5 Best FREE Digital Marketing Tools to Maximise Your Productivity in 2024

Marketing tools are the methods, processes, strategies, resources, technology, and materials that firms and marketing professionals use to build and implement effective marketing campaigns for their products and services. Because your company's marketing campaign is the direct link between the firm and its consumers, it's crucial to select the most successful marketing tools for your customers. There are different various kinds of marketing tools, each of which serves a different function and purpose. Businesses and marketing professionals frequently employ a variety of marketing tools as part of their overall marketing plan.

Consumers' growing usage of the Internet has necessitated the creation of a website for businesses. As a marketing tool, your company's website will serve various purposes. Your company's website may be used to raise brand recognition, educate and inform potential consumers, market products and services, connect with customers, create leads, and close transactions. It's also critical to ensure that your website is optimised for speed, design, functionality, and a variety of devices, including PCs, cellphones, and tablets.

Don't spend more money on digital marketing than you need to! There are a plethora of digital marketing platforms available to assist you cut costs, and today we're going to show you the top 15 best free marketing tools for small businesses.

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a web analytics tool provided by Google that records and reports website traffic. It is now available as a platform within the Google Marketing Platform. After acquiring Urchin in November 2005, Google announced the service. Google Analytics is the most used web analytics service on the internet in 2019. Browsers, browser extensions, firewalls, and other tools can all be used to restrict Google Analytics. Google Analytics has gone through several iterations, and the software is now on its fourth generation, known as GA4. GA4, which is now the default Google Analytics installation, is a rebranded version of the (App + Web) Property, which Google published in a Beta form in 2019. Universal Analytics has been replaced by GA4. A natural interaction with Google's BigQuery is one of GA4's standout features, which was previously only available with the enterprise GA 360.

Google Analytics is used to track website activity of individuals using the site, such as session duration, pages per session, bounce rate, and so on, as well as information on the source of the traffic. It can be used in conjunction with Google Ads, which allows users to design and evaluate online campaigns by monitoring landing page quality and conversions (goals). Sales, lead generation, accessing a given page, or downloading a specific file are examples of goals. Google Analytics has the technique of showing high-level, dashboard-style data to casual users, and more in-depth data deeper down in the report set. With techniques like funnel visualisation, where visitors originated from (referrers), how long they spent on the website, and their geographic location, Google Analytics analysis helps uncover poorly performing pages. More advanced options, such as custom visitor segmentation, are also available. E-commerce reporting in Google Analytics helps track sales activity and performance.

How Google Analytics Work

To get any data from your website into Google Analytics, you must first place the tag on your site. As soon as that tag is properly placed (and don’t worry, we’ll cover that in the next chapter), Google Analytics will start collecting data. The data is then put into reports made up of metrics and dimensions.

Metrics are what produce the numbers you’ll find in the platform. Anything that can be measured with a number is a metric. Think of the number of users, number of purchases, value of conversions, average time on site, etc. A dimension is how metrics can be segmented. Think of the word “by”: Number of users BY source. Average time on site BY landing page. Number of conversions BY device type.

Why choose Google Analytics?

Perhaps the most enticing thing about Google Analytics is that it’s free. This makes the platform available to anyone with a website, which in turn creates a larger community of users to share information and guidance. There are plenty of resources available on how to use Google Analytics, making it accessible for users of all levels.

That’s another advantage: Google Analytics is helpful to analysts at any skill level. With Google Analytics, you can achieve more basic level analysis on your site performance, but there is also opportunity for advanced analysis. Not only do you get information on what marketing channels drive traffic to your site, but you can also see which sites users come from at different times of day, what landing page they arrived at, and how long the page took to load for them.

Also, who wouldn’t want information on their website from the largest search engine on the internet? As search engine marketers, much of the work we do is aimed at pleasing Google. Having a platform that can tell us some of the information Google is tracking on our site is extremely beneficial for strategic planning. Using the numbers in Google Analytics, you’ll be able to make changes to your site with data-driven strategy as opposed to relying solely on intuition.

Lastly, as marketers, we use a lot of Google tools: Search Console, Google Ads, Data Studio, Google Tag Manager, Google Optimize and more. All of these tools integrate seamlessly with Google Analytics.

Get started with a Demo Account

Getting started with the demo account can get you hands-on experience with Google Analytics before you even have a website. The demo account comes loaded with plenty of data to dig in and analyze.

To set up your demo account: 

 

1. Go to analytics.google.com

 

2. Create your account

 

3. Add the demo account

 

We will be using demo account data throughout this guide. Diving into the account and following along will help solidify what you learn. Each section will come with step-by-step instructions, so consider following along using the demo account before applying the learnings to your own website.

 

2. Google Search Console

 

 

Google Search Console is a web service by Google which allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites. 

Until 20 May 2015, the service was called Google Webmaster Tools In January 2018, Google introduced a new version of the search console, with changes to the user interface. In September of 2019, old Search Console reports, including the home and dashboard pages, were removed.

 

 

Search Console offers tools and reports for the following actions:

1. Confirm that Google can find and crawl your site.

2. Fix indexing problems and request re-indexing of new or updated content.

3. View Google Search traffic data for your site: how often your site appears in Google  Search, which search queries show your site, how often searchers click through for those queries, and more.

4. Receive alerts when Google encounters indexing, spam, or other issues on your site.

5. Show you which sites link to your website.

6. Troubleshoot issues for AMP, mobile usability, and other Search features.

 

Who should use Search Console?

 

Anyone with a website! From generalist to specialist, from newbie to advanced, Search Console can help you.

Business owners: Even if you won't be using Search Console yourself, you should be aware of it, become familiar with the basics of optimizing your site for search engines, and know what features are available in Google Search.

SEO specialists or marketers: As someone focused on online marketing, Search Console will help you monitor your website traffic, optimize your ranking, and make informed decisions about the appearance of your site's search results. You can use the information in Search Console to influence technical decisions for the website and do sophisticated marketing analysis in conjunction with other Google tools like Analytics, Google Trends, and Google Ads.

Site administrators: As a site admin, you care about the healthy operation of your site. Search Console lets you easily monitor and in some cases resolve server errors, site load issues, and security issues like hacking and malware. You can also use it to ensure any site maintenance or adjustments you make happen smoothly with respect to search performance.

Web developers: If you are creating the actual markup and/or code for your site, Search Console helps you monitor and resolve common issues with markup, such as errors in structured data.

 

Getting Started with Search Console

If you're ready to spend more time digging into Search Console's reports, learning how Google Search works, and redesigning your site, you can really analyze and customize your site's performance on Google Search. This track assumes that you are familiar with basic SEO practices and terms.

Understand how Google works with your site. There are a lot of things to know about how Google crawls and presents your site content. Start with this guide and learn what you need to know for your specific site.

Browse the list of key tools and reports in Search Console. This list shows the most important tools and reports in Search Console. Be sure you read the full documentation for a tool at least oncebefore you use it; otherwise you might misunderstand some subtle concepts in the tool, which will end up costing you more time and effort in the long run. You can find the full list of reports here.

Learn how impressions, clicks, and position are calculated in Search Console

Take advantage of the online help community, SEO office hours, twitter feed, blog.

 
3. SEMrush

 

 

Semrush is an all-in-one tool suite for improving online visibility and discovering marketing insights. Our tools and reports are able to help marketers that work in the following services: SEO, PPC, SMM, Keyword Research, Competitive Research, PR, Content Marketing, Marketing Insights, Campaign Management.

 

SEMrush is trusted by internet marketers all over the world. It is also used by a number of businesses, big and small. Major companies such as Philips, Forbes, PayPal, Hyatt, etc. use this tool. SEMrush has a massive database of over 46 million domains and 120 million keywords. It tracks so many things, such as the organic position of a domain or landing URL on Google’s SERPs (search engine results pages), copies of AdWords ads and their positions, CPC ads, competitor analysis and so much more.SEMrush helps with your content marketing, and that is the most important thing it does. But before I tell you more about how the SEO tool does it, let us talk a bit about content marketing and why it is so important.

 

Why use SEMrush?

1: More Effective Keyword Research

 

Your keyword strategy should be the bedrock of your content marketing plans. Keywords are how your customers will find you. What SEMrush does is to identify the keyword phrases that are likely to get you the most search traffic. SEMrush arms you with an amazing amount of SEO intelligence and help you with your keyword optimization and content strategy.

 

SEMrush helps you discover the different keyword variations that are associated with a particular root word. This will allow you to get a much better understanding of how people actually search online. So this takes the guess out of the game and helps you to identify user behavior much faster.

 

You can see the average number of searches for each keyword phrase per month on SEMrush. You will be able to see the competition for them, the average prices of a click on a PPC ad (AdWords), how many pages Google has for the search query, and the top-ranking sites on Google for any keyword search query.

 

2: Comparative Competitive Intelligence

 

Before analyzing how well your competitors are doing and what they are doing right, it is important that you should first arrive at a better understanding of what you are doing yourself. When you enter your web address on the SEMrush tool, you will see an overview screen, which tells you all you need to know about the traffic that you are getting, whether it is paid or organic. You can see if your traffic is getting better or worse, and how you are ranking on Google, on a real-time basis. SEMrush sends monthly SEO reports in PDF that leaves you in no doubt at all about your speed of progress and traffic growth over the last 12 to 24 months. Be sure to monitor your dashboard every week and keep a close watch on your progress. 

3: Analyze and Strategize

 

There are tens of millions of blogs out there, many of which are not much different from your own. So, it is very important to watch out for the competition and find out exactly how they are doing. SEMrush allows you to get a deeper look at your competitors as well as at the keywords that they get most of their traffic for. Once you know the keywords that are used by your competitors with the greatest effect, the next step is to make them a part of your own content marketing efforts. Develop content that targets these search terms. SEMrush allows you to build a very successful content marketing strategy that is based on understanding your competition and targeting the traffic that they get for their best keywords.

 

SEMrush does more than just help you analyze your competitors. It allows you to analyze your competitor’s competitors. Basically, it finds out all websites that are ranking well for similar keywords and gives you an exact estimate of the amount of traffic received for the top 20 keywords used by each of these sites. This would give you a very good understanding of their traffic levels and formulate a strategy that takes this into consideration

 

4: Don't Lose Out on Your Existing Traffic

Even as SEMrush helps you get new traffic, it gives you the tools to make sure that you don’t end up losing your existing traffic. Looking after your existing traffic is absolutely essential. You may rank highly for a while because of the new traffic that is coming in, but if you start losing your existing traffic, you won’t stay there for long.

With SEMrush, you can choose what you want to track (your domain), the location for which you want to track your keyword positions for, compare the results with those of your competitors, connect to Google Analytics or Google Search Console to get the additional information you need and add keywords to be tracked. The tool allows you to add 20 top keywords to be tracked from a text file or from the information that you retrieve from Google Analytics or Google Search Console.

5: Find Better Advertising Opportunities

One of the best ways to make money online is to display ads on your blog and to look for other advertising opportunities. There are a number of businesses that pay a lot of money for traffic generated through Google AdWords. However, AdWords can be really expensive for competitive keywords.

A great way to monetize your own blog or website is to reach out to these companies to display their ads on your site or to join their affiliate programs. To become a successful affiliate marketer, you must, first and foremost, create great content. You cannot make money from affiliate marketing without creating content that is informative, interesting and helpful to your readers.

SEMrush plays a vital role here. It looks at the keywords for which you are trying to rank your website or blog and identifies the various businesses on the internet that are paying for pay-per-click ads that are based on these keywords. SEMrush then displays these keywords in a user-friendly chart and connects to the businesses using them. So you will know which company to reach out to while looking for great advertising opportunities.

6: Find Advertising Opportunities Before Your Competitors Do

This follows up on the point made earlier. SEMrush not only helps you find the best advertising opportunities for your business, it helps you find them faster than your competitors. Here’s what SEMrush allows you to find out about the businesses that you want to advertise on your website.

Domains that are paying for the traffic

Common keywords they are bidding for, which your website or blog happens to rank for

Keywords targeted by their ads

Traffic generated by their ads

Cost of driving the traffic through these ads

Once you have this information with you, you will be in a better position to convince these businesses why advertising on your website – which ranks for the keyword that they are trying to target – makes so much sense instead of spending it all on AdWords.

7: Create an Effective Guest Blogging Strategy

Guest blogging is one of the most effective content marketing strategies that will get you great results every time. There are a number of websites that accept guest posts, there are so many of them that identifying the best blogs to carry your guest posts is not easy. 

This is where SEMrush comes in. With SEMrush, you can do your research on a website or a blog where you are considering guest blogging and find out about its strengths and weaknesses. So you will be in a position to know better if guest blogging on these sites would be beneficial to you or not.

8: Handle Panda Updates Better

A number of websites were hit very badly by Google updates such as Panda when they first came out. If you are not careful, you can get hit, too. Panda updates are essentially content filters to the Google algorithm. They weed out any duplicated content or poorly written content with a lot of keyword stuffing and so on. SEMrush performs site audits of your website and identifies things that can get you hit by Panda. So, you can make changes accordingly and make sure that all the loopholes are addressed. 

12: Performs Backlink Analysis

The objective of any content marketing strategy is to ultimately get more inbound links to the content. Links are the currency of the internet. As a content marketer, you must have a link building strategyin place. With SEMrush, you can find out where your competitors are getting their backlinks from and the total number of backlinks they have. You can then use this information to design a more effective backlink strategy for yourself.

SEMrush uses a pie chart to display the backlinks and divides them into dofollow and nofollow links so that you can see how many high quality links any website has, including your own. 

Getting Started with SEMrush

“I enjoy spending hours flipping through complex manuals,” said no one ever. That is why they created the  SEMrush Academy. Think of it like Hogwarts, only you don’t need to be that special to get in. All you need to do is soak in the knowledge from their videos, occasionally take courses, and every once in a while challenge yourself with tests.

Just like the best things in life, our courses, along with many  marketing classes online, are free and will help you and your team make great things happen using SEMrush’s toolkits and reports. Their courses are taught by field experts who love what they do, so things never get boring. After each test you take, you will receive a SEMrush certificate that you can brag about to your colleagues, friends, and acquaintances, along with the peace of mind that comes with knowing you have what it takes to be a SEMrush rock star!

4. Google Keyword Planner

Keyword Planner helps you research keywords for your Search campaigns.
You can use this free tool to discover new keywords related to your business and see estimates of the searches they receive and the cost to target them.
Keyword Planner also provides another way to create Search campaigns that’s centered around in-depth keyword research.

Why Use Keyword Planner

It's important to keep in mind that while Keyword Planner can provide insights into keyword targeting, campaign performance depends on a variety of factors. For example, your bid, budget, product, and customer behavior in your industry can all influence the success of your campaigns.

Getting Started

How to Use Google Keyword Planner

Step 1: Set up a Google Ads Account
Step 2: Access Google Keyword Planner
Step 3: Try the Discover New Keywords Option 
Step 4: Try the Get Search Volumes and Forecasts Option

Step 1: Set up a Google Ads Account

Before you start using Google Keyword Planner, you’ll need a Google account. If you don’t have one, creating an account only takes a few minutes.

Once you’ve created an account, go to the Google Ads home page and click Start Now. Now select your Google account to sign in.

After signing in, Google Ads will ask you to create a campaign. Since we’re not here to spend any money on ads, you can skip this step by clicking Create an account without a campaign.

Next, enter your business information like billing country, time zone, and currency. Once you’ve entered the information, click Submit.

Congratulations, you’ve now created a Google Ads account. Now click Explore Your Account to go to the Google Ads panel.

Step 2: Access Google Keyword Planner

To open Google Keyword Planner, click Tools & Settings on the right top corner. And then from the drop-down menu, select Keyword Planner listed under Planning.

You’ll then see two options:

• Discover new keywords – This option gives you new keyword ideas that you can use to increase your website traffic.
• Get search volume and forecasts – You can use this option to find out the historical trend, search volume, and future forecast for a list of keywords.

We’ll be discussing both the options and how you can use them in our tutorial . Let’s start with discover new keywords.

Step 3: Try the Discover New Keywords Option

After selecting Discover new keywords, you’ll see two tabs: Start with Keywords and Start with a Website.

Start with Keywords

Under start with keywords, you can enter words (example: Google Analytics) or phrases (example: how to use Google Analytics) to find keywords. You can enter up to 10 keywords/phrases, and if you want, you can enter a domain to use as a filter. After entering the search terms, click Get Results.

Start with a Website

If you go with the start with a website option, you can enter a website URL to find keyword ideas. Google Keyword Planner uses the website you entered as a source and brings up search terms for you to use.

It even gives you a choice to search the entire website or a specific page. After entering the URL, click Get Results.

This option is perfect for looking at what your competitors are doing and finding ideas from their keywords. Just enter their website URL and see the keywords they’re working on.

Once you click the Get Results button, Google Keyword Planner will bring up results using the URL or the keywords you entered and suggest lots of new keyword ideas.

For example, when we entered Google Analytics as our search term, the tool showed us 674 keyword ideas available. It also suggests other keywords to broaden your search result.

For each keyword shown by Google Keyword Planner, you’ll see four metrics:

• Avg. monthly searches – This shows a range of how many searches the term receives every month, so you know which keywords get the most traffic.
• Competition – This represents how difficult is it to get an ad placement (usually described as low, medium, or high), but you also use it a basic metric to see the competition on the organic keyword, too.
• Top of page bid (low range) – This shows the lowest price advertisers would pay for a top of page bid.
• Tope of page bid (high range) – This number shows the highest price advertisers would pay for a top page bid.

You can also use additional filters to find new keywords based on location, language, search network, and time period.

Step 4: Try the Get Search Volumes and Forecasts Option

Now, let’s take a look at the other option for finding keywords we can choose: Get search volume and forecasts.

Just enter your keywords or phrases in the box, separated by commas or on the next line, and click Get Started.

For the keywords you enter, Google Keyword Planner will forecast the total number of clicks, impressions (how many times your ad would be displayed if you were running ads), overall cost, average position, and the cost-per-click (CPC) you could expect for the next 30 days.

It further breaks down each keyword forecast into individual clicks, impressions, cost, click-through-rate (CTR), and average CPC.

There are no keyword ideas in this report, as it’s meant to display the information for the specific keywords you entered. So, to make the most of this report, head over to the Historical Metrics tab, and you’ll see average monthly searches and competition for each keyword.

Google Keyword Planner is meant for advertisers, but it has a lot of SEO value. For starters, it’s 100% FREE! And it offers a good starting point to find keywords for your business.

You can look up individual search terms or enter a website address to see keywords. The bidding values and the competition level is great for understanding how lucrative the keywords are. It helps you select monetary keywords that can help you increase sales.

On the other hand, if you’re looking for detailed information about keywords and your competition, you might want to use some of the alternatives below.

How to Choose Keywords Using Google Keyword Planner

Choosing which keywords to focus on can be hard, but choosing the right ones can make or break your SEO strategy and your organic traffic numbers.

In general, there are a few best practices to use when choosing keywords:

1. Choose a variety of keywords that are both more and less competitive. It’ll take you longer to rank for the more competitive ones, whereas you might be able to rank for the less competitive ones sooner. This gives you some balance between getting traffic sooner and later.
2. Dive further into each keyword before targeting it with content. Use another keyword research tool and your own Google searches to expand your research. Look for keyword variations, “people also ask” questions, and other related keywords or topics that you might want to roll into your content.
3. Don’t give up on keywords because they don’t have a huge search volume.Sure, you want to target keywords with some volume, but if it’s a solid topic for your site, cover it anyway. Organic traffic isn’t the only type of traffic! You can also create content that’s perfect for newsletters or social media but doesn’t have a huge organic search volume. At least, not yet!

5. Hotjar

Hotjar is a powerful tool that reveals the online behavior and voice of your users. By combining both Analysis and Feedback tools, Hotjar gives you the ‘big picture’ of how to improve your site's user experience and performance/conversion rates.
The Analysis tools allow you to measure and observe user behavior (see what users do) while the Feedback tools enable you to "hear" what your users have to say (the Voice of User). To improve your site's user experience and performance/conversion rates, check out a complete write-up on What is Hotjar? in their blog.

What is a heatmap?

A heat map (or heatmap) is a graphical representation of data where values are depicted by color. Heat maps make it easy to visualize complex data and understand it at a glance.

The practice we now call heat maps is thought to have originated in the 19th century, where manual gray-scale shading was used to depict data patterns in matrices and tables.

The term heatmap was first trademarked in the early 1990s, when software designer Cormac Kinney created a tool to graphically display real-time financial market information. Nowadays, heatmaps can still be created by hand, using Excel spreadsheets, or with specialist software like Hotjar.

What is a website heat map?

Website heatmaps visualize the most popular (hot) and unpopular (cold) elements of a webpage using colors on a scale from red to blue.
By aggregating user behavior, heatmaps facilitate data analysis and give an at-a-glance understanding of how people interact with an individual website page—what they click on, scroll through, or ignore—which helps identify trends and optimize for further engagement. Heat maps also usually display the average fold, which is the portion of the page people see on their screen without scrolling as soon as they land on it.

Why you should use Hotjar for your website

If you own or manage a website that you’re trying to improve, you’ll probably value any tool that:

1. Gives you clear and visual data points about what’s happening on your site

2. Helps you get some of the context about why people behave the way they do

3. Does the above quickly without requiring a steep learning curve

4. Is easy to get buy-in for and show the value of

Hotjar does all of the above. Let’s look at each of these four areas in more detail: 

Step 1: Get started
Start creating your first heatmap by clicking on the ‘NEW HEATMAP’ button:

Step 2: Name your Heatmap
Give your heatmap a memorable name (like Homepage, Pricing Page, or Homepage v2 November) so you know exactly what page you are tracking:

Step 3: Customize your Pageviews
Select how many pageviews you want to capture in your heatmap:[Note: the number of pageviews you can collect will depend on your plan. With the free plan, you get 1000 pageviews.]

Step 4: Select the Target Page(s)
Choose which page(s) you want the heatmap to capture (don’t know where to put your heatmap? Keep reading to the end of this chapter):Step 5: set your heatmaps live
Review your configuration, save it, and set your heatmap live: And that’s it!