20 Best Digital Marketing Tools (Free & Paid)

From digital marketing platforms to competitive analysis software, there are a wide variety of tools to help businesses handle the full spectrum of digital marketing activities.

In this guide, you will find a list of the best digital marketing tools needed to manage your business’ online marketing. These are tools that we’ve been using for years for our own business and clients and can attest to their quality and effectiveness.

20 Top Digital Marketing Tools

Digital Marketing Software Reviews

1. Semrush

Semrush is a suite of online marketing tools built to help you manage all aspects of your digital marketing.

In total, there are over a dozen tools enabling you to perform a wide range of tasks.

This includes:

• Finding keywords for both SEO and PPC campaigns
• Finding opportunities to build your backlink profile
• Auditing your pages for on-page SEO
• Tracking the ranking of your target keywords

Semrush also compiles data from sites around the web, allowing you to analyze your competitors. You can see their top traffic sources, backlinks, best-performing pages, and which keywords they use in their PPC campaigns.

You can use Semrush for free but in a limited capacity. To access the full range of features, you need a paid subscription. There are three plans available:

• Pro: $119.95 per month
• Guru: $229.95 per month
• Business: $449.95 per month

Best Tool Features

Semrush provides a comprehensive solution for managing your digital marketing efforts.

You can sync your website to the platform to actively monitor your search performance while also running technical audits to find any issues with your site. Plus, you can actively monitor your closest competitors to know what they are doing.

With the keyword research tool, you can find valuable keyword targets to know what to focus on when creating content or launching ads.

2. SiteChecker Pro

SiteChecker is a digital marketing tool that lets you analyze your website’s search performance.

With the daily rank tracking feature, you can see where your website ranks for important keywords and how this trend is changing over time.

Backlink tracking lets you see all the backlinks you’ve earned and lost for your site to evaluate how well you are executing your link-building strategy.

SiteChecker also includes a Site Audit tool you can use to test the technical and on-page SEO elements of your site.

The software integrates directly with Google Analytics and Google Search Console to pull accurate traffic data.

SiteChecker requires a paid subscription. There are three plans available, each offers the same features but the number of keywords and backlinks you can view scales with higher-tiered plans.

The price for the basic plan starts at $29 per month. You can pay a lower rate by signing up for an annual renewal.

Best Tool Features

Sitechecker provides an extensive set of tools for managing your website’s SEO. The Rank Tracker lets you quickly see how your website is performing and how this performance is changing over time.

With the On-Page Checker, you can run technical audits for any of your web pages to find any issues impacting your SEO performance.

You can also set up website monitoring to receive alerts for any notable changes to your website.

3. SERanking

SERanking is an all-one SEO software that includes a website technical SEO audit tool. With the SEO tool, you can review your site’s search performance in an easy-to-use interface.

Best Tool Features

Performing regular SEO Audits is important for maintaining and improving your Google rankings.

SERanking offers three pricing plans. How much you need to pay for each plan depends on the refresh period you select for the search rankings check feature as well as what type of installments you want to pay. If you select daily checks and pay in monthly installments, your price is $39 per month.

4. OnlyPult

OnlyPult is a digital marketing platform that allows you to manage all your social media accounts in a single place.

After you sync your accounts, you can start uploading photos and videos to use for your posts. You can then craft your posts right in OnlyPult.

Posts can be scheduled in advance or shipped in real time. The software provides a social calendar for you to get a high-level view of when your various content is being promoted.

OnlyPult also has an analytics platform you can use to track the performance of your social media posts.

Best Tool Features

OnlyPult gives you a streamlined way to manage your various social media profiles.

Instead of having to log in to each account to make a post, you can instead use OnlyPult to create posts for different networks at the same time.

Plus, you can schedule your posts in advance as opposed to manually posting each at the moment.

5. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of the best SEO link-building software that helps site owners improve their search rankings. Its Site Explorer feature is considered one of the most efficient link-building tools in the market.

Best Tool Features

You can use Ahrefs to:

• Check a site’s complete backlink profile
• Compare sites to find link-building opportunities
• Check for broken links and find quick-win link opportunities

Ahrefs works on a subscription basis. Pricing starts at $99 for the Lite plan, $199 for the Standard plan, and $399 for the Advanced plan.

6. Tidio

Tidio is by far the best live chat software for all kinds of websites. It combines live chat with chatbot functionality in an easy-to-use customizable environment.

Best Tool Features

One of the best features of Tidio is the ability to power your support team with a chatbot. There are more than 35 ready-made templates for bots to choose from, and you can customize everything using the drag-and-drop editor. Tidio also offers integrations with a wide range of third-party tools.

You can try Tidio for free (up to 3 operators). This includes access to 100 unique reachable visitors and unlimited chats.

7. MailChimp

Mailchimp is an email marketing software that allows you to manage all aspects of your email marketing efforts.

The software provides an easy-to-use drag-and-drop builder and there are tons of pre-designed email templates you can use to quickly create attractive email messages.

Mailchimp features advanced marketing automation you can use to create automated email sequences such as a welcome newsletter or abandoned cart follow-ups.

You can use the software to send highly targeted marketing messages by segmenting the users on your email list based on the attributes you choose.

Mailchimp has both free and paid plans. The free plan allows up to 2,000 contacts and comes with limited functionality.

The paid plans come in three tiers; Essentials, Standard, and Premium. Prices are based on the number of contacts on your email list.

For Standard and Essentials plans, this starts at $14.99 and $9.99 respectively for up to 500 contacts.

Best Tool Features

Email marketing offers some of the highest ROI of all forms of digital marketing. With Mailchimp, you have a centralized tool for managing all aspects of your email marketing.

You can create signup forms, build your list, and segment users based on different criteria.

The email automation software lets you schedule newsletters in advance and programs automated messages that are triggered by certain user actions.

8. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a plugin for the WordPress CMS. It is designed to help you optimize all the critical SEO elements of your WordPress site.

With the plugin, you can assign a target keyword to each page and blog post. Yoast will then help you optimize for that keyword by giving you an overall score and steps for improvements.

Yoast gives you the ability to generate a sitemap, manage URL redirects, and modify your breadcrumbs and structured data snippets.

The plugin also handles other technical SEO factors in the background to ensure that your site is always up to speed with the latest SEO best practices.

The plugin is free to use. There is also a premium version that costs $89 for a single website.

Best Tool Features

There is a lot that goes into optimizing your website for SEO. Yoast provides a user-friendly tool for handling all the important SEO factors right from your WordPress dashboard.

With the tool, you get detailed insights into what you need to do to optimize each page for your target keyword.

9. Canva

Canva is a free graphic design tool you can use to create a variety of graphics and designs even if you do not have any graphic design experience.

Some of the designs you can create using the software include:

• Infographics
• Posters
• Social media posts
• Ebooks
• Business cards
• flyers

Canva offers thousands of free professionally designed templates that you can use as a starting point for your designs.

There is a drag-and-drop editing interface you can use to add different elements like text boxes, lines, charts, and frames. You can also upload your own images to use with the editor

Canva is free but you can get access to more features and templates with a paid plan.

Canva Pro provides extra storage and folders along with over 100 million premium images, elements, fonts, and templates to use for your designs. The plan costs $12.99 per month. New users can get a 30-day free trial.

Best Tool Features

Over the course of your business, you will likely need to use some form of graphics or visual elements. This could be images for your Instagram profile or a banner for your website.

Canva provides an incredibly easy-to-use graphic design tool to create any type of visual design.

Plus, there are thousands of pre-made design elements and templates to help you create attractive graphics faster, and free graphic design courses to build your skills.

10. Optinmonster

Optinmonster is a marketing software that enables you to create sign-up forms to collect email addresses from your website visitors.

Some of the types of email forms you can create include:

• Floating bars
• Lightbox popups
• Inline forms
• Exit intent forms

Optinmonster features a drag-and-drop builder that you can use to quickly create high-converting forms and there are plenty of professionally designed templates to help you get started.

Optinmonster has a detailed analytics dashboard you can use to track the performance of your various forms.

Additionally, the software supports A/B testing allowing you to split-test different designs for your forms.

Optinmonster is a paid marketing software and requires a recurring subscription. There are four plans available:

• Basic: $14 per month
• Plus: $30 per month
• Pro: $47 per month
• Growth: $80 per month

Some of the more advanced features are only available with a higher-tier plan. For instance, if you want to use exit-intent technology, you will need at least a Pro plan.

Best Tool Features

The key to successful email marketing is your email list. With Optinmonster, you have all the tools necessary to maximize the subscription rate of your website visitors.

The drag-and-drop builder makes it easy to create attractive forms and the software integrates seamlessly with popular content management systems (CMS) like WordPress.

11. TrustSpot

TrustSpot is an online marketing tool used to collect reviews and other types of social proof from your audience.

You can use the social proof you collect to help boost the confidence and perception of your business.

There are several mediums you can use to collect reviews including email request forms, on-page review forms, and SMS messages.

The reviews you collect are consolidated in a single place for easy management. You can add a feed to your site or social media accounts to showcase your reviews.

TrustSpot syncs with Google to enable the ratings for your eCommerce products to show up in the search results as rich snippets.

Best Tool Features

Social proof is an essential part of winning customers for any type of business. Whether you offer professional services or sell physical products, potential customers need to know they can trust you.

Social proof offers this validation. With TrustSpot, you can collect both company and product reviews and seamlessly add content to your website for all your visitors to see.

12. WP Rocket

WP Rocket is a WordPress plugin that allows you to significantly improve the performance and loading times of your website.

It does so primarily through various forms of caching, minifying CSS and Javascript files, and integrating with content delivery networks (CDN).

We use WP Rocket for our own site and have been able to achieve a 100% score for the page speed insights test on both desktop and mobile.

Best Tool Features

Page speed is critical for online businesses. WP Rocket gives you a tool to quickly optimize your website performance without needing extensive technical knowledge.

Caching and other performance optimization techniques are complex and can lead to site malfunctions if not configured properly.

This is often what befalls site owners that use other WordPress caching plugins with more complicated settings.

WP Rocket removes this problem by handling all the complexities in the background. You simply need to enable a few settings to experience a major boost in performance.

13. Cloudflare

Cloudflare is a web performance and security company that offers a free-to-use content delivery network (CDN).

The CDN has edge servers placed at strategic geographic locations, enabling your website to load faster for users around the world.

The CDN also provides several important security features as well. Among them are a free secure sockets layer (SSL) certificate and DDOS protection.

Cloudflare has both free and paid options. The free version includes the CDN, SSL, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack protection.

The core Cloudflare features, including the CDN, are available for free. There are paid plans for those looking for more functionality.

The paid plans start at $20 a month and include additional features like a web application firewall, image optimization, and additional page rules.

Best Tool Features

If you want your website to perform well, a CDN is an essential component. Cloudflare is one of the most popular CDNs in the world because it offers great performance benefits while also improving your website’s security.

Additionally, the CDN is free to use and integrates easily with popular web hosting providers and content management systems.

14. Grammarly

Grammarly is a marketing tool that helps with writing. The software scans your text for grammatical errors and other mistakes so that you can quickly make changes and create high-quality writing.

You can use the Grammarly editor in your Grammarly account or you can download extensions to add the Grammarly tool to Google Chrome, Microsoft Word, or Google Docs.

The editor provides a performance score that represents the quality of writing for the document. There is also a readability score that measures how difficult (or easy) your content is to read.

Grammarly is free to use however you can sign up for a paid plan to get more detailed suggestions on how to improve your writing.

The premium plan costs $30 per month or ($144 per year).

Best Tool Features

Grammarly significantly reduces the effort it takes to write great content. With the tool, any words, phrases, or sentences that need to be fixed are highlighted.

When you over the highlighted section, Grammarly shows you how you should correct the error and allows you to do so with a simple click.

This helps improve your writing quality as you do not need to worry about overlooking mistakes as Grammarly will catch most of them.

15. Vimeo

Vimeo is an online marketing tool for creating, editing, and broadcasting videos.

The video editor features hundreds of templates to use as a launching point for your designs.

Whether you use a template built for a social media ad or start from scratch, the editor makes it easy to add clips and text or select background music.

In addition to creating videos, you can also use the software to live stream a webinar or other virtual event.

Vimeo provides a central location to host and store your videos as well as a viewing platform to share your videos and watch videos from others.

This is the platform we use for all our Reliablesoft Academy Courses.

You can use Vimeo in a limited capacity for free.

To access all the extensive video creation features you need a paid plan. There are four options available, starting at $12 per month for the Plus plan

Best Tool Features

Vimeo provides an all-in-one solution for creating and managing videos for your digital marketing efforts.

You can use one of the hundreds of templates to quickly create a professionally designed video to use for your ads on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms.

The editing interface is easy to use so you do not need advanced design experience to create videos that align with your business.

16. Bluehost

Bluehost is our recommended hosting company. They offer an affordable and easily scalable platform for all kinds of websites.

Best Tool Features

Bluehost offers perhaps the most user-friendly interface to create a new hosting account. This is important for beginners and novice users who don’t want to go through a dozen of options or questions to get started.

With your hosting package, you also get a free domain registration (for one year) and unlimited email accounts for free.

When you choose Bluehost for hosting your website, you’ll know in advance how much to pay for the period of the offer (as a new customer) and how much to pay after the offer ends.

17. Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free service from Google that helps you manage and monitor your website’s presence in Google Search results.

Once you verify ownership of your site, the tool provides performance metrics for your site’s search engine traffic including impressions, clicks, and clickthrough rates.

You can also see what keywords your site ranks for and what pages are ranking for them.

With Google Search Console you can add your web pages to Google’s index either by submitting your sitemap or by using the URL Inspection Tool.

If Google experiences any errors when crawling your site, the issues are added to Search Console along with the solution so that you can quickly get your site back in top order.

Best Tool Features

Google Search Console is an essential tool for managing your SEO performance. You can use it to control what pages are submitted to Google and to see which of your pages are indexed and ranking for keywords.

The tool also lets you track any errors and issues with your site to quickly fix the problems before they negatively impact your search engine performance.

18. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free web analytics service that lets you track the behavior of your website users.

With the tool, you get detailed statistics and reports on how visitors find your site, what pages they visit, what products they buy, and where they leave your site.

Some of the important metrics you can track in Google Analytics are:

• Bounce rate
• Pages per session
• Session duration
• Pageviews by page
• Conversion rates
• Product revenue

With Google Analytics, you can track the results for Google Ads and other marketing campaigns to see how much revenue they generate and how the traffic behaves.

Best Tool Features

Google Analytics is vital to any business that wants to monitor its website performance. With the tool, you can get a detailed understanding of what parts of your site are the most valuable and which are underperforming.

You can analyze these insights and metrics to make improvements that lead to better results for your business.

19. Google Looker Studio

Google Looker Studio is a free reporting tool from Google. With Looker Studio, you can combine data from various data sources into beautiful reports. It’s a great tool to use for SEO reporting purposes since you can combine data from Google Search Console, Google Analytics and other sources.

Best Tool Features

You can easily transform data into charts (line, bar, and pie charts) as well as geo maps, bubble graphs, and tables. There are options to add interactive elements like filters and data range controls, as well as clickable links and images. Plus, you can annotate and brand reports with styles, color themes, text, and images.

Sharing insights and collaborating on reports is simple. You can invite others to view and edit reports, send links in scheduled emails, and export reports in multiple formats. Editors can work simultaneously on the same reports, and annotate in real-time.

Google Looker Studio is free to use.

20. Google Trends

Google Trends is a free Google keyword research tool for finding trending and popular keywords in various Google properties.

Best Tool Features

Google Trends lets you review multiple terms at once to compare the results side by side. This leads to faster keyword research and helps you prioritize the keywords with the best opportunities.

The best part of Google Trends is the ability to see how interest in a keyword or topic is changing over time.

Google Trends is free to use.

Methodology

To help you find the best digital marketing tools, we’ve looked at the most popular marketing tools in the market. The tools that made it to our list have all the features you need to create successful digital marketing campaigns. We included in the list tools that we’ve been using for years for our own business and clients and can attest to their quality and effectiveness. The review was performed by an experienced digital marketer.