The digital world of marketing never fails to surprise anyone of us, as there are new tools, tips, and trends being introduced now and then to be incorporated into the marketing strategy. With so many tools available and new algorithms being established, how we can then identify which is the best one for our website and how to utilize them effectively? This is the biggest question and challenges most of the digital marketers face today.

We are living in an era where we cannot ignore the importance of data. There is a lot of data available on the internet and data analytics has become a very important part of marketing strategy. It is imperative to have a well-defined plan in place to achieve success in marketing activities. It is crucial to have 360-degree marketing activities ongoing so that we don’t miss on the important conversions through any one of them. India has become a marketplace where almost everyone is utilizing smartphones to access the internet either for shopping or availing any information. It has now, therefore, become an effective medium to reach audiences through digital marketing strategy. There are many free as well as paid tools available in the form of analytics, remarketing, web forms, etc. These digital marketing tools can be of great help while executing proper marketing strategy but the right sense of technology utilization can help you compete efficiently with the competitors.

We would like to highlight a few important online marketing tools that you must utilize while implementing your marketing plan. Each of these tools helps you get that competitive edge and are highly effective in simplifying your marketing strategies. 

1. Ahrefs – https://ahrefs.com

Ahref is an SEO tool boasting of around 150 million keywords in the US and more than 150 in different countries across the globe. As per the suggested claims from Ahrefs they can crawl up to 5 billion web pages every day and have accumulated a huge database of index pages.

If you want to do competitive analysis, this tool will be of great help as it allows you to identify who is linking to your competitor’s web page and which one is the best-performing pages. It also enables you to check the content ranks and helps you identify the weakness of your content. It will help you define content strategy and make changes in the strategy accordingly. It is a SaaS-based SEO tool that gives you the insight to check any domain’s top ranking keywords, domain ranking, backlink profile. 

This SEO tool lets you identify pages that receive the highest traffic of users. You can hence identify the pages getting the lowest traffic and accordingly make changes in the website designs for improving performance. It is a very user-friendly and robust tool and can be utilized by everyone. 

One of the unique features of Ahrefs is that it not only shows backlinks but also highlights the ones which have broken down so that you can focus and realign your strategies. You can check the competitor’s website and can compare its performance with yours. It is one of the greatest tools to identify how your competitors are performing in the market. It can also be downloaded on Chrome and Firefox toolbars and is one of the fastest means to audit SEO performance for your website. Once downloaded it will provide you suggestions for improvement and you make amendments to your website for improvements in SEO. 
4 different plans offered by Ahrefs are:
– Lite: $99/month
– Standard: $179/month
– Advanced: $399/month
– Agency: $999/month

With tiered pricing in place, it is slightly costly but it justifies the cost with its usability and performance. If you want to improve the SEO performance of your website you should check out this tool as its features can be of great help to you in form of Backlinking data analysis, SERP Checker, keyword tool, Keyword generator, ability to check keywords rank, broken link checker and much more.

2. SEMRush – https://www.semrush.com

Another important tool of great significance is SEMRush. Concerning functionality and performance, it is similar to Ahrefs but it has one unique feature which Ahref does not offer. With the help of this tool you can look at the search words that a specific website is running, this includes search ads, display ads, and video ads. It can be of great help to you as it can let you know the competitor’s strategy concerning the marketing activities. It allows you to do comprehensive keyword research analysis, concrete SEO audit of the website, backlinking analysis, social media analysis, PPC advertising research and a lot more.

In addition to this, by using this tool you can also compare 2 domains side by side and can notice the stats for performance analysis of the websites. It can be of great help to identify the strategies and budget, in AdWords and Bing ads, display ads, etc. The tool is of great significance for social media strategy as well since it helps to track and measure social media performance. Plans offered by SEMRush are as follows:
– Pro: $99/month
– Guru: $199/month
– Business: $399/month
– Enterprise: Unknown

SEMrush is also known as the Google webmaster tool from where you can monitor your website performance. It provides relevant information for auditing the website which includes- search appearance, search traffic, average position, technical issues, crawl data, backlinks, mobile uses.

3. Google Analytics – https://analytics.google.com

Google Analytics is one of the most renowned SEO tools. It is available free of cost. As a digital marketer, it is important to be well versed with this tool. The tool is highly user-friendly, and at the very basic level, it can highlight the user traffic coming to the website, the real-time user’s, demographics, location, page views, unique page views, time users spent on the website and bounce rate. Using such basic information you can make changes to the web pages on your website. Beyond the basic information, it allows us to set up goals to track the user conversions on the website and learn more about user engagement. When you have built your website you can have the Google analytics code in place which can help you improve the SEO of your website. If you are executing any digital campaign you can track your conversions which can be very helpful.

4. Similar Web – https://www.similarweb.com

Similar Web is an analytics tool for businesses that provides its customers with information on their clients and competitor’s website, traffic volumes, referral sources including keywords analysis. Its intelligent solutions provide customers with insights to help understand, track their digital performance. With this, marketers and analysts can benchmark their performance against their competitors and can understand customer journey and performance. Various statistics that it highlights are total visits, average visit duration, pages per visit, bounce rate, and many more. Like Google analytics, you can also check the traffic sources from different locations, referral websites. This tool has a premium as well as a free version and is also available to download as a browser extension.

5. Ubersuggest – https://app.neilpatel.com/en/dashboard

Ubersuggest is one of the most popular tools and is free of cost. It can help you find 100s of new long-tail keywords in a few minutes. There is no limit towards its usage, you can use it indefinitely and aggregates data from Google suggest which offers keywords ideas similar to the searches on Google. 
The tool is acquired by the renowned digital marketer Neil Patel and offers premium features for free while some tools are priced higher. Recently, the tool was re-released with many new features and one of the most fascinating ones which have been added are competitor’s domain analysis. With this feature, once you enter a keyword in the search bar, it will show you many insights which include- total organic keyword ranking, monthly traffic, domain score, the total number of backlinks, top-ranking pages. The tool also allows you to generate an unlimited number of suggestions for free and you can take your content strategy to a new level while improving the performance of the website.

6. Pingdom – https://www.pingdom.com

Pingdom is a very popular website analytics and performance monitoring tool. It enhances your website performance with real-time, actionable and intelligent results. Pingdom helps you track and analyze page speed, the load time of the website’s critical pages. Its services also focus on uptime monitoring, transaction monitoring, server monitoring. It is popularly known as a free website speed test tool. To test the website performance using the Pingdom tool, you have to paste the website URL and run tests. You can also choose the location from where you want to execute the test run which will provide you with page grade, page loading time Testing location you choose is important as it relates to the physical location from where you host your website. It will provide you with suggestions and technical aspects that can be utilized for website performance.

7. Google Trends – https://trends.google.com/

Google trends is a very popular and handy tool that analyses top searched keywords in the search queries across various locations and languages. It is utilized by many for keyword research and graphs to compare the search volume of different queries. You can use the tool to get trending news around the globe. Being a digital marketing expert, if you are targeting any specific keywords then this tool can be helpful as it will show interest over time graphs. Using the tool trends, you can define your content strategy which can help you in improving the SEO traffic. It was launched in the year 2006 and you can also see how popular websites are performing concerning the demographic information. Once you install it as a browser extension, you can search for any keyword and it allows checking monthly search volume, CPC and completion. Its additional feature includes: country-specific search volume, add all keyword option that allows to add them,  analyze page option that allows showing volume metrics.

8. SpyFu – https://www.spyfu.com

SpyFu was originally known as GoogSpy, it shows the keywords that websites buy on Google Adwords as well as keywords on the website. It is one of the most popular and recommended the tool to identify how competitors are performing. It offers SEO research, PPC research, and Keyword research, backlinks, tracking, and reporting. Keyword recommendations and management are built-in throughout the Spyfu dashboard. Its free version provides detailed information about keywords and domains. It also shows the buying intent of that keyword and profitable related keywords. SpyFu finds websites that are trying to rank for some keywords. By entering your website URL you can identify the list of your closest competitors. The information provided allows seeing what other keywords competitors are ranking for. You can also check, PPC research section of these tools which allows you to see competitor ads, keywords and results which can help you determine: the budget, top-performing keywords and an effective ad copy.

9. Seobility – https://www.seobility.net

Seobility is a free SEO audit online tool for better website optimization and SEO monitoring. It checks your complete website, by crawling all the linked pages. After entering your website, it displays all the SEO issues like slow-loading pages, blocked pages from crawling, sitemap problems, technical SEO issues, highlight pages with errors, issues with on-page optimization and duplicity in the content if any. The Seobility tool also provides backlink monitoring, rank monitoring tools, and link building tools. Another interesting feature of this tool scans the pages that have contents and shows content-related SEO issues that cover missing meta descriptions, title, keyword stuffing, and duplicacy. You can export the report in the form of a PDF.

10. Screaming Frog – https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk

Screaming Frog is a very useful tool that enables you to quickly identify issues. It can be installed locally on your system and it can crawl the website for links, images, CSS from an SEO perspective. This information can be utilized to quickly analyze, audit and review websites from an SEO perspective. It can help you save a lot of time because manually analyzing it can be very tough and challenging. It is available for Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu and it is free of cost. 

11. Yoast SEO – https://yoast.com

Yoast SEO  is one of the most widely popular WordPress plug-ins. It is very user-friendly, whether you are running a personal blog, the website you can easily manage it. It can be easily hosted on any word press website. It’s one of the most comprehensive plugins. It can help you manage titles, meta descriptions, set targeted keywords and track them, with the management of site maps. You can also create and update the XML site map of your website whenever required. It offers both premium and free version. Most of the important functionalities are covered in the free version and you can utilize it effectively to manage your SEO related tasks. It is a favorite tool of millions of users and provides the tallest that helps you maintain a number one position in the search results.

Based on our extensive research and understanding these are one of the best marketing tools available for the users globally. Numerous SEO experts are utilizing them for improved ranking and enhanced SEO performance. These tools are available free of cost as well as with the paid version facility. You can choose them depending upon your business requirements as well as budget. We hope our research helps you in taking the right decision for your website.