However, with so many different online marketing tools available, it’s sometimes hard to know where to start. This is why in this opportunity, we have compiled 25 of the best options used by marketing consultants on a daily basis.

We will divide these tools into categories, according to their core features. Let us begin by discussing what’s arguably the most important category: marketing analytics tools.

Analytics Tools

Arguably, half (or more) of good marketing efforts is about proper understanding of your audience—so, analytics—.

With that being said, having the right analytics tools in your marketing arsenal is a must, and here are the best ones available today:

1. Google Analytics

A fairly obvious choice, but a very important one nonetheless.

The best part of Google Analytics is that it is totally free. Well, there’s the ultra premium Google Analytics 360 that can cost more than $100,000 annually, but for most small to mid-sized businesses (and even most large businesses), the standard version is more than enough.

Google Analytics allows us to analyze various performance metrics on our website, especially regarding our audience. These metrics include audience demographics, keywords/search queries, actions taken by visitors, bounce rate, and so on.

2. Built-In Social Media Analytics

Too often we look in other places while what we need is already on our hands. Most major social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter, among others, offer their own built-in analytics. More often than not, they are actually the best compared to other third-party social media analytics tools for the respective platforms.

The key to social media marketing is properly understanding your audience and how you can fulfill their needs, and tracking various user metrics with these built-in tools will help you in this aspect.

3. MixPanel

MixPanel is often considered as the main competitor/alternative of Google Analytics because indeed, both of them have similar core functionalities—at least on the surface—. However, there are several major differences where we can use MixPanel for different purposes.

For instance, Google Analytics mainly works by tracking user’s behavior around page views, while with MixPanel we can track various visitor actions—or “events”. MixPanel can update real-time data regarding these actions in mere seconds.

Meaning, if your marketing revolves around tracking real-time data like conversions, first-trial registrations, and so on, MixPanel can be a better choice.

4. Sumo

Formerly known as SumoMe, Sumo is an excellent all-in-one suite of analytic tools covering many different areas. Sumo especially focuses on content-related metrics like showing where your visitors click on your site, how much of your content they actually read, and so on.

If your marketing is content-heavy, Sumo is a great analytics tool to help optimize your content, increasing your site’s traffic and conversions in the process.

Besides its analytics function, Sumo also covers useful automation features like the email list builder and easy-to-use CTA buttons. A very useful tool especially for blogs and websites with heavy focus on content.

5. Whatagraph

Whatagraph is a comprehensive marketing data platform designed to help marketers easily understand and present data from various sources. It simplifies the process of creating intuitive reports and demonstrating the ROI of marketing campaigns.

The platform enables seamless connection to a wide range of data sources. Users can transform and prepare data for intuitive visualizations, create stunning presentations with a user-friendly drag-and-drop dashboard, and automate the sharing of reports. With over 45 integrations, Whatagraph makes generating reports using your existing data sources straightforward. Notable integrations include MailChimp, Semrush, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, TikTok Ads, Google Sheets, BigQuery, Ahrefs, GA4, and more.

Pricing options include the ‘Essential’ plan, starting at $249 monthly. This plan includes up to 20 source credits, 5 users, access to pre-made templates, more than 45 integrations, and the capability to transfer data to BigQuery, among other features. For more demanding users, ‘Advanced’ and ‘Custom’ plans are available. These offer additional source credits and users, custom branding, and a consolidated dashboard feature that provides a unified view of all your clients’ KPIs.

Social Media Marketing Tools

In the world dominated by social media, obviously we can’t miss social media marketing in our marketing efforts. Thankfully, a lot of useful—if not, powerful— tools are available to assist us here, such as:

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is certainly one of the most popular social media marketing tools available, with the core feature of monitoring and scheduling all your social media profiles in one streamlined dashboard.

Besides its automation functionalities, Hootsuite also offers analytics features to track the performance of your social media campaigns. The key feature, however, is the ability to schedule hundreds of posts of at once to automate your social media presence.

2. Buffer

Often compared to Hootsuite and with good reasons, mainly because both of them are centered on post-scheduling and automation.

Admittedly, Hootsuite offers more features, integrations, and even more supported platforms. However, this also means that Buffer is a simpler tool that is easier to use.

Buffer also offers analytics features, that is also simpler and focused on the performance of your posts.

3. Tailwind

Tailwind especially focuses on Instagram and Pinterest, and you can use it to schedule posts, monitor conversations, finding interesting content, and as usual, analyze your performance, among others.

The scheduling and automation features are pretty handy, as you can create an optimal schedule while using the analytics data like engagement, reach, and traffic.

With Instagram being one of the most popular social media platform today, Tailwind is a great choice if your business is active on both Pinterest and Instagram.

4. Socialbakers

An A.I.-driven social media marketing tool that especially focuses on analyzing audience behavior. With Socialbakers, you can custom-tailor your posts with more personalizations, improving engagement and conversion in the process.

Socialbakers is also capable of managing different social media platforms in one dashboard, complete with a real-time analytics feature.

With personalizations becoming increasingly important nowadays, Socialbakers is an excellent tool that can help you understand your audience better.

SEO and Content Marketing Tools

Yes, SEO is still alive and well, if not even more important than ever with the saturated market. However, it is also true that SEO has evolved to be more complicated than ever, and this is where these tools can help you.

It is also worth noting that SEO and content marketing are inseparable from each other. So, here are some of the best SEO and content marketing tools suggested by SEO expert Mike:

1. Yoast SEO

If your site is WordPress-based, Yoast is an excellent plugin that can “crawl” your website or blog, give suggestions where you can manually optimize your site, and give automated optimizations in some aspects.

This allows Google an easier time to index your site, as well as optimizing other important technical aspects like keyword density, meta description optimization, readability, and many others.

A very useful SEO tool so you don’t have to manually assess your site every time.

2. Feedly

Content monitoring is a very important aspect of content marketing: by knowing what’s currently trending and what kinds of content are effective, we can properly develop our own content.

With that being said, Feedly is simply one of the best content monitoring tools available. It’s easy to use with its intuitive and minimalist interface, and you can easily customize your preference to get the content you need.

3. Google Alerts

Google Alerts, as the name suggests, will send an alert to your email when a certain topic or keyword showed up on the web, according to your preference.

This is very useful when you are monitoring a certain topic or keyword. You can also get alerts when someone mentioned your brand, or even your competitors. This will be useful in monitoring the current trends, engagements, and your overall brand awareness.

Again, monitoring other content pieces is often the best approach in planning your own content marketing, and Google Alerts as a totally-free tool is a must.

4. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is an A.I.-powered content tool offering a pretty well-rounded set of features. However it focuses on topic suggestion by analyzing topics and/or your competition.

For instance, BuzzSumo can analyze the most shared content of your chosen topic on different social media platforms, this can give you a great insight on what kinds of content to develop. You can also check what kinds of content shared by your chosen influencers, which can really help in building relationships and getting those valuable backlinks.

BuzzSumo has been one of the most popular content marketing tools for some time, and with great reasons. Very well-rounded and very useful for content research and topic generation.

5. Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is technically a tool designed for Google Adwords—Google’s keyword-based advertising publication—, but is very useful for content marketing and SEO purposes. Why? Simply because it’s so good at what it does: researching and planning keywords.

With Google Keyword Planner, you an especially find out about the search volume of your target keywords, how the trend changes over time, and suggestions for topics and other keywords.

Again, being a totally free tool, there’s simply no reason not to use Google Keyword Planner.

6. Moz Link Explorer

Formerly known as Open Site Explorer, Link Explorer is a totally free tool from Moz to check domain and page authority, as well as backlinks profile.

Domain authority, in a nutshell, is a metric developed by Moz to predict a website’s SEO performance—namely, how high it will rank on the search engine result page (SERP). It’s not 100% accurate, so we will need to take it with a grain of salt, but it’s still useful to assess your current optimizations.

You can also use Link Explorer to analyze your competitors’ websites, which can be a vital step in your overall SEO efforts.

7. Social Mention

Similar to Google Alerts, but as the name suggests, this tool focuses on social media mentions. With Social Mention, you can keep track of the social media presence of your brand, listen to the conversations, and analyze your current performance to make your improvements.

Social Mention is also very easy to use: simply type in your search query, and you’ll get various data for the query like reach, sentiment, engagement levels, and so on.

8. SEMRush and/or Ahrefs

SEMRush and Ahrefs are similar tools—and direct competitors— to each other with similar core functionality: keyword research. Both also offer similar pricing ranges starting at $99/month. Being the “premium” keyword research tools, they offer more features compared to Google Keyword Planner, and so they are worth a shot if you are serious about keyword research.

While they offer similar core features in many ways, generally SEMRush a little better at keyword research, while Ahrefs is stronger in the backlinks research aspect.

Email Marketing and Automation Tools

Even in 2015 with all the newer marketing channels, platforms, and technologies, email marketing is still one of the most effective promotional channels out there. One of the biggest reasons is the fact that a huge majority of people simply prefer email messages to receive promotional messages from brands.

So, email marketing is still very important, and with the increasing demands for personalizations, also comes a great number of email automation tools.

Here are some of the best email marketing tools available today:

1. Omnisend

Omnisend is an email marketing and automation tool created mainly for ecommerce brands. It helps businesses run email, SMS, and push notification campaigns from one place, which makes it a good choice for stores that want to keep their marketing simple and organized. The interface is also easy to understand, so it works well both for beginners and for growing teams. Another good thing about Omnisend is that it offers useful automation features built for online stores. You can set up ready-made workflows for welcome emails, abandoned carts, order updates, and follow-up messages, which can save time and help increase sales. It also comes with signup forms, audience segmentation, and product recommendations, making it a practical option for ecommerce marketing.

2. SendinBlue

SendinBlue is a well-rounded tool dedicated for email and SMS marketing. It comes with a minimalist interface that is very easy to use, making it an ideal tool even for email marketing beginners.

Another good thing about SendinBlue is that the free version is actually useful. You can input unlimited contacts on the database, which is a huge plus, and you can send up to 9,000 emails per month. For most small businesses, this number is enough, and the premium plan is fairly affordable, starting from $25/month for 40,000 emails/month.

3. ConvertKit

ConvertKit is designed with the focus for content marketing, for bloggers, podcasters, Youtubers, and other content producers.

With that being said, ConvertKit is especially focused on user experience, ease of use, and personalization. You can create attractive forms and CTAs, as well as personalized emails for individual email subscribers.

ConvertKit is also great in its automation features that are easy to understand even for complete beginners. There’s a visual automation builder where we can build our automation campaign with just our mouse clicks.

4. Drip

Drip focuses on ecommerce CRM, so there are unique features to help convert site visitors into email subscribers, and in turn,into purchasing customers. So, Drip is especially focused on generating conversions, especially by sending automated email at the right time based on the prospect’s behavior and intent.

For example, we can analyze important behaviors like returning visitors, abandoning carts, people who took a certain actions, and so on to custom tailor the messages and plan a schedule.

Drip also offers great third-party integrations, for example, the ability to display Facebook Ads.

5. MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing tools available today, and for its reasons.

For instance, MailChimp is very well-rounded with various features like automation, landing pages creation, smart scheduling to send your emails at the right time. It also offers excellent integration with popular third-party platforms. For example, you can easily integrate MailChimp with your WordPress-based site and ecommerce platforms.

Another reason why MailChimp is so popular is its affordability. The free plan allows you to list 2,000 subscribers and send 12,000 emails per month, while the paid plans are offered from just $10 monthly. There are also some good Mailchimp alternatives that can be a better fit for your business.

6. Aweber

A very important aspect of email marketing is actually building that email list—the lead generation phase—. Yet, too often marketers focused on the process of email marketing than actually building a list, and this is where AWeber can help you.

You get all the essential features to grow your email list in AWeber, while there are also the usual email marketing tool features like drag-and-drop newsletter builder, automating features, and conversion focused signup forms.

Landing Page Tools

A very important aspect of digital marketing is the conversion-focused landing page. This is where you convert visitors into qualified leads and convert leads into actual, paying customers.

Thankfully, nowadays there are various tools can can help you design and optimize your landing pages, such as:

1. Unbounce

Unbounce is a pretty well-rounded landing page builder where you can build, test, and optimize custom landing pages as well as other useful features like building a website pop-up.

Very easy to use with its drag-and-drop approach, a lot of built-in templates, and great integration with various popular marketing tools like WordPress, AWeber, and MailChimp, among others.

2. GetResponse

As the name suggest, GetResponse is especially focused on conversion optimizations. With GetResponse, you can easily set-up a high-converting landing pages that is also mobile-responsive (which is very important nowadays).

GetResponse also features built-in analytics and A/B testing feature. Excellent third-party integrations with Facebook and Adwords, among other platforms, and there are also useful extra features like a webinar builder and email marketing tools.

3. HubSpot

HubSpot is a popular choice not only as a landing page builder, but as a well-rounded digital marketing tool.

For instance, you can build, modify, and optimize a website some scratch without any IT knowledge, and same goes with the landing page builder. HubSpot is easy to use and the extra features from SEO and content creation tools to A/B testing features to lead capture form builder are great for those who need an all-in-one marketing tool.

A downside for HubSpot is that it’s fairly expensive, but you can just your tier package according to your needs.

4. Leadpages

Another popular landing page builder choice where you can easily build a landing page with a drag and drop approach.

A lot of (more than 160) templates, great integration with 40+ marketing tools, and is relatively easy to use. The form builder is also very intuitive and you can use it to create high-converting forms.

Leadpages is relatively old and the interface is relatively outdated, but offers some nice features with an affordable price.

End Words

Obviously, there are still many more digital marketing tools available on the market, and even categories that haven’t been listed on this guide. However, these recommendations can give you a good starting place to understand how to invest wisely in digital marketing tools, according to your business’s needs and purposes.

The post 25 of The Best Digital Marketing Tools appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Thankfully, there are now a lot website analysis and SEO tools that can assist you in this long, often arduous process, and on this guide we will discuss 10 of them, which in our opinion, are some of the best ones available.

Using these tools properly can turn your SEO strategy into the next level, allowing you to find out the areas where your site is currently lacking and how to optimize them further.

Without further ado, let us begin with the first one.

1. SEMRush

For most SEO practitioners, the name SEMRush shouldn’t be a stranger, being one of the most popular (and powerful) SEO tools available.

SEMRush, in essence, is a dashboard with various detailed reports of a web domain. Simply enter the site’s URL on SEMRush’s search bar, and you will get various information of the site from what keyword it is currently ranking, the search volume for that keyword, and so on.

SEMRush also offers various SEO-related features from the Site Audit tool, On-Page SEO checker, and their famous SEO Toolkit. The SEO Toolkit is extremely handy as you can get detailed reports on your competitors’ SEO approaches, identify your competitors’ traffic sources, identify keyword and backlink gaps, as well as in-depth keyword, backlink, and traffic analytics.

Very easy to use even for a complete SEO beginner, and although we can’t say that SEMRush’s packages are cheap, they are definitely worth it if you are serious about SEO.

Main Purpose: Keyword research and competitive SEO analysis

Key Features:

• Analyze various keywords and which ones will be valuable for your brand
• Easily find out the top competitors in your niche and who’s ranking on your target keywords
• Track your own target keywords and monitor the results of your SEO efforts
• Determine the most valuable keywords of your competitors

2. Google Search Console/Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools, and especially Google Search Console is very effective, and totally free tool for your SEO initiatives. In general, the Webmaster Tools are especially useful because they allow you to see your site just as Google sees it.

There are several tools included in Google Webmaster Tools. For example, there’s the Fetch as Google tool, allowing you to analyze how Google will crawl a specific URL. This is critical especially in measuring the SEO performance of your site.

Another useful tool is the Structured Data Testing Tool and Structured Data Markup Helper. Implementing structured data is now a relevant part of the SEO game, allowing you to be featured in rich snippets, which will translate to more traffic.

The list of useful tools don’t end just there, and considering the Google Webmaster Tools is totally free, you should definitely make the most of it.

Main Purpose: various aspects of site analysis

Key Features:

• Various analytics tools by Google. Meaning, you can see everything as Google sees it, which is extremely relevant for SEO

3. Ahrefs

In many ways, Ahrefs is quite similar to SEMRush, as both are powerful keyword analytic tools. A lot of similar features are shared between both tools. Both tools are great for keyword research, capable for processes like SEO competitive analysis, backlink analysis, topic ideas, and of course, keyword analysis.

The clear difference between the two is how Ahrefs shines in the backlink analysis department, while SEMRush has more powerful keyword analysis tools overall.

So, Ahrefs, is especially useful if you are looking for a backlink analysis tool, as many SEO practitioners regarded Ahrefs as the absolute best in this aspect.

In general, Ahrefs is a more robust and complete SEO analytics tool if you are looking to invest on one of them. However, Ahrefs and SEMRush working hand-in-hand, along with the other tools we have on this list, will be a more ideal approach.

Main Purpose: backlink analysis and keyword research, all-in-one SEO analysis tool

Key Features:

• Extremely powerful backlink analysis tools to check your competitor’s backlink, the quality of backlinks, and so on
• Decent keyword analysis tools and topic ideation
• A complete all-in-one SEO toolkit package

4. Check My Links

Check My Links is a Google Chrome plugin with one purpose, which as the name suggests, check all the links that crawl through your site to look for broken links.

Broken links, both internal and external is not a direct ranking signal for SEO. However, it can severely hurt the overall user experience, which can affect dwell time and bounce rate, which are direct ranking signals.

Check My Links as a tool is extremely easy to use, and will be extremely useful when your content has a lot of links.

Also, checking for broken links can be an effective link building tactic, a strategy often referred as “broken link building”. Here, you can analyze sites that can potentially give you quality inbound links, and check whether they have broken links. You can inform the webmaster regarding this link, and offer them to link your site instead,

Considering Check My Links is totally free, this is a very valuable tool to have in your SEO arsenal.

Main Purpose: check for broken links

Key Features:

• Checking for broken links in a matter of seconds, extremely easy to use

5. HubSpot Website Grader

Hubspot’s Website Grader is a web app capable to generate a personalized, detail report on several important metrics like:

• Whether your site is easily indexable and crawlable by Google and other search engines, as well as whether your site can be easily found by human readers
• Analyze your site’s page size, loading speed, and other key SEO metrics
• Analyze mobile-responsiveness of your site
• Analyze various security aspects of your site like SSL certificate. Security is a very important visitors’ concerns nowadays, and might affect your overall traffic.

Hubspot’s website grader is also very easy to use, simply input your URL and email address, then you’ll get a score of 1 to 100 along with a detailed report. You get all this in just a matter of seconds.

Also, Hubspot offers various SEO tools to help your SEO activities, and let’s not forget the fact that HubSpot’s blog is an excellent information source not only for SEO but also for other marketing activities.

Key Purpose: site performance analysis

6. BuzzStream

BuzzStream is a relatively affordable tool to manage your outreach efforts in getting more backlinks.

Backlinks are extremely important ranking signal for Google SERP. Yet, the outreach process in getting these inbound links can be painful and difficult, quite similar to cold calling. BuzzStream can significantly help you in this arduous process from researching the relevant site/people, designing an effective email message, and keep track on who have accepted your link requests.

An extremely important feature is how BuzzStream can effectively identify outreach candidates based on their industry and how they are engaging in various different social media platforms. So, you can effectively determine the quality of the inbound links.

Main Purpose: link building management

Key Features:

• Identify key candidates of inbound link outreach
• Keep track of the inbound link candidates that have accepted your link requests, and those who don’t
• Design effective email messages for your outreach

7. Upcity SEO Report Card

Upcity’s SEO Report Card is a free tool to analyze how your site currently fares against your competitors’ sites.

Considering it’s totally free, except your contact information, the SEO Report Card offers a fairly detailed report covering various SEO aspects like:

• Inbound Link Analysis: a fairly detailed report on the total number of sites that link your site
• Rank analysis: a report on where your page(s) currently rank on major search engines. When you first enter your information, you will need to enter a target keyword. Your report will be based on this keyword
• On-site optimization analysis: mainly covering the keyword density throughout your page
• Indexing analysis: a report of how many pages on your site have been indexed by the search engines
• Accessibility analysis: from your site’s load time and whether it’s easily indexable by Google
• Authority metrics: a report on your current level of authority

Main purpose: site analysis

8. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

SEO Spider by Screaming Frog is a very powerful, and relatively affordable tool for any SEO practitioners.

As the name suggests, the SEO Spider crawls your website according to your URL, and analyze the site for important SEO issues. Doing this process manually can be extremely frustrating and time-consuming, especially for large sites. With SEO spider, you can do it in just a matter of minutes instead of hours or even days.

SEO Spider is also fairly easy to use with an intuitive interface. If necessary, you can export parts or all of the report into an Excel sheet. This is also useful as you can upload .csv file format to various SEO tools.

You can use SEO Spider for free with several feature limitations like limited configurations, source code, and you can only scan 500 URLs per site. You can also use the full-version of the tool for around $160 annually.

Main Purpose: site analysis

9. Moz’s Pro Tools

Moz Pro is an all-in-one SEO suite widely regarded as one of the best in the business. The catch? it’s not exactly on the affordable side, as the cheapest package will cost you $99 monthly.

However, if you are serious about your SEO effort, the Moz Pro toolkit will be totally worth it, offering virtually anything you need to monitor and control your SEO tactics in just one dashboard. The Moz Pro can analyze various ranking signals from search visibility, competitor rankings, keyword analysis including local keywords, to the highly advanced SERP features.

Also unique to Moz Pro is the Crawl Test Tool. Here, Moz’s web crawler -the RogerBot- will crawl your URL and analyze up to 3,000 links. This is a pretty powerful feature on its own, and you will also receive a very detailed email report detailing the data for every crawled page.

As mentioned, not a cheap tool, but a great investment if you are serious about SEO.

Main Purpose: very detailed site analysis

Key Features:

• Virtually everything you need on SEO analytics from ranking signal analysis, keyword analysis, backlink analysis, traffic analysis to an advanced site crawler

10. Found SEO Audit Tool

This SEO Audit Tool by Found is a totally free and easy to use site analysis tools. With the SEO audit tool, you can easily identify common SEO issues on a specific URL where you can quickly take action to fix them.

As mentioned, it is very easy to use. Simply enter your site URL, and you will get an automated SEO audit report covering three main aspects:

• External link analysis: analyzing both the quantity and quality of your external links
• Content analysis: checking the content optimization aspects like keyword density and META data
• Technical: on-site optimization factors like XML sitemap and various others

Once you are done, you can also download the result as PDF for documentation and sharing purposes.

Main purpose: as the name suggests, SEO audit

End Words

The 10 SEO tools we have shared above are certainly not the only ones available. However, they are among the best and the most effective ones to assist you with your SEO activities. Keep in mind that each tool has its own advantages and disadvantages, covering different aspects of SEO. The key here is to combine several tools in one integrated approach to cover the different areas. While SEO can be a long-term, difficult process, having the right tools can tremendously help you. You can also request an SEO consultation to ensure you use them the right way.

The post Top 10 Website Analysis and SEO Tools You Should Try appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.