9 of the Best Free Digital Marketing Tools

Digital marketing is an important strategy in growing and maintaining your business. There are a whole host of tools at your disposal. Most tools require a subscription or outright purchase, but some tools are free to use and just as effective as those paid ones.

If you’re just starting and need something to get your brand marketed, these resources are the perfect starting point. However, as your company continues to grow, it’s not a sign of failure to bring in qualified experts. For more information, check out our previous article on when to bring in outside help for your business. In the meantime, here are some of the best free tools for digital marketing available on the web.

SEO and Metrics

SEO, or search engine optimization, in its simplest form, is the process of improving website traffic through SEO best practices, such as keyword research and any technique by which to generate organic traffic to your website. There are plenty of tools to help you maximize your website’s traffic. Using SEO best practices is just half the battle. You want to be able to measure how effective your SEO strategy is performing. Here are some free tools to measure your website’s performance. Though these are free versions of SEO web tools, these certain tools also have a paid version that you can purchase for more in-depth research.

Google Lighthouse
Google Lighthouse is a free web tool that runs diagnostics on your web apps and website. Lighthouse also comes with an extension, so you can run reports and measure how well your site is doing. This tool measures website performance overall and gives you the diagnostics behind the activity on your website.

Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a spider crawler that crawls your website for free with up to 500 links with an unpaid version. Spider crawlers comb through a website and look through all of the technical code to find things like broken links and duplicate content. There is also an option for you to export this information to create a sitemap to better understand the construction of your website.

SEOquake
SEOquake comes as a free plugin for your web browser. The data collected is organic, and the tool provides other data such s keyword density, internal and external link analysis, and an SEO audit of your website. There are also stats for social media impact. Through this plugin, you can find any technical issues plaguing your website, and you cut down on manual input of information from page to page.

Blogs

Your website’s only chance of staying relevant and ranking on a Google search is the constant production of content on your site. Blogs help with content by providing useful and relevant information about topics relating to your industry. Good writing has to be about what you know, and familiarizing yourself with digital marketing concepts will help you grow your brand further. Here are some free blogs that provide good strategies for outlining your blog content.

Hubspot Blogs
Hubspot is an incredible resource for business owners, as it is comprised of experts in the digital marketing realm. Not only do they provide resources such as online learning and web tools, but their comprehensive blogs cover a wide range of topics from the most complicated parts of SEO to the very basic steps in consolidating your Google sheets. Just browsing through their website is a great resource and one that should be taken advantage of immediately.

Backlinko
Backlinko is a site dedicated to the best SEO practices. Their free blog outlines the best techniques and effective digital marketing strategies for businesses of all kinds. Their focus is on link building within your website and how establishing authority with your domain. Although they cover all aspects of digital marketing, their primary focus is better to link building and the tools you will need to accomplish this.

Ahrefs Blog
Ahrefs is a known SEO marketing tool for keyword research and gauging metrics. It would stand to reason that going to the experts for marketing advice is your best bet. Ahrefs’s blogs are focused on digital marketing topics, and the common problems and setbacks people experience. Their site features case studies and exhaustive tutorials to provide you resources you need on your digital marketing journey.

Content

The more useful content you produce, the more effective and trustworthy your website becomes, and this helps with a higher ranking. You don’t have to do this alone, and there are plenty of resources to help get you started. To get a good idea of how to format your content, here are some useful tools to help your content journey.

Evernote
Evernote is a note-taking app with lots of features to help you organize and stay on task. With Evernote, you can save notes as written or typed texts, pictures, websites, Pinterest pages, and more. It also has a plugin for you to add to your web browser so that you can easily clip and bookmark pages and take “clips” for your notes. Though it has an upgraded version, the free version is plenty effective.

Grammarly
Grammarly is a web-based grammar checker. It goes beyond spellchecker in that Grammarly smartly analyzes your writing to create clear and concise communication. The free version has a ton of features for you to take advantage of.

Google Docs
Google Docs is simply a web version of Microsoft Word, except it’s free. It has a lot of the same actions to perform as Microsoft Word does. With Google Docs, however, you can easily share and edit documents with others, such as members of your team. Collaboration with Google Docs is easy and the user interface is simple. Every document created is saved to your Google Drive for continual access.

There are a lot of free web tools available for you to take advantage of for your operations. With a plethora of tools that perform a myriad of functions, you will take on the challenge of running your business with a bit more confidence and ease.