There are lots of fantastic tools out there for travel companies to use to optimise your website and find opportunities to promote yourself are online as part of a travel marketing campaign. Many of these are paid and offer fantastic insight, but there are also many free tools which don’t require any investment and can still guide you on the route to make great progress. It’s a no brainer to get hold of these tools and use them to your maximum advantage.
We’ve put together the very best of the free tools on the market below so you can use them to take your travel company forward….
The first and easiest thing to do for any website is ensure you can track your progress. The Analytics tools below can give you free insight into how your site is performing and where you can improve…
Google Analytics – free insight from the horse’s mouth into where you are getting traffic to your site, conversions and much more
Google Webmaster Tools – Information about your site’s technical setup, insights into errors, links and keyword data. Teamed with Google Analytics this is an invaluable resource
Clicky Analytics – a free alternative to Google Analytics
Bing Webmaster Tools – another source of website data which provides alternative information to Google. It’s worth having accounts for both platforms
Bitly – known best as a URL shortener but can provide amazing information on social analytics when used in combination with social platforms like Facebook and Twitter
Keyword research is a crucial part of SEO success, identifying the phrases customers are searching for and incorporating them into your website in a natural way so more people can find you. The tools below do a great job of helping do this…
Google Keyword Planner – Google’s insight into the number of searches per month for any phrase out there, along with suggestions for related phrases based on your input
Ubersuggest – a great tool to widen the net of phrases in your basket. Cross reference your results with the Keyword Planner above
Soovle – more ideas for growing your keyword list from one or two basic phrases
Wordstream – a suite of keyword tools to use and complement the others above. Paid options available too
SEMRush – free trials available, though SEMRush can give you some incredibly in depth competitor data too if you can afford the paid options
Once you have your Analytics installed and target keywords ready to go, you can start looking at your website’s technical setup and how best to optimise its on page elements. These tools will show you how…
Pingdom – website speed is crucial to SEO performance as well as user experience. Let Pingdom tell you how you’re doing and where you can improve
Web Page Test – further insight into page speed, content types and technical aspects
SEO Book Toolbar – all sorts of on page insight, including meta data, internal links and page structure as well as a wide range of other information on links, keyword research and much more. Indispensible
Screaming Frog – a fantastic tool which will crawl your website and give you all the relevant data you need and highlight errors your site has. Limited to 500 pages for the free tool
XENU – not the most attractive of tools, but incredibly useful for finding broken links, creating sitemaps and more
XML Sitemaps – a free tool to create an XML sitemap for your site of up to 500 pages. Create it, then submit it to Webmaster Tool
SEO Tools for Excel – another amazing suite of SEO tools in Excel, with technical SEO help amongst many other useful insight
Copyscape – duplicate content is a big no no for search engines, Copyscape will help you check that your content is unique and no-one is copying it
Similar Page Checker – think some of your content may be sailing too close to the digital wind, this tool will help you compare your page to another on the web and tell you how similar the content is
Analysing the competition is a crucial method of enhancing your SEO performance. Seeing how the competition are setting up their pages, which keywords they rank for, what links they have and how they are interacting socially all contribute to fantastic intel for improving your own visibility. The tools below help you do just that…
Search Metrics – amazing insight into almost anything your competition are doing. Some people say it is indispensible
SEMRush – extremely comprehensive insight into competitors keyword data as well as the ads they are running
Keyword Eye – a less comprehensive tool than the two above, but a very simple interface for looking at competitor data, from keywords they rank for to the types of content you should be trying to create
Whois – all the background on your competition’s domain registration, hosting and more. If they haven’t hidden it that is
Follow – does what it says on the tin. Follow the competition and see what they are doing online. The paid version gives more comprehensive data but the free one still gives good insight
Similar Web – wide ranging data for any competitor, from traffic levels to the break down of where it comes from, referring sites and keywords
Links are crucial to your website increasing its visibility online. The tools below will help you find sites to target and analyse which are good, bad and even ugly ones to avoid!
Open Site Explorer – a fantastic tool to analyse competitors and see where they are being linked from, as well as additional link suggestions
Majestic SEO – similar to OSE, further insight into competitor links and insight into the strength and topics of competitor link profiles
Buzzstream – a great tool for outreach, but which also provides some great free link building tools
SEO Quake – a toolbar to give you immediate insight into the strength of websites that you might consider and the widest selection of SEO data out there
MOZ Toolbar – instant access to data about a website’s strength, number of linking domains and much more
Removeem – a useful tool for those who may have had low quality SEO work done in the past. Analyses anchor text profiles to make sure you’re not at risk from Penguinor manual penalties
Way Back Machine – see what target websites looked like in the past to ensure you are targeting genuine sites and not spammy ones which have been repurposed
Venny – combine this with data from Majestic SEO or Open Site Explorer to input the links of multiple competitors and find which they all have in common. Not really an SEO tool, but serves this purpose perfectly and can uncover some real diamonds and crucial links that are aiding the competition
Content marketing should tie in with your link building strategy and the tools highlighted above. However, the set of tools below can help you find and create great resources on your website and to provide to others and further enhance the work of the link building tools above….
Wordle – simple and easy word clouds which you can use to understand the phrases being used on other sites, to create your own content pieces and better picture content anywhere on the web
Canva – if you want to create beautiful headers, presentations, infographics, Facebook ads………..basically design anything, then look no further. Canva is easy to use, has great templates and even the worst technophobe will be able to handle it. Highly recommended.
easelly – a great tool for creating easy infographics and other visual ideas. Templates provided so it’s straightforward even for novice
Wistia – fantastic video hosting with great options even on their free package, including data on what people have watched. Paid options for those who want a little more
Content Strategy Helper – a Google document which will help you find trends, potential editorial targets and develop a strategy for your content approach
As all marketing practices merge closer and closer together, traditional PR is still a fantastic way of enhancing your SEO performance and getting great links online, as well as good visility offline. The tools below will help you find opportunities to chase…
HARO – Help a Reporter out is a great service to sign up to which links reporters looking for quotes/references with business owners and publishers who can help. Might not provide perfect options week in/week out, but just one piece of coverage will be worth signing up and watching the opportunities get delivered every day
Blogger Link Up – another great service which delivers opportunities straight to your inbox. Find bloggers who are looking to feature guest content and vice versa
Travmedia – sign up for access to what stories journalists are writing and how you can help. You can also submit your own press releases and have them distributed to targeted journalists
As with PR, a good presence on social media will undoubtedly indirectly aid your SEO performance. Having an active social presence will help you build brand awareness, and the tools below will help you do that and monitor your progress…
Followerwonk – find influencers in your industry on Twitter to target and connect with and optimise your own social performance
Social Crawlytics – find where the competition’s content is being shared so you can target your own promotion. Identify influencers in a similar way to Followerwonk
Social Mention – real time search in social media platforms so you can monitor your brand as well as uncovering trends
Hootsuite – A social media dashboard where you can manage your social profiles as well as monitoring relevant hashtags and trends
It’s useful to stay up to speed with the most significant changes in the SEO industry in case your website has suffered from them. Even the best behaved webmasters have suffered in the past from updates like Panda and the sites below will help you keep your finger on the pulse…
Panguin – map your Analytics data over a timeline of the main Panda and Penguin updates to see if you suffered
Mozcast – a daily update on the fluctuation in the search results so you can gain insight into major Google updates
Moz Algorithm Changes – updates on all the major algorithm updates in an easy to reference format
In addition to the tools mentioned already, there are a few extras that will complement them nicely and don’t fall into any of the categories above…
Rank Checker – part of the SEO Book tools package, Rank Checker is an easy way to check your rankings for key phrases every now and then. If you’re looking for something more comprehensive and a regular update then you’ll have to look at some paid options
Peek – an amazing free tool which gets a real person to test your website’s usability for 5 minutes and offer their thoughts and advice. You then get the full recording delivered to your inbox
Local Citation Finder – Whitespark’s tool to find suitable citations for your business which will help your local performance. Perfect for travel companies in particular areas, such as B&Bs or holiday cottages
So there you have it. So many fantastic tools, all for no cost! You can go and start using every one of these tools now to start improving your visibility online, all it needs is a bit of time and effort. If you know of any other fantastic free SEO tools that we haven’t mentioned here then please let us know in the comments!
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