image badge to your blog that will monitor your feeds for you. When you want to run a check, simply click the badge. If it turns red, CopyGator has detected plagiarized versions of your content.
• RSS feed: Your other option is to input an RSS feed directly into CopyGator’s tool and ask it to watch the feed. It will create your own custom overview page where you can get updates.

Cost

6. PlagScan

Screenshot from PlagScan.com, June 2024

PlagScan is quite a robust plagiarism detection tool most commonly used by academic institutions and professional writers. One thing to note upfront: There is no free version of this tool.

PlagScan compares your text to a massive database of websites, academic resources, and journals to find plagiarism and compiles a report to help you understand the results.

You’ll receive a PlagLevel score, which summarizes the level of duplicate text found within a document, as well as colored highlighting for possible plagiarism:

• Red for direct matches.
• Blue for potentially altered copy.
• Green for correctly cited text.

With PlagScan, you get a list of sources that match your document to help you with proper citation. You can also compare two documents side-by-side to find similarities. It works with most file types, and your data is protected.

Cost

• No free version.
• PlagScan uses a prepaid pricing model based on the number of words/pages. Pricing starts at $6.5 for 6,000 words/24 pages.

7. Copyleaks

Screenshot from Copyleaks.com, June 2024

Copyleaks is a more sophisticated plagiarism detection tool than many of the options used on this list, making it a popular choice for businesses, educational institutions, and individuals around the world.

According to Copyleaks, it uses “advanced AI” to detect instances of plagiarism across over 100 languages, including paraphrasing, plagiarism in programming code, and even AI-generated plagiarism. Each scan checks content against 60 trillion websites, more than 16,000 journals, over 1 million internal documents, and 20+ code data repositories.

The tool has a very user-friendly interface, allowing you to choose from different types of files you might want to scan – text, documents, code, URLs, etc. You can also use the “compare” option to compare two documents or URLs to each other.

Another handy feature within Copyleaks is the ability to schedule recurring scans so that it will automatically check for duplicate content on a regular basis. It also offers easy and flexible API integration,

Cost

• Free trial available.
• Paid plans start at $8.99/month for up to 1,200 credits (equal to 300,000 words). For $13.99/month, you’ll get access to both the plagiarism detection and AI content detection tools in one.

8. Plagium

Screenshot from Plagium.com, June 2024

Plagium is a good choice if you’re looking for an easy and cost-effective plagiarism checker. It uses a simple web-based text box and offers both “quick search” and “Deep Search” functions, the latter of which is basically a term for a closer check and the ability to scan large documents.

A quick search is free and allows up to 500 characters – though the website appears to indicate that the number of quick searches is capped. In order to use the Deep Search feature, you’ll need to create an account – and these searches start at $0.08/page using Plagium’s credits system.

As a member, you’re able to upload different types of documents – such as PDFs – and Plagium also integrates with Google Drive and offers a Google Docs Add-on.

Cost

• Free quick search up to 500 characters.
• Paid plans start at $9.99/month for over 143,000 characters, with options for prepaid plans if that is more your speed.

9. Dupli Checker

Screenshot from DupliChecker.com, June 2024

Need a free, easy-to-use plagiarism checker that’s available in up to seven languages and accepts a variety of file formats? Dupli Checker could be for you.

Dupli Checker’s simple interface makes it easy to scan your documents for plagiarism. You can paste directly into the website or upload files from your computer, Dropbox, or Google Drive. Like other tools in this list, you can also share a URL you’d like the tool to check, and up to five URLs you want it to exclude.

The tool promises 100% privacy – meaning it doesn’t save any of your documents – and summarizes your results in a report that highlights duplicate copy, gives you a percentage rating, and offers more features like grammar issues.

Cost

• Free version with up to 1,000 words per search.
• Paid plans start at $10/month for increased searches, higher word limits, and other advanced features.

10. Quetext

Screenshot from quetext.com, June 2024

Quetext has become a popular plagiarism detection tool, and for good reason. It’s dependable and user-friendly, with some handy little features to help you spot plagiarism in your documents.

How does it work? You just enter your text into the web-based browser box and click “Check for plagiarism.” Quetext then uses its DeepSearch™ Technology (a machine-learning algorithm) to scan your text against billions of internet sources and spot plagiarism.

It provides you with a report that includes a plagiarism score and both exact matches and near matches to other existing text.

It highlights the latter using its ColorGrade™ feedback feature, which uses different colors to highlight exact match copy vs. “fuzzy” matches (or close matches) – a valuable tool for spotting plagiarism that might have otherwise flown under the radar.

It also offers a “Cite Source” feature, which helps you produce citations across Chicago, MLA, and APA formats.

Cost

• Free version available, which includes up to 500 words, a website citation generator, and a citation assistant.
• Paid tiers start at $8.80/month, which includes 100,000 words per month and a range of other advanced features.

11. PlagTracker

Screenshot from Plagtracker.com, June 2024

PlagTracker is an online, web-based plagiarism detector that bills itself as “the most accurate plagiarism checking service.” The tool lists students, teachers, publishers, and site owners as its intended users, and it checks text against over 14 billion webpages and “more than 20 million academic works.”

Using PlagTracker is pretty straightforward. Users upload a document into the tool, which scans it and then returns a detailed report that shows what percentage of their document is plagiarized and highlights specific sections with sources.

It supports multiple languages –English, German, French, Romanian, Spanish, and Italian – making it a versatile tool. PlagTracker has a 5,000-word limit for free users, though you can pay for a Premium membership for unlimited access.

Cost

• Free version is available with a 5,000-word limit.
• Premium subscription starts at $7.49/month for unlimited volume and other advanced features.

The Best Plagiarism Detection Tools On The Market

And there you have it: Copyscape is by no means the only option for plagiarism detection tools.

Those listed above are great alternatives that cater to a wide range of use cases, whether you’re looking for a cheap and easy solution or an all-in-one AI-powered writing assistant.

If you’re a content creator of any kind, you must produce work that’s original and unique – and these tools can help you do just that.

However, always remember that these tools are far from perfect; you should have other checks and balances in place to ensure the quality of your work.

Avoiding plagiarism will protect your credibility and reputation and ultimately drive more traffic to your website. Not to mention, it’ll keep you out of trouble.

More resources: 

Featured Image: VectorMine/Shutterstock