The 8 Great Free Marketing Tools Every Business Should Have

When you own a small business, it can be extremely challenging to find money in your budget for marketing. The good news is that there are plenty of free tools out there that you can use to boost your marketing efforts without spending any money. If you use these you can free up money in your budget to place targeted ads on social media, or even compete for some choice keywords on Google.

With that in mind, here are the top eight free marketing tools available, along with some tips about how to use them.

1. Open Site Explorer

Open Site Explorer is a free tool that can help you build a killer link profile to boost your SEO. When Google ranks websites, off-site SEO – meaning the sites that link back to you – are even more important than your use of keywords.

Here’s what you can do with Open Site Explorer:

1. Do an analysis of your existing backlinks to make sure they all work.
2. Analyze your competitors’ backlinks to see where you might be missing out on opportunities.
3. Contact sites that are linking to your competitors but not to you to see if you can build new links with them.

Link building can be a painstaking and slow process, but this simple tool can help you build links quickly – but in a way that is still organic and unlikely to subject you to any penalties from Google.

2. Portent’s Title Generator 

Coming up with fresh and compelling titles for your blog posts, articles, and other content can be a real challenge. There’s plenty of research to support the idea that having a great title is half the battle when it comes to generating clicks, so why not have a little fun with it. Portent’s Title Generator lets you:

1. Enter a topic
2. Play around with suggested titles based on what you enter
3. Choose the title that’s the most likely to get you the traffic you want

If you want to increase your clicks and conversions, having compelling and irresistible titles is a key step in the process. This tool can help you take your titles from drab to dazzling.

3. Moz Local: Check Listing

Did you know that when it comes to local SEO, one of the most important things you can to is to standardize the listings of your name, address, and phone number (also known as NAP listings)? The reason is that inconsistent listings can dilute your online presence. Keeping track of all those listings can be a pain, but the Moz Local: Check Listing tools makes it easy for you to:

1. Generate a comprehensive list of your NAP listings
2. Compare your listings to make sure they are consistent
3. Use what you find to correct any mistakes and consolidate your online presence

It might seem like a simple thing, but standardizing your NAP listings can have an immediate impact on your local search rank – and that can make a huge difference in your sales.

4. Keyword.io

While backlinks are a very important part of any company’s SEO strategy, it would be a mistake to ignore your choice of keywords as a component of your search ranking. If you want to get an idea of the best keywords to use on a variety of websites, consider using Keyword.io, which lets you:

1. Enter keywords and topics
2. Get a list of popular keywords on popular sites including YouTube and Fiverr
3. Pay for more comprehensive suggestions, including high-value, long-tail keywords

There are other keywords tools out there, but the real benefit of this one is that it gives you keywords targeted by site – something that can be extremely valuable when it comes to fine-tuning your marketing.

5. Screaming Frog

Performing a full audit of your website can be an enormous hassle, but Screaming Frog makes it easy. You can use this free tool to:

1. Identify and fix broken links on up to 500 pages
2. Audit redirects
3. Find duplicate content so you can rewrite it as needed
4. Check your page titles and meta data to make sure they are optimized

A site audit might take days, but Screaming Frog can help you shortcut the process and hone in on the areas that need to be fixed.