10 Free Online Marketing Tools Every Small Business Owner Needs

Posted by gmehrguth

[Estimated read time: 5 minutes]

Every small business owner needs tools to get their marketing campaigns off the ground. Frankly, too many of these tools are only for enterprise-level businesses or require a budget that doesn't always justify the ROI.

A personal hobby of mine is testing out tools and finding the best ones for myself and the team to use on our campaigns.

After much testing, here are some of my favorites that every small business should have in their tool box. [Editor's Note: Each of the tools listed here has a free version.]

1. Answer The Public

Answer The Public's tool is completely free and has become an integral part of our content strategy. We use it to determine the topics and questions surrounding the primary keywords that we want to rank for. We then try to answer as many of these questions as we can with our content. This way, when Google is looking at which websites have the best information regarding the topic, we're not only more likely to rank, but we also are more likely to convert visitors because we answer the most important questions they have.

2. Open Site Explorer

Understanding your link profile and that of your competitors is crucial to building your Domain Authority. One of the quickest wins in every SEO campaign is to copy and paste your competitor's URL into OSE and find all the sites that are linking to them but not linking to you.

3. Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is the go-to crawl tool for most everyone in the industry. While they do have a paid version of the tool, you can crawl up to 500 pages for free, leaving most small businesses in the clear. As mentioned above, this tool is terrific for finding broken links, auditing your redirects, finding pages that are missing meta data, and finding duplicate content at a URL level.

4. Siteliner

Siteliner is a dream come true for quick and dirty duplicate content analysis. Once again, they limit the amount of pages you can crawl, but 99% of small businesses are totally fine with the free version. Simply place your url into their search bar and press go. You'll be rewarded with tons of actionable data, like:

• Duplicate content
• Common content
• Unique content
• Average page size
• Average page load time
• Number of words per page
• Internal links
• External links
• Text-to-HTML ratio

5. Portent's Title Generator

Say goodbye to writer's block with this handy tool. Our content team loves to use this tool to come up with highly shareable content ideas. With the simple press of a button, this free tool gives you title ideas that range from serious to downright hilarious. Nobody's ever said: "WOW, that sounds like a boring article; I'll read it!" Have some fun with it, and even if you can't find the perfect title, you're bound to get the creative juices flowing.

6. Google Keyword Planner

Google's keyword tool is a great resource for any small business looking to launch a pay-per-click campaign. Countless opportunities exist to use this tool when setting up an Adwords campaign. One of our favorite features is the search volume calculator. Here, you can enter a keyword and see how many people searched for it each month for the past year. From there, you can layer it with location targeting to get an estimate of how many monthly impressions you'll get for that keyword in your area. On top of search volume metrics, you can check out competition level and suggested bid for any keywords that you select.

7. Moz Local: Check Listing

The key issue for every small business that does business locally and wants to show up in search engines is the consistency of their name, address, and phone number (NAP) across citation sources like Google, Yelp, Facebook, Yellowpages, and more. Moz Local's tool gives you a free way to audit your NAP and easily fix on your own. Or, you can pay to have them do it for you. Either way, it's a great free tool for quick analysis and improvement.

8. Keyword.io

Keyword research is a necessary aspect for every small business' SEO campaign. With this handy tool, you can get keyword ideas from Google to Fiverr to help you understand which keywords to target and/or topics to create content around. Unfortunately, at the free level you're not able to get important metrics like keyword competitiveness or search volume.

If you do have a couple extra bucks to shell out, Moz Pro has done great work with their keyword tool, and recently launched an improved version with some free access. There's also the old-school favorite, Long Tail Pro, which will integrate with Moz and Adwords to give you killer data at scale.

9. Facebook Audience Insights

Facebook Audience Insights is a terrific free tool for doing market and content research. By toggling through the options, you can view specific demographic information about your audience and even learn a few new things.

One great way to use this tool? Allow it to help you create content your audience will love. For example, if you're a local business you can type in your service area/location, toggle the advanced option (bottom of the left column), select "home," and start learning exactly what the homeowners in your area are interested in.

10. Pablo by Buffer

With Buffer's free social media tool, you have access to over 600,000 images (or you can upload your own image) and all the tools necessary to be a social image pro. You start by selecting an image, and from there you are able to overlay with text, choose sizes, select filters, add logos, and download/share. In moments, Pablo makes it easy to go from Photoshop noob to social media design pro.

Bonus: Followerwonk

Followerwonk is amazing for quickly and easily analyzing your Twitter followers for information that can be used for your brand. It allows you to search Twitter bios, compare accounts for overlap, drill down by location, see who others are following, and identify influencers. It's a tool with many uses, capable of taking some of the pain out of finding the people who could most help your brand.

Whether you run a small business or market to them, these free tools can help add expertise and insight into your marketing campaigns. Have fun trying them out and feel free to add your favorites in the comments below!

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Do bounce rates affect a site’s search engine ranking?

The bounce rate debate continues…

Bounce rates and how they affect a website’s ranking on Google has been discussed, dissected, and dismembered over and over again.

As fully transcribed on this site, a conversation between Rand Fishkin, CEO of Moz, and Andrey Lipattsev, Google’s search quality senior strategist, led to a surprising discussion on click and bounce rates affecting search rankings.

Rand stated that he has recently been running a few experimental tests with various crowds of 500 to a couple thousand people.

Everyone participating was prompted to take out their cellphones, laptops, and digital what-have-yous and perform a specific search. Once the search listing appeared, he had everyone in the crowd click one of the listings at the bottom of the results page and then click away from that site. He then monitored the results over the next few days.

Rand found a whole bunch of inconsistencies. In a little more than half of the experiments, the ranking did change on the search engine results page (SERP), and in a little less than half of the experiments, the rankings did not change.

This begs the question:

Do bounce rates affect a site’s search engine ranking? If so, how much?

Lipattsev believes that for each individual search query in the experiment, the generated interest regarding those specific searches impacts the rankings change rather than just the clicks and bounces.

He said that if a certain topic is gaining a substantial amount of searches and an increase in social media mentions, Google would pay more attention to that rather than a site getting more clicks.

Lipattsev says that it is certainly doable to determine exactly what causes a large rankings jump for an individual listing, but Internet-wide, it is much more difficult.

All this being said, what actually is a bounce rate?

The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a particular site who navigate or “bounce” away after only viewing that individual webpage.

Usually, the term ‘bounce rate’ has a negative connotation associated with it. People think that if a visitor only visits one page and then leaves, it’s bad for business. Their logic isn’t that flawed, either. After all, a high bounce rate would indicate that a site does not have the high-quality, relevant content Google wants out of its top ranked sites.

A great Search Engine Journal article shows nine negative reasons why your website could potentially have a high bounce rate, including poor web design, incorrect keyword selection, improper links, and just bad content. It’s true that these high bounce rates can reflect poorly on a website… sometimes.

So, what gives?

Having a high bounce rate on something like a ‘contact us’ page can actually be a good thing. That’s more of a call-to-action site, where the goal of that particular page is to have the user find the contact information, and then actually contact the business. The visitor got what they came for and then left. Extra navigation around the website doesn’t really mean anything in this case.

Of course, if your site is more content-driven or offers a product or service, then your goal should be to have a higher click-through rate (CTR) and more traffic to each page.

But what about Google?

Does Google know your bounce rate and are they using it to affect rankings? This Search Engine Roundtable article provides the short answer (which is “no”).

Many organizations don’t use Google Analytics, so Google has no way of tracking their bounce rate information. And even with the analytics that they can trace, it’s difficult to determine what they actually mean because every situation is different.

There are many factors that go into determining how long a visitor stays on a particular webpage. If a visitor remains on a site for over 20 minutes, they could be so engaged with your site’s content that they can’t even imagine leaving your wonderful webpage… or… it could mean they fell asleep at the screen because your website was so boring. It’s too difficult to tell.

If you are operating one of those websites that should have a lower bounce rate, these tips on lowering that number should be able to help. Some highlights include making sure each of your pages loads quickly, offers user-friendly navigation, avoids cluttered advertisements, and features quality content!

If bounce rates don’t affect Google’s rankings as much as you thought, you wonder how significant other ranking factors are. Well, Google recently revealed that magical information. They narrowed it down to three top ranking factor used by Google to drive search results:

• Links: strong links and link votes play a major role in search rankings.
• Content: having quality content is more important than ever.
• RankBrain: Google’s AI ranking system.

It’s no shock that links and content matter, but RankBrain is still relatively new. It’s Google’s new algorithm to help determine search results (after factoring in links and content). RankBrain filters more complex searches and converts them into shorter ones, all the while maintaining the complexity of the search, thusly refining the results.

Google’s newest AI technology – and whatever other secret technologies they are working on – may resolve the never-ending debate over bounce rates, but it’s certainly going to be a difficult process.

More research is to come and Andrey believes the challenge to make bounce rate click data a strong and measurable metric is “gameable,” but Google still has a long way to go.

“If we solve it, good for us,” Andrey said, “but we’re not there yet.”

There is no one-size-fits-all answer when it comes to SEO and all its intricacies. The greatest answer to any SEO question is always “it depends.”

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Google Removes Pricing Rich Snippets From Travel Industry Websites

If you are in the travel industry, Google has removed rich snippets from a variety of travel websites and are no longer showing pricing information for more generic search queries.  John Mueller confirmed in yesterday’s hangout that flights are no longer showing pricing rich snippets.  We have also noticed hotels are no longer showing pricing rich snippets as well.

It sounds as though this was an industry-wide issue, not just a single site doing it.  The person who asked the question in the hangout mentioned multiple major price comparison travel sites and none of them are showing pricing rich snippets now.

The problem was that travel sites were showing pricing prices for multiple products as if it was only one.  But with multiple departure airports and prices for dates often varying wildly, it isn’t surprising that Google targeted this.  While it is hard to see with the snippets already removed, it could be that sites were using the lowest possible price which might not reflect what the searcher was looking for, which of course would lead to negative search experience.

Here is what John said specifically about it:

I double checked about this just before the hangout actually. And we didn’t actually change anything specific there. What we did notice is that a bunch of sites were using this as a way to kind of markup a variety of products instead of just one product. So we essentially hope that the price markup on a page is specific to one specific product and you are talking about a page like flights to Berlin, then that’s like tons of different products essentially, like different flights and from different locations going to Berlin, so it is very hard to say well, it makes sense to mark that up with the price rich snippets and to show that in the search results because it is essentially all different kinds of products on the same page.

So that is kind of what the team took action on there. We noticed that these pages were marking up multiple different types of products in a way that you would for one product specifically. So that’s, I think from what I heard from the team, that’s kind of what changed there.  And it’s not so much that we changed our guidelines it’s just that we noticed it was a problem, someone reported it or somehow the word got to the rich snippets team and they said well we have to take action here to make sure what we show in the search results matches what’s in our guidelines.

The person in the hangout then asked whether action would be taken against sites doing the same thing for “Hotels in Berlin”, but it seems like that has already been targeted and removed by the rich snippets team.

Bing is also not showing pricing rich snippets for flights or hotels in their search results.

It isn’t clear if sites also received a rich snippet manual action related to these snippet removals, although John does say that these sites likely did.  If they did, Google will normally remove all rich snippets from the site until a successful reconsideration request is filed.  But since the person in the hangout noted they had been removed a week ago, it sounds as though there might not have been manual actions issued.

The post Google Removes Pricing Rich Snippets From Travel Industry Websites appeared first on The SEM Post.

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How Google fights webspam and what you need to learn from this

Google has this week revealed its annual report on how it has policed the internet over the last 12 months. Or at least how it policed the vast chunk of the internet it allows on its results pages.

Although it’s self-congratulatory stuff, and as much as you can rightfully argue with some of Google’s recent penalties, you do need to understand what Google is punishing in terms of ‘bad quality’ internet experiences so you can avoid the same mistakes.

It’s important to remember that Google for some people IS the internet, or at least the ‘front door’ to it (sorry Reddit), but it’s equally important to remember that Google is still a product; one that needs to make money to survive and (theoretically) provide the best possible experience for its users, or else it is off to DuckDuckGo they… uh… go.

So therefore Google has to ensure the results it serves on its SERPs (search engine results pages) are of the highest quality possible. Algorithms are built and manual reviews by actual human beings are carried out to ensure crappy websites with stolen/thin/manipulative/harmful content stay hidden.

Here’s how Google is currently kicking ass and taking names… and how you can avoid falling between its crosshairs.

How Google fought webspam

According to Google, an algorithmic update helped remove the amount of webspam in search results, impacting 5% of queries.

The remaining spam was tackled manually. Google sent more than 4.3 million messages to webmasters notifying them of manual actions it had imposed on sites affected by spam.

Following this, Google saw a 33% increase in the number of sites that went through a spam clean-up “towards a successful reconsideration process.” It’s unclear whether the remaining sites are still in the process of appealing, or have been booted off the face of the internet.

Who watches the watchmen?

More than 400,000 spam reports were manually submitted by Google users around the world. Google acted on 65% of them, and considered 80% of those acted upon to be spam.

Hacking

There was a huge 180% increase in websites being hacked in 2015, compared to the previous year. Hacking can take on a number of guises, whether its website spam or malware, but the result will be the same. You’ll be placed ‘in quarantine’ and your site will be flagged or removed.

Google has a number of official guidelines on how to help avoid being hacked. These include:

• Strengthen your account security with lengthy, difficult to guess or crack passwords and not reusing those passwords across platforms.
• Keep your site’s software updated, including its CMS and various plug-ins.
• Research how your hosting provider handles security issues and check its policy when it comes to cleaning up hacked sites. Will it offer live support if your site is compromised?
• Use tools to stay informed of potential hacked content on your site. Signing up to Search Console is a must, as it’s Google’s way of communicating any site issues with you.

Thin, low quality content

Google saw an increase in the number of sites with thin, low quality content, a substantial amount likely to be provided by scraper sites.

Unfortunately there is very little you can do if your site is being scraped, as Google has discontinued its reporting tool and believes this problem to be your own fault. You just have to be confident that your own site’s authority, architecture and remaining content is enough to ensures it ranks higher than a scraper site.

If you have been served a manual penalty for ‘thin content with little or no added value’ there are things you can do to rectify it, which can mostly be boiled down to ‘stop making crappy content, duh’.

1) Start by checking your site for the following:

• Auto-generated content: automatically generated content that reads like it was written by a piece of software because it probably was.
• Thin content pages with affiliate links: affiliate links in quality articles are fine, but pages where the affiliates contain descriptions or reviews copied directly from the original retailer without any added original content are bad. As a rule, affiliates should form only a small part of the content of your site.
• Scraped content: if you’re a site that automatically scrapes and republishes entire articles from other websites without permission then you should just flick the off-switch right away.
• Doorway pages: these are pages which can appear multiple times for a particular query’s search results but ultimately lead users to the same destination. The purpose of doorway pages are purely to manipulate rankings.

2) Chuck them all in the bin.

3) If after all that you’re 100% sure your site somehow offers value, then you can resubmit to Google for reconsideration.

For more information on Google’s fight against webspam, read its official blog-post.

And finally, I’ll leave you with this terrifying vision of things to come…

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How Google Handles a Site When It Changes Topic Focus

Something that periodically comes up is how Google will treat a site if it goes much broader or much narrower from the topic area it started in.  Some shy away from straying too far from that topic, concerned that the signals and rankings that they have built up could somehow suffer when Google sees they are changing their topic area.

Here was the specific question:

Let’s say my site has been touching different topics at once, and I decided to focus on one topic (i.e. doctor profiles, but before i had pages about diseases and hospitals). How would Google see this change? IMO, it’s an improvement, but would Google see?

John Mueller from Google sees this as a natural evolution from a website.  He doesn’t recommend creating entirely new sites just for changing or altering the site’s topic area.  But he also says that this is nothing that site owners should “shy away” from doing.

That is kind of a normal change on a website.  The themes of a website change over time, that’s not something that I’d say you’d need to shy away from or create separate sites if you want to touch upon a new topic.  So that’s something, personally I see that as kind of a normal organic change of a website where maybe you expand on some areas, you kind of contract on other areas, focus more here, go a bit broader there, that’s totally natural, that’s not something I’d kind of shy away from.

He does also raise the concern that site owners should still ensure they are doing what is best for their visitors.

I guess the normal advice on growing a site is something you might want to look at is how people react to your content.  Do they still understand what your pages are about?  Can they understand which things belong together? Those kind of more general marketing user experience type of questions, I guess.

So don’t worry about narrowing or broadening your topic area, worry more about if what you are doing it best for those who actually visit your site.

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Time-critical SEO project management – classic or agile?

Many companies face the problem if they should manage their projects in a classic way, using a waterfall model, or if it would be better to use agile methodologies. Agile concepts like Kanban or Scrum offer a better flexibility with the disadvantage of impeded deadline planning. Especially for SEO agencies in a dynamic and deadline-driven environment, this can be a huge problem. The good news is: There are opportunities to combine the benefits of agile development and classic project management in order to be both flexible and reliable concerning deadlines.

Exact planning alone isn’t sufficient for delivery in time

Have you ever worked at a huge and detailed project plan with its numerous work packages, dependencies and milestones, only to recognize that all this had to be revised due to circumstances that couldn’t be anticipated at the beginning? Large Gantt diagrams ordered in a waterfall-like cascade, usually beginning with a concept phase, followed by concept detailing, development, quality assurance and rollout give you a fake sense of security. The more complicated such a plan is, the more error-prone it will be. It is no accidental occurrence that most of the projects planned this way won’t meet the expected deadlines and budget.

Agile development

In opposition to classical project management, agile development perches on small units of progress. With each development cycle, only a few features are implemented. These so-called increments each are deployable software packages or other artefacts that can be rolled out and tested.

There are several agile methodologies. Two of the most popular ones are Kanban and Scrum. While Scrum is built on top of fix development cycles with a predefined set of work packages per cycle (sprints), Kanban forgoes mechanisms like that. Kanban relies on the visualization of the development progress. The work packages are symbolized by paper cards or tickets in an electronical ticket system like Jira. They run through a number of development phases, mostly beginning with a backlog (the work basket), followed by a selection phase where the upcoming work packages are collected, before they reach the development phase. After the development is finished, usually a testing phase follows, before a feature is finally rolled out.

In a daily meeting, the development team shifts all the cards that have finished a certain phase to the next one. This physical process of moving cards is one of Kanban’s most important characteristics because it makes the progress perceptible.

Besides Kanban and Scrum, there are several other methods and hybrid agile development methodologies, e.g. Scrumban.

One of the biggest disadvantages of agile development is the difficulty to plan reliable deadlines because a comprehensive and all-embracing plan rarely exists in such projects.

Deadlines vs. flexibility

Most companies can’t work without reliable deadlines. This is true especially for SEOs who are bound to contractual agreements. The customers expect the punctual delivery of the stipulated services. Albeit the results of the SEO actions can’t be guaranteed – this is especially true for the time when these results can be expected – at least, the work that is done in order to enable these results should be finished in a dependable manner.

Also, in-house SEOs see themselves confronted with agreed-upon deadlines – e.g. when the department that receives the SEO services does classical project management and expects the delivery for a fixed time or date.

On the other hand, SEOs work in a highly dynamic environment. What is true today can be obsolete tomorrow – think about all the Google updates in the past. Not to forget the competitors: Their actions – especially relating to SEO – can impact the effects of a company’s endeavors.

In many cases the dependency on both updates and competition implies the necessity for immediate action which often overburdens a classic project management organization.

This shows: SEO projects need a combination of reliable deadlines and great flexibility.

Agile development and deadlines: Do they fit together?

The question is how one can bring together the advantages of agile development with a reliable planning of deadlines. The experience shows: It works! And the best thing is: The developers do not even have to change their working habits. The only thing you as a person responsible for a project have to do is to change the administration of the work packages. By doing this it is ensured that no disturbances are brought into the development team.

In order to plan deadlines in Kanban, one simply needs the estimated effort for all the respective work packages in the project. For those work packages that will be implemented mid- and long-term, rough estimates are made up. The work packages should be tailored in a way that makes them comparable – e.g. each work package has an estimated effort of two to three person days. The number of the work packages lets you estimate the total effort for the project.

A second dimension you need to plan in Kanban projects is the amount of available contributors or developers that will participate until the end of the project. From the number of available project days, holidays and other days off are subtracted. The ratio of the effort needed for the project’s work packages and the available man-days results in the required time for finishing the project.

Dependencies between work packages don’t necessarily need to be taken into account for this calculation – except for external dependencies. You are free to choose which work packages to implement per sprint later on. This warrants the flexibility of the delivery team.

Conclusion: What is the right project management methodology for SEOs?

One of the most famous answers to questions like this in economics is: “It depends.” This is especially true for the question for the most appropriate project management methodology. Depending on the size and the complexity of a project, the number of involved contributors, the existence of internal or external dependencies, both classical project management and agile development can be the best way to do things the optimal way. By experience even when working in an agile mode one doesn’t have to spare the advantages of a reliable deadline planning – and this without changing the development team’s way of working.

Especially in the context of SEO with its fast-changing requirements, agile methods seem more and more appropriate. A planning that benefits from both the flexibility of agile methods and the reliability of classic project management can help to satisfy the customers’ needs.

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How Google Sees Links from Other Languages & Countries

Google has talked a bit previously about the value (or lack thereof) of links when they are comingfrom other countries or languages, even for links that are coming from countries or languages the website doesn’t target or service.  The question came up again in yesterday’s Google webmaster office hours with John Mueller.

Here is the specific question:

We are tidying up our link profile. Does inbound links from other countries count against you or are treated as less important than links from your own country or is it only the relevancy of the website that the link has come from which matters in SEO.

There are some people who automatically disavow all links from sites that are not in English.  But in reality, doing so could hurt the site because they could actually be high quality and extremely targeted links that were disavowed solely for not being in English.

Here is how Mueller said to handle links from other countries and languages.

In general, links from other countries are fine.  It’s not something you’d need to suppress or remove or put in a disavow file.  Sometimes you even get links from other languages where you don’t even know what they’re really writing about in regards to your website.  And that can also be fine.  So that’s not something I’d say you need to artificially prune or fine tune there.   The way links to come to your site is essentially out of your control for a large extent.

Someone raised the issue that some people consider all links from non-English sites to be problematic.

Sometimes those are completely natural links and sometimes you get spammy links from the US.  It’s kind of, I guess, the way the web is.  Just because its from a different country, isn’t something I see as being problematic.

He was then asked directly, if it was one of his sites if he would leave those links alone, and Mueller said he would.

So don’t automatically discount links to disavow simply because they aren’t in the same language as your website.  They could be great links and for SEO purposes, they won’t hurt your site as long as they are quality.  But for a quick quality check, looking at the page through Google Translate, even though the translation won’t be perfect, it will be good enough to give you an idea of the link quality before deciding to disavow or not.

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