Tools Of The Trade

Hotjar is a powerful tool that helps businesses to analyze and improve your website’s user experience. It’s a great way to learn how people use your website, to inform the various aspects of your digital strategy and boost conversions.

Google Tag Manager is the best tool to create, publish, and manage tags on your website. Tags empower you to track tiny user interactions, such as clicks or plays. You can then use them to add depth to other website data in Google Analytics.

Google Analytics tracks website traffic, and displays it in customizable dashboards. It’s a fantastic – and FREE – way to learn about your audience demographics and behaviour, plus traffic sources, content performance, campaigns, and more.

Unsplash is a free stock photo website with over 110,000 contributing photographers and over 1.5 million photos. It’s a great place for teams with limited resources to access images for your website, social media, and other marketing channels.

Pixabay is a fantastic free source for all kinds of exciting content to use in your digital marketing. Membership is free, and gives your business access to over 1.7 million photos, illustrations, vector graphics, film footage, and music files.

Canva is a graphic design tool to help you create digital content. It has a library of free images, fonts, and illustrations, plus templates for all kinds of marketing needs. The free plan includes 8,000+ templates and hundreds of thousands of images.

Visme is a powerful visualization tool for creating engaging visual content. They specialize in infographics and presentations, offering templates and editing tools to help turn data into shareable graphics. But you can also create GIFs, videos, and more.

GTMetrix is one of the free tools that the Anvil team has been using more and more, to get detailed reports about site performance. It’s a Canadian owned-and-operated tool that analyzes page speed performance using Google Page Speed and YSlow.

Internet users expect pages to load instantly! PageSpeed Insights is Google’s own speed testing tool. It analyzes the content of any web page by URL, then generates a list of suggestions and fixes that can help make that page faster.

If you struggle with business writing, you’re not alone! 20 million people use the free Grammarly Chrome extension to help improve their writing. It will catch all of your typos, but also help you with suggestions to improve sentence structure, style, and tone.

The Hemingway Editor is a slightly more advanced copywriting assistant that focuses on readability – grammar, fluency, and sentence structure. You can add drafts of website or email copy into the free online editor, and receive instant analysis.

Answer the Public is a free and fun keyword research tool that helps you quickly identify search-friendly topics. You can gain country-specific insights on searches around any topic, and use them to create content that people really want.

Ahrefs isn’t free, but if you’re serious about SEO it’s a worthwhile investment. It includes competitor site exploration, rank tracking, keyword research, technical website audits, and the most powerful content research tool we’ve encountered.

BuzzSumo isn’t free, but it’s an awesome content research and monitoring tool for those looking to level-up their website and social content. Use it to find popular topics, analyze competitor content, seek out influencers on specific topics, and more.

Google’s Keyword Planner is a free tool that helps provide keyword ideas and traffic estimates. It’s intended to help build stronger paid search campaigns, but you can also use it to get inspiration for creating search-friendly website content.

SEMRush is a huge paid SEO tool with multiple benefits for business. Its features include technical SEO audits, keyword research, competitor domain and advertising research, link building assistance, tracking, and even social media management.

Feedly is a news aggregator app that’s highly useful for curating relevant third-party content to balance your company’s social media or website content. It compiles newsfeeds from chosen online sources into one place for easier reading and scheduling.

Moz Pro is an all in one tool that helps businesses manage numerous aspects of their SEO campaign. It’s a great tool to use in addition to Google Analytics. When visitors come to your site, you gain insight as to how they got there. You see if they come from paid ads, search, or social media.

If you’re super busy but need to curate third-party content for social media, this is for you. The Pocket browser extension lets you – or anyone on your team – quickly save potential articles and videos into one ‘pocket’, so you can review them when you have time.

Later is the world’s leading Instagram marketing platform. This tool is uniquely awesome for creating Stories and posts, scheduling content (including first comments for hashtags), and analyzing results. You can also use it for Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.

Hootsuite is a powerful, Canadian owned-and-operated social media management and analytics platform. You can manage posts within multiple accounts and social platforms, schedule posts, conduct social listening, and respond to customer messages.

Buffer is an awesome and extremely user-friendly social media management and analytics platform. With it you can connect multiple accounts on various social media platforms, create and schedule posts, and analyze content performance.