When it comes to optimizing your website, there’s a multitude of tools to choose from. Additionally, researching tools can quickly become time-consuming, and many of the tools available are expensive. However, we believe optimizing your website doesn’t have to break the bank. That’s why we’ve curated a list of free marketing tools for building, optimizing, and measuring website performance.
Google Analytics
In our opinion, Google Analytics is — hands down — the most valuable free tool available to measure your website. It provides essential insights for website traffic, acquisition sources, user behavior, landing pages, demographics, and more. Using Google Analytics, you’ll be able to better understand your audience and their behaviors and what’s working and what’s not. You can also do deep investigations into sudden drops or spikes in traffic or set and measure specific goals, such as ecommerce sales or lead conversions right from the free dashboard. If you’re not already using Google Analytics to measure you website’s traffic, set it up NOW! If you do already have it configured, be sure you’re checking in on your website’s health here regularly.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is another super valuable tool that helps glean insights into your website’s search results. The dashboard shows you which of your website’s pages are indexed in SERPS (search engine results pages), identifies crawl errors to fix, and displays what search queries led to impressions and clicks on your website. You can also submit and resubmit sitemaps to prompt Google to crawl and index pages on your site. Google Search Console is a must for measuring and optimizing your website’s organic search traffic!
Moz & SEMRush
Moz and SEMRush are both all-in-one SEO platforms with both paid and free tools available. Among Moz’s free tools are its link explorer and keyword research functions. SEMRush also has a few freebies available, including a keyword research tool and page audit function. You do have to create free accounts on both of these sites to access these free features, but trust us: it’s worth it for the gems you’ll find inside!
Hotjar
Hotjar is a website heat mapping tool that allows you to better understand how users behave on your site, including where they scroll, linger, click, and engage with certain areas or features. With the free version, you will have access to track and view 35 daily sessions and up to 1,050 recordings per month. Plus, there are no limits to the number of heatmaps you can create. You can even collect live site feedback through surveys or incoming feedback widgets to gather UX insights in real time.
Measuring your website’s performance is just the first step toward practicing smarter marketing habits. The tools above are the ones we use regularly at Huckleberry Branding for our own website optimization and SEO purposes. If you’re not sure where to start, just take it one step or tool at a time, and you’ll be well on your way to better understanding and optimizing your website in no time.
“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” – Arthur Ashe.
Not sure where to start?
If the setup seems overwhelming or if you have daunting account cleanup to tackle, give us a shout, and we’d be glad to help get you set up with the right tools for marketing success.
