There are thousands of tools available to web marketers, many of which are so popular, you’re probably using them already. So rather than rounding up the usual suspects, here are nine tools of which you may not have heard.
These marketing tools take only seconds to use. Although many of these have paid options, they each also have useful free versions, even if the options are limited. Notice how each tool answers a specific question.
Something is happening somewhere in the world. But how will you know if it’s “World Bacon Day” or the birthday of Adam Sandler? This is a great web marketing tool for anyone using social media.
Check an event calendar to get ideas for the day.
2. Are my top phrases becoming less popular over time?
It’s possible that your content is focused on a phrase that is trending downward. If so, you’ll want to adjust the language you use on your pages and diversify your blog post topics. See trending over time with a keyphrase research tool: Google Trends.
Understanding how your competitors attract visitors is an important part of search marketing. There are tons of competitor analysis tools available. But here’s a simple online marketing tool that will quickly show what SEO and PPC phrases your competition is focussed on: iSpionage.
It’s possible that competing sites are plagiarizing your content. This kind of duplicate content can confuse Google and hurt your search rankings. It’s also annoying. If you’ve ever been the victim of website plagiarism, you know what I mean.
Use a plagiarism checking tool to find copycats: CopyScape.
Your homepage has earned trust and credibility in search engines through incoming links. This credibility gets passed down to your interior pages through links. But having too many links dilutes this “link juice” and reduces the chance that your interior pages will rank. Even a huge site like Amazon has only around 100 links on their homepage.
Use an internal linking checking tool: The SEO Tools
Finding the right topics is fundamental to content marketing and an important part of keyword research. As soon as your audience begins typing, Google starts suggesting search terms. Wouldn’t it be nice to see them all in one place?
Use this keyword discovery tool to find topics that Google suggests related to your keywords: UberSuggest.
Slow loading sites are bad for search marketing and terrible for visitors. If a site is slow, visitors tend not to stick around. If you know precisely what is slowing things down, you can fix it quickly.
Use a page load analyzer tool to see the load time for each element on each page: Pingdom Tools.
All visitors are welcome to visit, right? But is your site welcoming to the visually-impaired? Making your site accessible is a smart way to not lose potential visitors. It’s also the right thing to do.
Check the accessibility of your website with this accessibility validation tool: WebAIM Wave.
Hopefully, Twitter is already a part of your web marketing. But if you’ve been at it for a while, you may be following people who aren’t that relevant. Some of them don’t even follow you back. It’s good to purge sometimes and bring your following/follower ratio into balance, but it can take hours to go through Twitter, find, and unfollow these accounts.
Use a tool to quickly see who’s not following back and possibly unfollow them: ManageFlitter.
Bonus Marketing Tool
Visuals communicate quickly and get shared often. Word clouds make a great alternative to stock photos for blog posts. Wordle makes it easy to create word clouds, but here’s a marketing tool that goes a step further: Tagxedo makes word clouds in specific shapes. (Note: this requires the Silverlight plugin.)
Use this tool to make Word Clouds in specific shapes: Tagxedo. That’s how we made the puppy word cloud for this post!
Ok, I’m sure you’ve heard of at least a few of these. Did we leave out any good ones? Share your favorite online marketing tools with us and with your fellow readers by leaving a comment below.
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Hi Andy, thanks for sharing this useful list. Unfortunately plagiarism happens a lot, so yes, we are familiar with CopyScape.
My contribution to this great post would be a reporting tool we recently started to make use of. It´s called Douply and creates structured and easy to read reports in no time. Best of all, we can give our clients access to a client side dashboard, in which they can consult the reportings. Overall, our clients are very satisfied with the reports and for us, using this tool saves a lot of time which can be spend on other marketing activities.
You’re quite good at this blogging thing. I learn something in just about every paragraph you’ve ever written.
Additions: Canva (not much of a secret now) – create images for anything; Pinwords – place elegant copy on a pic; Alexa – check how sites stack up for traffic; Orbit Media – learn how to rule the web.
Barry, that means so much coming from you…
To the readers of this blog, if you’re not watching, reading and learning from Barry Feldman (www.feldmancreative.com) I recommend you start doing so immediately. Barry is truly one of the greats.
PS: I’m going to take a close look at Canva now.
Thanks for mentioning Canva! I am going to start using it!
Great list- thanks for putting this together. These are definitely questions that I need to be asking myself more, and I’m sure it’s the same situation for many!
Great enthusiastic post, i hope all the above mentioned steps are great to make a better deal.
Great tips shared for focusing social media marketing program. However, here what I think is also very important –
The landscape of online marketing is changing at such a fast and furious speed that it is almost impossible to know if the same techniques and tools that apply today will work tomorrow. That is why it is important to focus on a comprehensive approach to understand online marketing environment holistically rather than just focus on learning new tools and techniques every day. Visit to my blog post for more information – http://onlinemediastrategy.net
Some of these tools will definitely help me build my social media presence. Thanks for putting together and sharing this list.
My best free tool for Link building: SEO SpyGlass by Link-Assistant.com