Tracking tags, monitoring campaigns and keeping an eye on your competitors is a constant challenge for an SEM marketer. With the right digital marketing tools, however, your job will be a lot easier! Here’s 8 of our favourite free tools for optimizing your search engine marketing!

1. SimilarWeb – get all the facts about your competitors’ sites

SimilarWeb is a free Google Chrome extension that shows all the statistics about the traffic on a special website in a certain category. With one click, it presents everything from the visitor’s average time on site and pages per visit, to traffic sources and audience interests. SimilarWeb is a great tool for understanding your competitors and comparing your own business to theirs. It’s a fair indicator of who’s the bigger player on the market – and gets you all the concrete stats!

2. SEMRush – a complete tool for search engine marketing and SEO analysis

SEMrush is a large digital marketing suite with different tools for SEO, paid traffic, keyword research, social media marketing and content. Use SEMrush to find out all the basics around a website’s traffic and ranking in different channels. With the trial version, you get a total of 10 free searches for websites – which is great for understanding your own position compared to your head competitors.

3. Tag assistant by Google – *troubleshoot and optimize your tags*

Tag Assistant is a free Google tool and Chrome extension that checks any different Google tags used on your website, such as Google Analytics, Adwords Conversion Tracking, Google Tag Manager, etc. It reports errors and suggests improvements, helping you find out the right tracking criteria, and implementing your tags in the right way. For example, Tag Assistant recommends moving tags and also finds outdated versions. It simply helps you stay on top of your tags!

4. Ghostery – finds EVERY tag connection on your competitor’s websites

Ghostery is a free browser extension tool that finds any different tags or scripts that a website has installed. Developed primarily for the user to be able to block different tags to get a cleaner browsing experience, this ad blocker also works as a tag tracker, giving any marketer a great glimpse into what different connectors the business owner has. Whether they’re part of a publishing network or how they use different display networks, Facebook, LinkedIn, Bing etc – you’ll see it all with Ghostery.

5. Data miner – extracts large amounts of data from your website

Data miner is one of many website scrapers – a digital marketing tool for businesses or ecommerces with lots of data on their website. Use it to index your website according to any criteria you set, and Data miner extracts the data and sends back a detailed spreadsheet. It’s a free, handy tool for any marketer that wants a fast and simple overview of their products or contact lists. Furthermore, it will help you find out if your feed isn’t updated.

6. Google Tag Manager – manage all your tags from the same place

Google Tag Manager is a free tool that allows you to congregate different tags from different places. With Tag Manager, you can easily manage any tracking pixels or snippets of code from the same spot, making it easier to add them to your website. In Google Tag Manager, you can track everything from link clicks and PDF downloads to scrolling behavior and shopping cart abandonment. It’s a simplifying tool especially for web developers, since you don’t have to modify the code to deploy new tags.

7. Google Optimize – simple tool for A/B testing

Google Optimize is a free tool for A/B testing with quite a simple implementation. You introduce some code on your site and get an interface where you can easily swap content around, choose shapes, sizes, colours or copy to create different versions to test against each other. Google Optimize is linked to Google Analytics, where you can follow how the versions differ in visits and conversions.

8. Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a free keyword planner and tool that helps you plan your digital marketing, content and SEM. Use it to generate keyword suggestions, get valuable insights into what SEO strategies are working for your competitors, and what keywords, back links and content ideas you can adopt in your advertising.

Make use of these free tools to grow your business to new heights.

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