Online Marketing Tools
Need help getting more qualified traffic to your website? After years of research, trial, and error we are proud to present you with what we believe are the top 21 free online tools that will give your online marketing and sales a massive competitive advantage. Below is a 7 step free online marketing process that we recommend you use to help maximize your online marketing and sales for your business.
If you are numbers, reports, and graphs person like us, then you are going to love this blog post. We have broken down all of these free tools into the following categories:
⦁ Keyword Research
⦁ Answer The Public
⦁ Ubbersuggest
⦁ Google Trends
⦁ Google Keyword Planner
⦁ Keyword Tool
⦁ Keywords Everywhere
⦁ Content Marketing
⦁ Portent
⦁ Buzzsumo
⦁ Technical SEO Tools
⦁ GTMetrix
⦁ SEOptimer
⦁ SEO Yoast
⦁ Link Building
⦁ Ahrefs
⦁ Social Media
⦁ Viral Content Bee
⦁ Later
⦁ Tweetdeck
⦁ Sales Tools
⦁ Drift
⦁ Bitrix 24
⦁ Rank Tracking
⦁ Google Analytics
⦁ Google Webmaster Tools
⦁ Google Tag Manager
⦁ Spyfu
Everybody wants to be on the first page of Google and get more traffic from social media. As a result, you want to give yourself every possible advantage to beat your competition. Are you ready to get started?
The tools that you will find in this category will allow you to find the best keywords for your website. You must find keywords that have low competition and high searches. These are some of the best free tools we found for you:
Answer the Public
Answer the public tool is very useful when trying to find out what people are trying to look for in the search results when using the internet. When using it you just type in your desired keyword or phrase. This way you can get an insight as to what your customers might be searching for. It will also give any type of question that people search for regularly.
You want to pay close attention to the keywords that indicate an intention to buy. It is better to have 100 visitors and have 10 purchases your product or service rather than 1 million visitors and nobody purchases your product or service.
But I want to know more data
This tool does not let you know how many people are searching for this particular keyword or how much competition there is. This is where the next tool comes in handy.
Ubersuggest
This is one of my favorite free SEO tools out there right now. It gives you lots of data for free such as search volume, SEO difficulty, paid difficulty, cost per click, historical data, and even the age groups that are searching for a particular keyword.
Ubersuggest gives you a chart of how many mobile and desktop searches for the word you type in the search bar to see how many people are interested in searching it.
Afterward, it gives you all the key terms that people search along with the word you had typed in. If you want to unlock more features, then they will want you to sign up for an account. These suggestions are great if you already wanted to cover a certain topic, it helps you if you’re not good at brainstorming a completely new keyword word and content ideas. That is because these keywords are closely on the seed keyword you have entered on the Ubersuggest home screen. Finally, it gives you some trends to review, but if you want to get more details about the trends, then you are going to love the next tool.
Want To See More Details?
Google Trends
By analyzing the trends of your industry, then you can make better business decisions. For example, in the graph below we can see that “Pool Service” searches hit an all-time high during June.
Are you thinking of opening a new business, product, or service? It would be important to check if the product or service is going up or down. The last thing you want is to invest a lot of money and time into something that might eventually become obsolete. Moreover, are you still advertising with the yellow pages? You might want to re-think your strategy after looking at the graph below.
Follow The Trends And Ride That Wave
Google Trends is an online tool that helps users visualize and discover trends. Google Trends later uses Google search, Google News, Google Images, Google Shopping, and YouTube. The data can then be visualized by Google. This way you can analyze the queries of up to 5 different searches at the same time, enabling you to conduct analyses and comparative research.
Google Keyword Planner
Google keyword planner is a free tool for new or experienced advertisers that shows you data historical data, mobile vs desktop, paid search competition, keyword suggestions, and much more.
Optimize For High Intent To “Let Me Buy It” Keywords
Here it shows a record of the data that shows how many people have searched. Just because people search for something doesn’t mean people will buy from you. You want to pay special attention to keyword phrases like “buy”, “near me”, “hire”, “company”, and more. Some of the tools mentioned above will limit the number of keyword ideas. However, here it will give you a more comprehensive list of the keywords related to your category.
Here in Google Keyword Planner, it shows the average of monthly searches that people have done. The only limitations are that unless you have a paid account, it won’t let you look at the raw numbers. Instead, it will give you ranges such as 10K – 100K. However, you can sign up for a paid account and put an extremely low budget. This way you can get access to the tools. What if you want to know the data from other major search engines or websites? This is where keyword tool.io comes in.
Keyword Tool.io
Keyword Tool.io is another SEO tool that is similar to other SEO tools but different because it also shows you what people search on other sites such as Amazon, Playstore, Twitter, Bing, and Instagram. This keyword SEO tool also shows you how much competition there is for a particular keyword. It ranks the keyword from the top being the most searched, bottom being the least searched.
Keywords Everywhere
Keywords Everywhere is another similar SEO tool to keyword tool.io when it searches different keywords.
Keyword Research For People In A Hurry
The only difference between keywords everywhere and other SEO tools is that keywords everywhere are an extension of chrome that means you research keywords without leaving your search. This saves time from clicking back and forth just to look for related keywords. Also, it gives you the monthly searches for any keyword you might type in the search bar. This helps you take away any unnecessary steps when researching keywords for your website. The only drawback is that you will be limited to so many searches after you use the tool for a while. Eventually, they will want you to purchase some credits.
Portent
Portent is a free title generator that can make a catchy and interesting title so that engine search users will be interested in clicking on your site. This could be helpful for you because if you’re terrible on brainstorming new titles that don’t sound interesting inturn people won’t take the chance to click. If you are barely beginning to write a blog and need a quick way to get a title for your blog. It’ll give you the reason for each section why every part is used in the title. You may want to run some A/B testing and test out two headlines to see which headlines get more clicks. Just ask your friends to form social media and watch the comments roll in.
Buzzsumo
So you have awesome keywords with high searches and low competition, but what content should your website have?
Give them what they want and they will click
with Buzzsumo you can type any keyword or phrase and it will show you some of the most shared content on the web. This will give you an idea of what kind of content to write for your website. Stop trying to write content that nobody cares about and use this tool to brainstorm on the best content to write for your website. This way you can maximize your traffic. Without Buzzsumo you could spend days searching the internet for the information about your competitor, but just by entering your search preferences and criteria into the tool’s input, Buzzsumo analyzes the online content for you and finds the pieces that will work the best for your marketing strategy. Buzzsumo is also connected to Twitter to see who is spreading your competitor’s content to see an influencer that can share your content for better traffic for your website.
GTmetrix
So now you have great keywords, a well-written article, but is your site fast enough or will people want to leave because it takes forever to load? GTmetrix is an online tool to get a more detailed report of how your website’s performance by giving your site a grade on little details about your website.
One of the advantages of using the GTmatrix WordPress plugin allows you to run analyses right from your WordPress dashboard. This tool can help anyone to better their site by seeing what is missings by looking at each grade for a certain topic to enhance their websites. GTMetrix is different from other online tools by locating where it operates its test server region. This determines how fast it’ll load your website. The hardware that GTMetrix uses also describes how’ll it will perform the analyses. The hardware that GTMetix uses is HTTP/2 which loads a lot faster than the tools from other competitors that still use the hardware’s outdated version HTTP /1.1. This is a benefit that GTMetrix has against other tools that give detailed reports on the website’s performance.
SEOptimer
Your website is now fast, but is it optimized for the search engines?
SEOptimer is a website audit and reporting tool that can comprehensively review a website and give a grade based on how fast a page loads, mobile usability, presence on social media, and its security. We use SEOptimer to help you improve your website for potential customers. It gives several recommended improvements that you can do to better the performance of your website.
For example, If your social media needs some improving it’ll give a list of what you do have and what you need to add. Social media is an important place that you need to have a presence on especially in today’s world where customers are heavily influenced by it when making purchasing decisions. SEOoptimer will check if you’re connected with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube when grading your website for the presence of it.
But is it enough?
SEO Yoast
No, in this competitive world it’s not enough to do a simple audit. This is where SEO Yoast comes in. It’s one of the most downloaded WordPress plugins. It’s a great plugin that anyone can use to make sure their website meets the highest technical SEO standards. SEO Yoast is helpful to those who aren’t good at technical SEO by guiding you step by to use technical SEO the right way. Yoast is a great plugin but it still requires you to create good content. This way your website’s ranking on the search results will be very great.
Yoast gives a detailed analysis based on the problem that you might have on yours.
Red = Problems that must be fixed
Orange = Strong suggestions to improve your SEO
Green = Congrats you did a good job
Pretty easy so far, but this is where it starts to get tuff
Ahrefs
Getting quality backlinks from other websites is one of the most influential factors to your online rankings and the most difficult to achieve in our opinion. However, Ahrefs is an amazing free tool that can help you get started on this competitive journey. Below is a very simplistic explanation of how backlinks work and how they affect the overall domain authority of each website.
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
A backlink is a link that is on a website that navigates to another and Ahrefs is a website tool that checks another website for those backlinks. You want to get as many high-quality backlinks from authoritative sites as possible. This way you can have a higher domain authority for your website. Your domain authority can vary from 0 – 100. It’s exponentially more difficult to go up a level so don’t worry if you feel stuck at a particular level.
It is still important to perform a backlink check on a website to see if the search engine user does follow them by clicking them. You will want to check the link to see if it’s coming from a spam website because it can hurt your overall SEO. What’s great about Ahref’s free backlink checker is that you can also review your competitor’s backlinks. This means that you can potentially try to duplicate the same backlink by writing a better article than your competition and requesting a backlink from that website owner.
So what’s next? Promote! Promote! Promote!
Viral Content Bee
Viral Content Bee is a free website and an excellent online marketing tool that allows the user to put their content on social media for people to see and also share. This helps you spread the word about your websites to get more traffic. It’s better if an influencer happens to share your content because they have more followers and it will get your blog articles more exposure.
It’s easy to use for even for beginners that want to grow their traffic. Viral Content Bee also allows you to manage your content whenever you want.
You can choose to purchase credits or you can share other people’s content for credits. It’s kinda like saying
You scratch my back and I’ll scratch your back.
You can use the filter settings to see which categories you would like to share to earn credits.
Later
Later is a social media scheduling app that was first developed for Instagram but later was implemented in other social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Later helps you save a lot of time doing other things by scheduling a week in probably an hour rather than 30 minutes every day.
Even though Later works with other social media platforms its better suited for Instagram when it comes to using stories. Later could also be visually appealing when scheduling posts ahead of time because it is important when trying to gain more followers.
Are you going on vacation? No problem! Schedule your posts and promote your articles far into the future and let the app handle the rest.
Tweetdeck
Tweetdeck is a tool that permits you to oversee and sort out a boundless number of Twitter accounts, searches, hashtags and the sky is the limit from there. Tweetdeck is completely different from other social medial managers because it is a free tool to use which means that you can focus more on reaching your target audience.
Tweetdeck users can tweet, answer, retweet, favorite, send direct messages, oversee, monitor multiple accounts, and streams all in one user’s interface. The ability to use multiple tasks can help you receive more clicks or potential customers to view your website if they show interest.
Drift Chat
Congratulations! You are getting visitors! But did they buy it?
The fact is that anywhere from 1 to 3 % of your website visitors will wind up buying something from your website. We now live in a world where people want instant answers. As a result, you are more likely to capture the sale or lead if you can answer their question right on the spot.
The Drift chat tool is a pop-up chat box that appears on your website and asks the visitor a question. This helps your website by giving your potential customers more opportunities to interact with you. Here is your opportunity to book the appointment or capture the sale. You must respond within 5 seconds or they will leave.
The drift chat helps potential customer that doesn’t want to make a call yet but also have questions about your product or service. Drift takes it to a whole another level by allowing you to also create a playbook that makes it seem like a real person is answering the potential customer’s question. The reason is that you can change the message in context to the customer based on contact data and contextual actions via the website. Drift is optimized for almost any possible scenario that could lead to bad user experience. Also, if no one from your team responds to customer’s questions within a minute a bot from Drift can come in and pick up to cover for you. Drift could help increase your traffic by creating a friendly user environment for your website. You can also download the app so that you can answer live chats on the go.
Your service sounds great, but I need to check with my partner
Bitrix24
We’ve had clients that will ask about our service today but won’t purchase until several months later. This is where you will need a powerful CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software. After researching many CRM software, we found that bitrix24 had the most bells and whistles at no cost.
Bitrix24 is a collaboration software tool for management, collaboration, and communication. It can help you manage your business when working from home. You can use it to plan out your project and tasks for your team to see and finish tasks on time. Bitrix can also contact your team using the internet to chat with your team from far away.
Rinse and Repeat
Google Analytics
You’ve done a great job so far. Now you need to ask yourself the following questions:
What happened here?
What can we do better?
What actions will I take next?
The best way to come up with answers to those questions is to review your data.
Google Analytics is a free online marketing tool that uses tracking and statistics software that can help you get insights based on how visitors found your website. Moreover, it will show you what those visitors did while visiting your website as well as showing you important information based on the success of your website. Google Analytics will also work with any other tool and platform such as your smartphone, laptop, and tablet. It’ll also show what potential customers are looking for on your website by measuring it’s internal site searches to improve on opportunities your site might have been missing.
Google Webmaster Tool
Another great tool for ensuring that website stays successful is Google Webmaster. Google Webmaster is a free service that can help you evaluate and maintain your website’s performance in the search results. Moreover, it will inform you if your website has issues such as being hacked.
Here are some ways that Google webmaster tools help you maintain the performance of your website.
1.) It verifies that Google has access to the content on your website.
2.) It makes it possible to submit new pages and posts for Google to navigate and remove unwanted content to be discovered by search engine users.
3.) It helps you deliver and evaluate the content on your website to offer users a more pleasant visual experience.
4.) You could also maintain your website without disrupting its presence in the search results so that users can still see your website.
5.) It also helps you detect and remove malware or spam problems that couldn’t have been seen otherwise.
You don’t need to use Google webmaster tools for your website to appear in the search results but it a really good tool that offers you valuable information that can help with your marketing efforts.
Google Tag Manager
There are hundreds of pieces of codes you can install on your websites such as Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, Google ads, remarketing codes, customizable codes, and many more! Installing all of these codes can make your website heavy and make you lose customers due to a slow website.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you can install only one code and that’s it?
Google tag manager could also be very helpful because changes are made at a rapid rate without requiring to change some of the code on your website. The only drawback is that it can be a little difficult to use. Nonetheless, you can call a Google representative, and normally they are more than willing to help as long you have a Google Ads ID.
What about your competitor’s analytics?
SpyFu
SpyFu is a user-friendly marketing evaluation tool that allows you to search any website to view it’s ranking history. The purpose of SpyFu is to help you spy on your competition. This way you can do some research on their rankings and what keywords they’re using and who’s linking to their website. SpyFu is a better option when it comes to being a marking evaluation tool because they have 10 years of competitor data to where other tools such as SEMrush only has 8 years. SpyFu could be of great use to you when you are deciding on your content strategy.
SpyFu only gives you limited data with their free search option, but it’s valuable data that can help you understand your competitors. If you want to get more data, then you can sign up for their paid options.
You Are Amazing!
I think you are awesome! Yes! You! Why? Because you made it through the entire article. You have a real desire to learn to improve your online marketing and sales. You might be wondering where am I going to find the time to do all of this? Well, the good news is that we can help you with your sales and online marketing. We’ve been doing this since 2008 and actively help over 500 businesses like yours. Call us today at 559-553-5000 or do a live chat with us now to get started.
Written by Efrain Rivera Aguilera and Luis Chavez
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