Internet Marketing Tools That I Recommend
Being in the Internet Marketing business for almost four years now we have tried many different tools to get my internet marketing jobs done. Whether it is for links, onsite content, websites, or analytics, I have a few tools which we are happy using. If you have any specific questions on different Internet marketing tools don’t hesitate to ask! Always remember to keep your online information secure with a network firewall to prevent cyberattacks. Here the tools by category:
All in One Internet Marketing Tools
Raven Tools
Raven tools is the all in one tool that we are currently using to manage our accounts here at Nelson Internet Marketing. It is easy to use and provides most everything an Internet Marketer would need. Some things in the system may take some time to climb the learning curve which is why we recommend this to in house marketers and small marketing agencies as it is their job to know how to work the tools. This is a great tool, that only costs $99 for an unlimited amount of accounts. Ask us for help on this tool if you need it!
Moz Analytics
Moz is a much more in depth tool that will do rankings for you too. Raven Tools doesn’t provide search rankings. The downside to this all in one Internet marketing tool is that it will only allow for 10 accounts at its lowest price point of $99. This is the tool to use if you have the budget as it has more benefits than raven tools.
Rankings Tools
Advanced Web Rankings
AWR is a great tool. It will track rankings for you in all forms of search. This is the most advanced technology there is for tracking rankings and has the top price to prove it. It is most lucrative to set this program up on a separate computer so that it can crawl with ease. This tool provides the most benefits but it can be overkill. I would recommend this for Internet marketing consultants and agencies but not for small businesses or in house teams.
Bright Local
Bright Local is a very easy tool to use. It is also very affordable with its beginning price point at $20 a month. I would recommend this tool for a small business or an in-house marketing team.
SEO SERP Chrome Extension
This is a great tool for one off rankings check. It is best used for a small lists of ranking checks too. You just click on the button in your chrome browser and input the website you want to check rankings for as well as the keyword you are checking and it populates it within seconds. If you have no budget for rankings this is what I recommend.
Content Management Systems
WordPress
I only recommend WordPress.org if your hosting provider provides it! Make sure you don’t go to wordpress.com to set this up. There is a huge difference when it comes to SEO. You will get a sub-domain if you go to the .com version, which is not SEO friendly. This is a very easy to use system and can be very straight forward to first time website administrators. I highly recommend this platform as you don’t have to be a web developer to implement specific functions on your website. I will even go so far as to recommend that you switch to WordPress.org if you are using something else.
Keyword Research
Google Keyword Planner
This tool is can be found within Google Adwords. Just create an account and go to the keyword planner in the tools tab. This is totally free to set up and very useful. You can get local and global search volume for the keywords you are interested in too. Additionally you can find keyword ideas that you didn’t think of.
SEMRush
SEMRush is best for comparing online competitors. You can find out what your competitors are using for keywords and decide if you would like to compete for them. You can also find out what keywords your website ranks for in general. You can only get limited data if you use the site for free but if you upgrade to the premium version you can get complete data to make Internet marketing decisions with.
Website Analytics
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is by far the best all around tracking tool for anyone with a website. It tracks visits, leads, and gives you performance metrics. It also can provide you with demographics to help you decide who your website should target. It does a whole lot more too.
Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster tools is a tool for webmasters, like you would guess. You can track website queries once you get your website(s) verified. You can also use it to help you set up site maps, structured data, get vague rankings, block site parameters from search, see what keywords are leading your visitors to your site and much more.
Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing webmaster tools helps webmasters for Bing search and is very similar to Google Webmaster Tools.
Online Advertising
Google Adwords
Google adwords has all the tools you would need to get your ad to show up either on the top of search or beside search when a searcher searches for a specific keyword. Google Adwords can also help you with testing titles and marketing messages too.
Bingads
Bingads does the same thing as Google Adwords, except for Bing search.
Social Media Ads
This is a category that I like to bundle all the social media sites under. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and more have their own area where you can get an ad to show up on their respective sites. Just look around and you should find where you can do this! If you need help dont hesitate to ask.
Social Media Management
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a great all around tool to help you post to multiple social media websites. You can schedule posts, tweets, pins and more. It can manage multiple profiles on a single social site too. And it even can give you social analytics and metrics to help you make your social media decisions. It also can integrate with other apps as well.
Link Management
Link Research Tools
Link Research Tools is by far the most in depth tool to use for links and probably should only be used for companies that are serious search marketers. This tool can help you detox bad links, get backlink lists, make link profiles and much more. I would recommend this for large Internet marketing efforts or for marketing agencies. If you can’t make conclusions from using OSE and Majestic SEO below I recomend going with Link Research Tools because it is more straight forward and easy to draw conclusions from.
Open Site Explorer
Open Site Explorer allows you to see how many backlinks there are for your site or your competitor’s sites. This is a great tool if you are working on a budget. There is a lot you can do with the data, like making link profiles, doing competitor link building and putting numbers to the links you have gotten. This is a Moz tool and once you use up the allotted uses for the day you will have to wait until the next day to run more data.
Majestic SEO
Majestic SEO is much more in depth than OSE and will show you links that your site has lost as well as the links that your site currenlty has. There are other more in depth metrics that it shows that OSE doesn’t. If you have the budget and you are concerned with your backlinks get Majestic SEO because it crawls faster and has a larger data base of links crawled compared to OSE.
OnSite SEO Management
Browseo
If you know the basics of onsite optimization, Browseo can help you break your site content into manageable categories on a single page. It will show you exactly what the meta data looks like, if your page has alt tags, if you are using heading tags and more. It can also show you if the page you are optimizing has any hidden text, which violates Google’s terms of service.
WordPress by Yoast
Worpress by Yoast is by far the best plugin to use for onsite SEO if your site uses WordPress. It helps you manage many aspects of onsite optimization like filling in meta data, giving you a way to add authorship, doing quick keyword metrics, helping to optimize your URLs, and much more. This is the number one plugin that I use for SEO on my sites.
Hubspot’s Website Grader
This awesome free tool will give you a grade on how well you are blogging, how well you are optimized, see if you have your social buttons are on your site, check your mobile status, and more! It is a great way to get a first look at what work needs to be done on your website.
Conversion Optimization
Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg will help you to track clicks on your website. It can help you figure out where most of your visitors click on a webpage and then you can change your strategy based on the information it gives. It shows how far visitors scroll down your pages too. You can get a whole lot more data but that is for another time.
Email Marketing
MailChimp
MailChimp is a free email platform until you reach 2,000 subscribers to your email lists. Once that is reached you must pay for the service which is quite a deal. MailChimp, like Aweber below, will help you organize your subscribers, send professional emails, make sign up widgets for your website and more! Additionally, you can also track key metrics like “open rate” too.
Aweber
Aweber isn’t free to start. Aweber can handle large volumes of subscribers though. The price is $19 per month, which is doable if you have a large subscriber list. Aweber also has many email templates to choose from like Mailchimp. Aweber does many of the things that MailChimp does as well.
Misc Tools
Xenu and Screaming Frog
These are great website crawlers and are best used to help you identify technical issues and fix them. Xenu is free to use but offers less technical SEO benefit. Screaming frog requires you to pay a subscription but gives you better data that an Internet marketer can understand better than Xenu. Crawlers are advanced Internet marketing tools, which is why I recommend it only to people who do website marketing themselves.
Feedly
Keeping in touch with your industry can be hard and this tool can help you organize your daily reading. You simply add the websites that you like to read from and every time you login you can read everything from all the different sites. It is a great place to do all your reading at once with out having to put in all the website addresses.
LastPass
This is a password manager that will keep track of all your passwords. All you have to do is make an account and then add all your passwords to it at once or as you go. Then when you want to login it does it for you automatically when you go to a login page, such as Facbook. It makes accessing multiple programs much faster.
Survey Monkey
Survey Monkey is great for when you would like to get answers to your questions. You make a survey and have the general public answer. This isn’t recommended for a specific audience however.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts help you keep track of Search Engine Results pages. Say you wanted to know all changes to the Search Engine Results Page for “Hot Wings”… you just make an alert and Google Alerts will alert you if the first page changes.
Topsy.com
Topsy is a great free tool that will help you manage online mentions on websites and social media. It is great for link building too!
Copy Scape
If you think someone has stolen you content you can check with Copy Scape.
Evernote
Evernote is my favorite app for taking notes. It is very versatile in that you can set up “notebooks.” Each notebook can be for something different such as journaling, employee notes, marketing ideas, meeting notes, class notes and much much more. The amount of creative ways to use this app is limitless.