On my last post we discussed the excitement of launching your new website and then the realisation that this is not the end but the beginning of your website journey! We now know that good marketing and building traffic to a website relies on consistency and what steps are needed to build this.
So today we will look at what tools are available to help you increase website traffic and what these tools can offer in a way of support. The websites below are essential tools in my marketing toolkit, they help me on a regular basis and best of all they are all free.
The Google Search Console helps you to understand how your website is performing on Google, any issues your site has, highlights improvement that can be made and provides information on how Google crawls, indexes and serves your website.
It’s OK writing heaps of content for your website and optimising it with the most relevant keywords but if Google can’t index your website it won’t help. This is where the search console comes in handy to check for any issues like this and gives you the ability to index pages.
The search console is broken up into four key areas – performance, coverage, experience and enhancements.
Google Analytics gives you real time and historic information as to where your website traffic has come from, what users do on your website and the journey they take and at what point they leave. Analytics is crucial to understanding your website traffic and the performance on your site, providing you key information on what’s working and what needs some improvement.
In Google analytics you can also see how other channels are performing for you. For example, when you link from your social media accounts to your website you can understand how many people click on these links and the journey and conversion that happens when on the site. If a bounce rate is particularly high for a certain channel you can delve into this better and explore that audience and message.
Google – People also ask
The ‘people also ask’ feature on Google results can give you great insights into blog content that your customers are looking for. Try typing into Google one of your keywords then scroll down until you find the ‘people also ask’ section.
When I type in digital marketing to Google one of the first questions is ‘What are the types of digital marketing?’. This is a perfect blog title and I could write about and would help me talk around the services I can offer.
Screaming Frog is a free SEO tool that I’ve used for a while now. You enter your website into the tool and it analyses your site providing information on common SEO issues. The tool has many features and gathers a lot of information for you. They do have a free and paid tool however I’ve always just used the free version.
I find Screaming Frog really useful for quickly checking images on my website to see which ones are too big and any missing alt tags. I can look through headers and meta description to see any missing, duplicates or information that is too long or short. I can see all the response codes from my website so if some 404 errors start to appear its quick and easy to spot these in the tool. You get an easy view of content, spelling mistakes and word count for each page.
There are plenty more features on Screaming Frog but these are some of the points I use on a regular basis that help me. The tool is easy to use and displays the data in a clean table format.
Canva is a tool I’ve used for the last few years and has really helped me to make quick and easy designs for print, website and social media. Canva is a free tool with some paid options (I think I’ve paid for the odd image).
You can tell Canva what you want to make your image for, for example a Tweet, ad it will create a template the right size for Twitter. You can also create a custom size which I have used in the past for website images and print material. Once you’ve created your template you have a number of features to explore – templates, upload images, stock photos, elements / icons, text, audio, video and backgrounds.
You can create your design with the help of these features then export in a number of formats – images, PDF, MP4 or GIF. It’s a quick and easy to use tool to create your designs.
Google Page Speed Insights analyses your website to see how well it is performing. It breaks the result down into both mobile and desktop speed and gives you a mark for each out of 100. The results are broken down into different technical aspects and it uses a traffic light system to quickly show you the outcome – red is a low score, amber needs improvement and green is good.
A lot of the results on this test are quite technical and do require a developers help. However, it gives you a starting point with the developers, helps you to understand what is required and a tangible list.
The Moz Keyword Explorer allows you to research keywords for your website. You do have to create an account with Moz to run this test however the account is free. Simple setup your account, enter your website and Moz will provide keyword analysis for your site.
Moz helps you to understand the difficulty of ranking for a particular keyword, the traffic to that keyword, gives you alternative keyword suggestions and looks at search results for that keyword.
Answer the Public is a tool I use for content ideas and is especially helpful when I’m trying to find blog content around a certain keyword or topic. You type in your keyword and it looks at what people are talking about around this keyword and presents all the questions and results people are looking for.
The results are broken down into questions (which, when where, who), prepositions (can, near, is, with), comparisons (versus, like, and, or), alphabetical and related. You can download the results into a CSV format and you get a few free searches (not unlimited) a day so plan this well.
The Hubspot Website Grader is a tool I use when auditing sites and performing competitor analysis. The site gives you an overall score of your website performance then breaks down the results into – performance, SEO, mobile and security.
Each area utilising a traffic light system where green is good, amber means areas for improvement and red is poor. You have details of each area, what the results mean and how to make improvements.
Mobile friendly websites are essential now and a lot of websites are built mobile first. Over the last few years mobile website traffic has overtaken desktop traffic showing the importance of making your website mobile friendly and monitoring this. As new internet browser versions and mobile devices come out it can alter the way your website is displayed and sometimes lead to poor usability.
Googles Mobile Friendly test runs a number of checks on your website to see how usable it is on a mobile device. The test looks at usability and touch points on your site, mobile speed and any blocked files.
Summary
So, there you have it 10 free tools to help increase traffic to your website and help you with day-to-day marketing tasks. These are all tools I personally use and find a great asset to my marketing toolkit.
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