lists

What tools do you use to get your online marketing done? Are you a content creationist? Are you a brand marketer? Or perhaps, a social media maven?

Whichever category you fall under, the reality as a marketer is that your stack is often overflowing with tools. But which are the most useful? Which can actually improve your efficiency rather than just adding another layer of work in your daily life?

Look no further! We made you a list of 11 essential optimization tools to help improve all you marketing efforts.

Content Optimization

HubSpot

HubSpot is well known for its CRM and especially for its all-in-one inbound marketing software. There are a number of great features that HubSpot offers that’s worthy of highlighting, but let’s focus on their content creation solutions.

HubSpot’s content editor incorporates content layout and copy creation while enabling you to preview how your work will look across devices. This is an incredibly useful tool considering how most readers engage with content on their mobile devices now a days. Adding CTA buttons and building landing pages are seamless in this process as well. But on top of this, SEO optimization is built-into the editor so you can say optimize for keywords while you write and say by to WordPress plugins.

CoSchedule

Similar to HubSpot, CoSchedule offers a great content creation solution for teams. Like HubSpot, you can easily plan and schedule your posts with their content calendar. But CoSchedule has the added feature of being able to schedule your social media posts immediately after you’ve finished writing and scheduling your content.

If you’re like a lot of marketers, you might be using a lot of tools from Google Docs and Analytics, to Evernote and more, so CoSchedule can be a good choice because of all its integration capabilities.

But one of CoSchedule’s best tools is its Headline Analyzer. Just enter your blog headlines and CoSchedule will give you a full analysis with an EMV (Emotional Marketing Value) score out of 100 and a breakdown of the ‘word-type’ components to help you write catchier, more click-worthy headlines. Best of all – it’s a free tool available to everyone.

SEO Optimization

Yoast

If you’re using WordPress to create content, you’re probably familiar with the Yoast plugin. If not, you should be. The basic version enables you to add a focus keyword for your content and provides you with content analysis to improve your readability and SEO.

We all know the importance of building up your blog or website’s SEO so you end up indexed properly across major search engines like Google and Bing. In addition to the XML sitemaps Yoast can generate for you and the keyword optimization, there’s post title and meta-description editors that allow you to fix exactly how your content will be viewed when links are shared socially too.

SEMRush

Equal parts competitive intelligence suite, and SEO optimization solution, SEMRush is a versatile tool in any marketer’s stack.

SEMRush gives insights into your competitor’s strategies across display, organic, and paid search, as well as back links. The company has expanded into display and video analytics recently, but its bread and butter has always been keyword analysis. You simply enter relevant keywords to get an idea of the keywords your competitors are using for their SEO and PPC campaigns, their long-tail keywords, and even their geo-targeting parameters. Leveraging the data on how your competitors are positioning themselves can also help you strategise your next move better.

Moz

Similar to SEMRush, Moz offers great keyword information. But in addition to this Moz helps decipher crawl errors and even provides you with a page optimization score. For publishers and web masters, this is a great tool to run an instant audit of your on-page SEO to optimize for specific and relevant keywords that your competitor is also using. Bonus, its page opportunities identifier helps you uncover what opportunities you’re missing out on your pages to help you improve your search ranking potential.

MonitorBacklinks.com

If you haven’t discovered monitorbacklinks.com, now is the time. Building a strong network of backlinks is important for improving your site’s ranking and boost traffic. Monitorbacklinks.com helps you identify the sites on which the best quality backlinks directing to your site are located.

This helps you identify where the best opportunities lies to build new relations and more content, and ultimately place more backlinks to push traffic towards your business.

Website Performance

Visual Website Optimizer

Visual Website Optimizer (VWO) is a favourite A/B testing software for marketers. Even with no understanding of basic coding, Javascript or HTML, you can tweak and optimize your website and landing pages for better performance. You don’t have to go to your developers and ask for help, VWO really makes it easy to split test multiple versions of your site.

After a simple integration process require you to plug in a small script into your site’s header to verify your domain, you’re ready to start testing. And you can test almost everything from URL split tests, A/B test headlines and images, CTA buttons, or generate heat maps to understand where people are clicking and how to boost your conversions. Bonus, VWO offers a number of analytics and reports so you can identify where the major fixes need to be made.

Optimizely

Like VWO, Optimizely gives you the ability to experiment with your site to optimize towards the best user experience and ultimately conversions. The big difference with Optimizely has to be its mobile optimization tool. If you have an app, this is a great tool to edit your interface on the fly AND run split tests on mobile to ultimately roll out new upgrades in phases, or re-engage your audience.

Social and News Monitoring

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a monitoring tool that helps you keep an eye on your content and understand what performs best based on audience engagement across social. But in addition to this, BuzzSumo allows you to identify the influencers that create and share content relevant to yours.

There’s a “Trending Now” stream that helps you keep a finger on the news pulse running across social. You can filter this according to your own viewing preferences as well. Bonus, there’s a back links tracker and a Facebook analyzer that helps you identify which of your Facebook content is doing best to optimize towards superior social content.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is one of those essential tools that almost every social media marketer has in their arsenal. We’re all aware that through Hootsuite you can schedule and share social media content across multiple channels. It’s an all-in-one social platform.

But, you can keep an eye on your competitors or industry relevant news by adding their social accounts into your stream. For example, keep an eye on everything eMarketer is posting to their Facebook page by plugging them into your Hootsuite Facebook stream.

Their Twitter stream is even better: you can add a stream based on keywords. For example, if you add a stream and specify you want to follow keywords like “Performance Marketing” or “Digital Marketing”, these tweets are filtered in and you only see the most relevant tweets in this stream, rather than everything like in your actual news feed.

Feedly

The best way to start your mornings? With a cup of coffee while scrolling through Feedly, the ultimate news aggregator. Feedly compiles news feeds from a massive number of online news sources all into one news feed that’s personalized to you. Feedly isn’t so much an optimization tool, but using it definitely helps optimize your workflow.

You can sort your news according to subject matter like Business, Design, or Marketing, and get through the most relevant news in the most organized way possible. It’s the easiest way to stay abreast of all of today’s digital marketing news.

And there you have it, 11 essential optimization tools to help improve your marketing that you should be adding to your stack, now. Did we miss anything? What’s in your marketing tool kit?