If you run a startup, it’s likely you have very little funds to spend on things outside your core business. If you do, congrats, you are above the fold. For those who don’t want to pay for pricey analytics tools, expensive industry research, or an SEO expert to help you understand your market better, here is a list of top FREE business tools for you to try out.
Entrepreneurs are used to hustle and adjusting for a lack of funds by putting in the extra effort. These tools will provide a return for the investment.
1. Google Adwords/Analytics
Keyword Tool
Behavioral Analytics
These tools need to become your best friends. If you don’t know how to use them you are already losing to your competition. With Google’s ever growing expansion to every part of our lives, getting on the first page of search results is fundamental for your startup to reach your target audience. The keyword planner will help you search for the low-cost, high-traffic search terms and behavior/acquisition analytics will help you track where your users are coming from and going on your site.
2. SpyFu
This is one of the best resources to use and actually see what your competition is paying in advertising. It will show the top organic and paid competitors, along with profitable ad campaigns, daily clicks, and costs per click.
3. Compete
Great resource for estimating web traffic for a particular website. Gives monthly unique, traffic rank, and top competitors. This is a quick and easy site to use but generally does not work unless the site is generating 50,000+ visitors.
4. StatsShow
If Compete isn’t giving you’re the numbers you need this the next best thing (or better). This will give you a backlinks estimation, Alexa ranking, bounce rates and time-on-site stats.
5. IBISworld
Simple tool to gather some industry research statistics related to your company’s space. Type in the industry you would like to look at and it will give you the estimated revenue, number of employees, growth rate and companies in the space.
6. SimilarWeb
New favorite. This site is the one stop solution for all things web traffic. It can give an estimation of traffic, site referrals; organic vs paid search terms (with referring search engines), social sites generating the most conversation about your site, and the general interests of your audience. Imagine what the Pro version can do…
7. FollowerWonk
Easy to use tool to help grow and reach your social follows. This tool, in combination with Buffer, will help to maximize your social presence.
8. CrazyEgg
This site analytics tool will show the patterns of your users while they are on your site. The heat-mapping feature will show their click patterns (great for A/B testing) and the scroll maps will help to show were you are losing/gaining visitors. Their pricing is $9/mo but you can learn a lot for implementing a 30 day free trial.