Google Analytics: This is the most critical tool for your business, and is absolutely free. Get insights of your visitors, total sessions, unique users, average time spend on page, bounce rate and more. Leverage the tool to power your marketing strategies as this tool will tell you traffic sources and exit paths. Implement ecommerce tracking and track the number of conversions on your website. All these insights will help you make calculated business decisions.
Google Tag Manager (GTM): Simply put, GTM is the house of tags. Every new website owner faces the issue of going to developer for simple tag installation which causes delays. Install GTM and house all your tags like Google Analytics, Adwords etc within GTM. No need to tweak or play around with website code again and again if you have GTM set up on your website.
Google Search Console: Also known as Google Webmaster tool, Search Console is a great tool that will show you stats like clicks, impressions, click through rate (CTR) and average position. Where Search Console excels is providing you with indexing report that will show you how many website pages have been indexed and hence are ranking in Google search results page. Moreover, you can also disavow links which appear to you as illegitimate and hence can negatively affect your website ranking.
Hootsuite: This free tool enables you to manage your social media networks from a single interface. All you need is to connect your Facebook, Twitter account to Hootsuite and viola; you will see all the feeds loaded in Hootsuite dashboard.
Yoast SEO/Screaming Frog: Yoast SEO is a plugin for WordPress, which gives you insights for search engine optimization. It’s a fairly simple tool; just follow the tips like optimizing title, description, readability analysis, and basic optimization is accomplished.
If your website is built on other platform, Screaming Frog is a great independent tool. Just enter your URL, the software will crawl your website and show you all the missing titles, heading tags, status codes, canonical and more. You can export the data as excel and begin fixing issues.
Google Adwords: This tool allows you to run ads on Google and its search partners. Sign up for Google account, set up campaign and run ads for business-oriented keywords. You can access the tool for free, however running campaigns will accrue cost. Even if you do not want to run ads, access Adwords for its keyword planner, which is a great keyword research tool.
Page Speed Insights: It is very important for a website to load quickly or visitor will lose interest. Google page speed insights analyses website for speed and provides you with both desktop and mobile speed score. Additionally, it will provide you with recommendations to improve website speed and estimated savings.
Other Notable Mentions:
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- BuzzSumo for content strategy
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- Hubspot for CRM and marketing automation
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- Crazy Egg to get heat maps based on visitor browsing
- Canva to build quick infographics and designs