Marketing Tools

This is a continuously updated page that contains free tools for guidance in search engine marketing and media buying. (Last Update: Jun 22, 2016)

All in one tool

Follow – New (free) all-in-one competitor spying tool. Shows some of your competitor’s traffic sources, demographic data, volume of traffic, estimated online ad spend, and you can watch the video on how it works here.

Analytics

Heap Analytics – Helps you analyze which items clicked on your page or pages viewed caused a sale or lead. It also has funnel analytics. (Free and paid versions).

Thrive Tracker – Advanced PPC tracker. $99-$299 a month. May be installed on your server or for faster redirects, use their version.

CloudFlare‘s domain popularity and trending domains (replaces what Alexa used to do).

Copywriting

Copywriter’s glossary

Typography tool – Quite simply: This tool tells you the best fonts and sizes to make it easy for people to read your content. Supply your font size and width (in pixels). The tool then determines ideal line height, CPL, fonts, font sizes, and width for optimized legibility.

Convertasaurus – Enter in two phrases. It says which will convert better or get more clicks. It analyzes AdWords to get the results, and it seems fairly accurate. For example, “free shipping & free returns” is better than just “free shipping;” “no cost better than “free;” etc.

Demographic tools

Click here to view demographic tools and my tutorial on how to properly use them.

Design

BroswerShots – See how your site looks in multiple browsers. Very helpful; this site has saved my landing page before.

Netrenderer – Fast checker for IE rendering.

IETester – Windows software allows you to use your sites in multiple IE versions.

Mobilizer – See how your site looks in lots of mobile browsers.

FoldTester – Everyone has different screen resolutions, but this tool is an easy way to find out exactly where that crucial fold is. Related post: Tracking: Where is “Above the Fold” Exactly for Each of Your Customers?

IconFinder – You may want to test having a “lock” by your optin form or an arrow as a call-to-action. Icons can help you increase your conversion rate. They have over 160,000 icons in their database.

Screenfly or ViewLikeUs – It shows how your site will appear on multiple browser sizes. Good testing for responsive design.

Devices

iOS version stats – See what percentage of users are on iOS 7.X, 6.X, etc. This is helpful so you can estimate browser capabilities and the style your users are accustomed to.

Images

Free public domain photo websites: unsplash, pixabay, http://piqs.de, and http://www.photl.com

https://www.pexels.com, http://negativespace.co, https://stocksnap.io.

Compfight – Search Flickr by selecting “Commercial” license on the left after typing in a keyword.

PicJumbo – A lot of modern photos for free commercial use.

IM Free – Requires attribution, categorized, with search.

Speed

WebPageTest – See how fast your site loads. Faster it is, the better your conversion rate.

GTMetrix

Search Marketing & SEO tools

Keyword finders

Google AdWords Keyword Tool External – Gives proportions between search requests for certain keywords, shows related keywords, and can help with PPC advertising.

Google SandBox – Gives actual daily clicks.

Overture – Gives actual numbers of search requests for certain keywords and gives related keywords. (I prefer to use this to decide on what keywords I should optimize for. One irritating thing is that it will time out a lot — probably because of a lot of automated requests.)

SEO Book – Uses WordTracker’s estimates and provides a quick way to compare with other sources.

SEO Book’s Misspellings/Typo Generator

Slang Lexicon – Great internet synonym generator.

TouchGraph Google Browser – Finds related sites for a certain key-phrase in a visual format. (Very good way to find out which sites you “need” to get a link from or you should link to.)

Visual Thesaurus

All-in-one SEO tools

SEO-Quake – Checks for links, pages, traffic, keyword density, etc. for the site you are currently browsing. (Download, FireFox Add-on)

SEO for FireFox Extension – Like the above, but requests the information while you are searching.

Link popularity checker

Ahrefs – Large backlink checker. Free and paid versions.

You should note that you can not check backlinks with MSN anymore because of the tons of automated requests they received — they say they’ll put this back up online once they find out another solution. Update: You can now check MSN backlinks — I wrote about it here.

Link Diagnosis – Useful for looking up anchor text.

Mikes-Marketing-Tools – Checks Google, Yahoo & MSN.

SEO Chat – Checks Google, Yahoo, MSN, Teoma/Ask. (Not very reliable.)

Spam-o-meter – Checks to see if a page seems like spam.