If you run all of your own digital marketing and social media efforts, you know how important it is to use your time efficiently while putting your best foot forward. Thankfully, there’s a whole world of free marketing tools beyond the basics like Google Analytics out there to help busy people like you do the job well. Here are five marketing tools you need in your life that you might not have heard of.
1. Siteliner
Siteliner is a great tool for checking if your site has duplicate content, which is content that exists in more than one place on the Internet. It’s good to avoid duplicate content because search engines reward unique content, and duplicates are not unique. Simply type in your URL and Siteliner will give you details on how much duplicate content you have, breaking down the number of matching pages and matching words. It also shows you other helpful site metrics like a rundown of your broken links and your average page load time.
2. Pablo by Buffer
If you want to improve your Instagram game or your photo game in general, Pablo by Buffer is a handy tool. It allows you to easily overlay text onto images, either one of the 50,000+ Pablo provides or ones you upload yourself. Super handy are the templates the site provides so you can resize images for Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook or Twitter. You can also easily insert a logo or graphic. Be careful — this tool is pretty fun to play around with!
3. UberSuggest
UberSuggest is an easy-to-use keyword research tool that generates hundreds of keywords that you might not find through Google Keyword Planner. You just type in a keyword, hit “suggest” and scroll through the hundreds of keyword suggestions to see what you like. The word cloud function offers a nice visualization of the most common keywords your search generated.
4. Answer the Public
If you have writer’s block or are struggling to find a topic to write about for your next blog post, Answer the Public is a great tool to turn to. When you type in a search term, the site generates potential search queries that resemble a search engine’s autocomplete function. For example, check out this Answer the Public search for “lighting design.” Along with cool graphics showing various extensions of your keyword and questions revolving around it, the tool also generates a long list of extended keywords with words that might follow your keyword, organized alphabetically.
5. Contrast Ratio
An often-overlooked component of site design is accessibility. An important aspect of this is the contrast between your text and the background, which needs to be at a certain level in order to be readable. Text with adequate contrast is simply easier on the eyes for anyone to read, and is especially important for those who are visually impaired or colorblind. Tools like Lea Verou’s Contrast Ratio allow you to check if you’re meeting accessibility standards with the colors you’re choosing. You can apply these same principles of color use to any marketing materials you share, whether it’s photos or promotional materials on your social media or a flyer for an event.
As a business owner, it can be hard to balance running a successful brick-and-mortar with managing digital marketing initiatives — but you can do it with the right tools at your disposal. What marketing tools make your life easier? Let us know in the comments!
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