Free Online Tools to Boost Your Small Business Performance
In the digital age of marketing, proper online strategies can make or break your small business. It is important to understand and learn the most effective optimisation techniques that can boost your business performance. There are tools that can help you in the process. By utilising such tools to craft effective online marketing techniques you can successfully grow your small business.
To help you get started, here are three free tools to help you ace your online marketing game.
Spyfu is a free tool that you can use to research your competitors’ business. It is important to analyse how similar businesses are attracting customers, where they are getting the traffic from, and what they are doing right so that you can implement the same strategies in your business to stay ahead of the game.
Say, you are a small business that sells handmade products in Australia. In that case businesses like CCraft To Consumer or Love Australian Handmade would be your competitors. All you have to do is visit Spyfu and insert the link to the business website of these competing companies in the search tab and voilà! You will have all the necessary information such as organic vs paid inbound clicks from Google, SEO keywords, ranking history (both national and global), PPC (pay-per-click), and organic vs paid competitors, at your fingertips.
Some key advantages of this tool are:
- Keep an account of your competitors’ business practices through the domain search
- Easy comparison with your own business using monitoring tools
- Overview of the pros and cons of certain keywords and promotion strategies
- Drive clicks to the AdWords or SEO campaigns of your business
Note – The free version has limited features which are sufficient to start with. But you can choose to obtain more features with the paid version.
Social Blade tracks statistics and analytics across an array of social media sites including YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. A major part of the traffic to your website comes from your social media accounts. Hence it is crucial that you keep an eye on how those accounts are doing and implement the best social media practices for your business.
For instance, you could easily look up your social media accounts on Social Blade and get an in-depth insight into all the accounts’ average performance. You will not only get an idea of what kind of content the audience is engaging with most, but also what kinds of posts are driving maximum traffic to your website. From subscriber and follower count, estimated earnings, engagement rate to detailed graphical and numerical data, Social Blade can assist you with all your analytical needs.
Some key advantages of this tool are –
- Easy access to statistics and analytics of your social media accounts
- Insight into the engagement rate and overall performance of your posts
- Optimisation of future content and subsequent improvement of social media performance
Google Trends is an online tool that can help users discover trends regarding people’s search behaviour across all Google platforms. As obvious as this one is, it is an extremely useful, free tool when it comes to reviewing the success of a company’s SEO strategies, especially in terms of keyword implementation.
Any small business could easily use Google Trends for effective keyword searches. This tool allows a clear view into search volume, relevancy and competition of a particular keyword, which can be further filtered by country and time period. Take for example a Sydney based hairstyling business, a long-tail keyword like “hair salon in Sydney” would yield more results than simply “hair salon” or “hairdresser”.
With Google Trends, SEO optimisation for your website becomes hassle-free. Some key advantages of this tool are –
- Know the latest trends
- Find sites for getting back-links
- Identify high-interest areas based on keyword search volume
- Choose the best performing keywords for your business
- Competitor check
Are You Ready to Grow Your Small Business?
With everything that is involved in setting up and running a small business, delving into the world of social media marketing can be a daunting task in itself. But, without a prominent online presence, businesses can’t stand a chance of surviving in this digital age. Especially small businesses with a low marketing budget.
Social media can be your best friend in this regard. When used wisely along with the above-mentioned free tools, it can do wonders for your business. A well-performing social media strategy can highly boost traffic that can lead to sales. With the knowledge of such essential techniques like assessing competitors, analysing website performance and keyword implementation for search engine optimisation, small businesses can achieve high profits at zero cost. Use these tools and you will see the results for yourself.
Feature Image by WikiImages from Pixabay
