The Best Free Tools to up your digital marketing prowess
Whether you’re a business owner, a beginner marketer, or managing the marketing for the company you work for, tools and software can help make your job easier by providing you with ideas, data, or even competitive knowledge for business growth and success.
There is an array of free digital marketing tools available that can empower business owners and marketers to enhance their online presence, engage with their target audience, and drive tangible results. This list contains some of the best free digital marketing tools that every business owner should consider incorporating into their marketing arsenal.
This powerful (and free!) tool helps illustrate seasonal trends in your industry. It can also show you whether there were periods of time in which your product or service was extremely popular, giving context to data you might be seeing in Analytics tools, and help you understand differences in search interest by geo. Data is available by country, state, and can even get as granular as DMA or city, making hyper-local search trends easy to spot.
For example, searches related to “free video chat” skyrocketed between March and April 2020 before returning to normal levels:
Google Search Console
As Google Analytics data gets convoluted with the mandatory GA4 roll-out, Search Console becomes even more valuable. Google Search Console helps marketers monitor and optimize website performance in Google search results to improve organic search visibility and drive more website traffic.
Use this powerful tool to get a much clearer picture of your organic website performance than ranking reports can provide. Use this tool an analyze the pages on your website that are top performers and to ensure your most important pages are fully optimized. You can track which keywords your website is being shown in search results for (impressions), which keywords are leading to clicks (showing engaged searches), and identify functionality and compatibility issues on your website.
Baked right into the Chrome browser, simply right click on your website, select “inspect,” and up pops Chrome dev tools. Chrome Console is a powerful resource that can significantly enhance your ability to understand what’s happening under the hood of their website. While this tool is one of the more advanced in this list, Console can be helpful in detecting code errors, loading issues, and security issues. Even if you’re unable to fully understand or resolve the detected errors yourself, knowing which errors are plaguing your website can help you find the right kind of assistance.
Google Lighthouse
SEO principles have evolved to match consumer expectations. Today’s consumer expects your website to function seamlessly on different devices, load quickly on all types of internet connections, provide key information, and stand out amongst your competitors. One of the best tools to help manage these expectations and ensure your website meetings the mark is Google Lighthouse- a free, open-source tool that’s available as both a standalone tool and within Chrome Dev tools.
Lighthouse will scan your website for a variety of issues related to SEO, accessibility, best practices, and load speed to help you identify user experience issues and address them. While the technical recommendations may be more advanced for most users, understanding where you website lands on accessibility, SEO, and Google’s best practices for websites can help guide your marketing initiatives in useful and fruitful ways.
The Meta Ads Library is filled with useful information that can be leveraged to understand your competitors on a deeper level. Use this tool to evaluate ad creative, calls to action, offers, platform targeting, and messaging for advertisers in your industry, or get granular and assess a specific competitor’s ad strategy.
“Site:” Search Engine Operator
While Google Search Console will tell you which page on your website are indexed in their cache, seeing what those pages actually look like on the search engine results page (SERP) can be a game changer.
Digital marketing is vital aspect of any business's growth strategy, and with the right tools, even business owners with limited resources can achieve remarkable results. By harnessing the capabilities of these tools, you can optimize your marketing efforts, increase brand visibility, and ultimately achieve your business objectives without breaking the bank.
If you’re interested in pushing your digital marketing to the next peak, contact Pink Paradigm and let’s discuss your goals!
