There are several free marketing tools out there to help you grow your business. You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars. There is a lot you can do for free. This is an overview of those tools and how you can use them. If you want to engage with customers online, use these tools to help you connect to your target audience.
18 Free Digital Marketing Tools
1. Google My Business (GMB)
Google My Business allows you to register your business online and manage your online presence across the Google platform, including Google Search and Google Maps. You can register with your Google ID. Google will put your business address on Google Maps. It is a very simple process. Just enter your business contact information and that’s it. Your business profile will be featured on Google Maps!
Create a profile that tells the story of your business or organization. You can edit your information anytime. As your business grows, share updates and special offers. This is a good way to make your business stand out online. It is like a directory listing and a social media profile in one.
Customers can upload photos of your business to your listing and leave a review. They will see your posts, so be sure to update them regularly because they are deleted every seven days.
2. Google Search Console (GSC)
With the tools provided by Google Search Console, you can monitor your website’s performance such as CTR and Search Analytics. It also lists all the keywords associated with your site. You can link this console to your website. It allows you to see how your users are interacting with your website and if the site is functioning properly. The console also shows what kind of search queries Google is recording about your website.
GSC helps you interpret troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results so that you can improve how Google views and ranks your site. To get the most out of the GSC, integrate it with Google Analytics and submit a sitemap.
3. Google PageSpeed Insights
With Google PageSpeed Insights, you can test the speed of a web page with this tool. Google will even provide a list of issues (if any) to help you improve your website performance. The goal is for your web pages to load as quickly as possible. There are many things you can do to improve the loading speed of web pages such as enabling compression and optimizing the number of images and image sizes. Google PageSpeed Insights do just that, provides insight into the performance of your website.
4. Google Mobile-Friendly Test
Google Mobile-Friendly Test is a tool where you can run a test to assess the mobile-friendliness of your site. It will show in a detailed report what needs to be fixed to make it more mobile-friendly. It is easy to download the report and send to your developer to make the necessary changes.
This tool measures how easily users can access, read, and navigate the site on mobile devices, providing a pass-fail score and suggestions for improvement. This is important because most people access websites on their mobile devices over their laptop or desktop computer. You want them to be able to do the same things on their mobile devices as they can on a computer.
5. Moz Local Listing
With Moz Local Listing, you can see what your business looks like in the business directory listings online. The free version provides some SEO tools that you can use to optimize your site. A free report will describe issues (if any) and suggest solutions. Use this tool to make sure your organization is listed accurately in the online directories.
6. Google Analytics
Google Analytics will give you a code to deploy within your website. Once you have this code implemented, Google Analytics will provide insights such as how many users have completed the forms on your site. You can set up goals and metrics that will indicate how users are interacting on your site.
7. Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner helps you understand what keywords would be relevant to target. It will suggest keywords as well. You have no obligation to pay for an AdWords account. You can just use this tool to create relevant and effective keywords for your site and to get forecasts about how much traffic they may drive to your website.
8. Answer the Public
Answer the Public is a visual search tool that gives you profitable keywords for your business. When you first arrive, don’t be turned off by the mysterious man who looks at you. This is a valuable tool that allows you to see what people are searching for online regarding the keywords you enter. You can also use this tool to write content which can help you rank higher in Google Search.
9. WordPress Blog
WordPress blog is a free publishing platform. It is very easy to use the fast and flexible blog script. It comes with many features designed to help you customize your blog. Search engines love WordPress sites. Use this blog to extend your reach online.
10. SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb is a website analysis tool that provides analytics information for any website. Use this tool to find out how much traffic your competitor sites are getting and identify the sources so that you can target them. If you do this for more than three competitors, you can easily redirect their traffic to your business.
Use this tool to find out who your competitors are and to get an overview of your website to monitor how many people are coming to your site. This tool also provides the most accurate analysis and reports.
11. Yoast SEO Plugin
Yoast SEO Plugin is a WordPress plugin used to attract more visitors to your site from social media and from Google. It is useful because it can help make your site search engine-friendly and achieve high rankings.
The main benefit of using Yoast is having the ability to quickly edit your WordPress site’s meta descriptions having Yoast check the readability of the page. The best part is that you don’t need a lot of SEO knowledge to use this tool to optimize your site.
12. Google Business Review Link Generator
Google Business Review Link Generator gives you a link for you to give to your customers to leave reviews on Google. As you know, reviews boost your SEO. Once you get your Google map business approved, you will need to get reviews from users.
When you enter your location, your map listing will be visible for you to click on it and retrieve the link. This is the link you will send to your customers and ask them to submit reviews.
13. Copyscape
Copyscape is a tool that finds duplicate content. It basically checks for plagiarism. Plagiarism is a serious and increasing problem on the Internet. You simply copy webpage content and enter it. Then Copyscape will search other websites for that content.
The content on your site must be unique, so you can use this tool to make sure your content is original. If you find another website that has the same content, you can ask them to take it down.
14. Built With
Built With is used to find out what a website’s platform has been built on. Simply enter a competitor’s website address to investigate any new technology that they may be using, for instance.
This tool shows which sites use shopping carts, analytics, hosting, etc. Filter websites by location, traffic, and more. It can also be useful to know your prospects’ platform before you approach them.
15. Ispionage and Follow.net
Ispionage is a research tool that allows you to steal your competitors’ traffic and to uncover their conversion strategy. Follow reveals your competitors’ PPC or paid advertising strategy.
16. SEMRush
SEMRush is a tool that will give you keywords that other businesses rank highly with. This is another way to gather competitor intelligence. Also, you can monitor your backlinks to see who is linking not only to your site but other sites as well. Start a free trial to see if this works for you.
17. AHREFS
Use AHREFS to dive deep into your website statistics to find your strengths and weaknesses and assess your competition. This tool also provides backlink building strategies. Ahrefs Rank will indicate how strong your website’s backlink profile is in comparison to other websites with an AR of 1 being the strongest.
18. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a great way to manage your social media all in one place. You can manage your multiple social media profiles and networks such as Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, etc. and schedule posts. This tool can help grow your brand on social media. You can schedule weekly or daily posts.
Tips for Using These Marketing Tools
First and foremost, never buy links from the Internet. You could end up with a link to a site that has been sandboxed by Google which can lead to your website being sand-boxed as well for many years.
Also, keep in mind that all links are not created equal. The more authoritative the links are, the better your site will rank on Google. For instance, a link from the LA Times has more value than from a local news outlet. Link diversity is good too (local, national, international links).
Lastly, you do not have to use all of these tools at the same time, but it is good to use several of these in order to get an objective view of your website. It can only help you improve and grow your business. Since all of these tools are free, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
How do you find links?
Links are critical to ranking and website promotion. To remain competitive by outranking your competition, our team continually executes quality link building campaigns that strategically point them to pages on your website. Here are six methods for you to acquire and build links effectively:
- Ask local businesses if you can contribute to their blogs and vice versa.
- Start a blog on your website or create a WordPress blog (as mentioned previously) and link it to your website. Write about general topics. A blog is a place where you can feature these backlinks from other businesses.
- Search Google for other blogs in your niche and reach out to them via comments or message feature.
- Utilize Canva to create nice graphics to share on the Internet. This is a simplified graphic-design tool website that uses a drag-and-drop format and provides access to photographs, vector images, graphics, and fonts. This is a method to get backlinks by creating Infographics, for example, and ask businesses to share it on their website and social media networks.
- Start a scholarship program or find scholarships on Google and contact them. Set up a small budget to pay out a scholarship of your choice. This is a great way to get links back.
- Create local citations on the top sites for your area using the Moz tool mentioned earlier. A local citation is any online mention of the contact information for your local business. Citations can appear on websites and apps, local business directories, on social media networks. Citations help customers discover local businesses and also affect local search engine rankings.
To learn more about how these tools can help you grow your online business, reach out to us at Acumen Velocity. We can show you how to leverage these tools to boost your business in many ways. Get started by requesting a free growth assessment of your business. Let our team of experts help you increase your site visibility.