12 free and handy single-purpose tools

When you ask around about the best tools for online marketing, you usually hear familiar names: Moz, Ahrefs, Majestic, Semrush, Searchmetrics and Sistrix. These tools are indeed all good, but they’re also all very expensive. As a freelancer, these tools are simply unaffordable, let alone having more than one. These are also all-in-one tools, whilst you often only use a few features of a programme like SemRush. For every feature offered by a comprehensive programme, there are also single-purpose tools available, which are usually free and very easy to use.

Keywordshitter2

Stuck for ideas on new keywords and combinations? With the Keywordshitter2, that’s a thing of the past. This little tool, which you can find here, generates endless combinations using the keyword you enter – to the point of tedium, in fact. Certainly not all the combinations provided are useful, but many are, and others can spark new ideas for related keywords. All in all, a very handy go-to when you’re stuck for ideas!

Keywords Everywhere

Whilst Keywordshitter can provide you with an endless number of keywords and variations on them, Keywords Everywhere is an excellent complement to this. Keywords Everywhere instantly displays the search volume, an estimate of the cost per click and an estimate of the level of competition for each variation you enter. So it’s very handy for immediately testing your newly discovered keywords using Keywordshitter!

URL to Domain – URL Trimmer

Every online marketer, and particularly those active in link building, regularly needs to access the root of a URL – and often dozens or even hundreds of URLs at the same time. Great link-building tools such as Majestic are extremely comprehensive, but something as simple as a URL trimmer is missing. Fortunately, many sites have emerged offering free trimmers, and the best one is from URLtodomain.com. The trimmer has multiple functions, is free, and you don’t need to download anything to use it. Not even your output, as this simply appears in a copyable field. This gives you an instant, handy list to run through Majestic’s Bulk Backlink Checker!

Web.Dev by Google

Want to give your site a quick technical check, but don’t have time to wait until Screaming Frog, Ahrefs and the like have finally crawled the entire site? Google’s Web.Dev gives you an overview of technical improvements needed for your website within minutes, based on scores, and also provides specific tips on what to look out for. A very handy tool, which in some areas even goes further than the well-known technical auditors!

Mockingbird Wireframes

Need to whip up a wireframe quickly? You’ll often find a designer staring at you with a pained expression, telling you it’ll take a while. Is that really necessary? No, certainly not! With Mockingbird’s wireframe tool, you can easily create a sketch of your new page yourself in just a few minutes. The programme is very intuitive; after just a few attempts, you’ll get the hang of it in no time, and you’ll be able to impress your stakeholders straight away with your creation. It’s incredibly handy for anyone who wants to sketch out what the client’s new website will look like right there during a client meeting!

Image resizer

Don’t have Photoshop to hand but need to edit the technical aspects of your image? Think of compressing it, resizing it and changing the file type. On Resizeimage.net, this is very easy to do, and you don’t need to bother with Photoshop or similar software. Simply upload your image to the website, adjust it as you wish and download it again. That’s it!

Bulk DA checker

Handy, isn’t it, that Majestic Bulk Backlink Checker? You can simply feed a whole batch of URLs into the programme and, within seconds, you’ll have all the scores for the websites checked. And now you’d also like to know the MOZ Domain Authority, but unfortunately MOZ doesn’t have a built-in bulk checker. Fortunately, there’s Bulkdachecker.com, a site that uses the MOZ API to check the DA, PA and Spam Score of your sites, and does so just as quickly as Majestic does for Trust Flow and Citation Score. However, there are a few drawbacks to this tool. For instance, you can only enter a maximum of 10 sites at a time, and partly because this tool is free, it’s used so much that it usually stops working by the end of the month. By then, the tool’s administrator has exceeded their MOZ account limit. Do you know of a better one? Let us know via our contact page!

HTML Checker

Every web page is built using HTML code, and every web page contains errors. That is a fact. However, you can minimise these errors. Optimising code has several advantages: it makes your website faster, it is a minor ranking factor, and it ensures that everything on the site works correctly. The website W3schools.com is well known amongst many people who work with the internet, and is an excellent resource for everything to do with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. To check your HTML and make it as good as possible, you can test your page using W3’s validator tool. You simply enter a URL, and the site then tells you what can be optimised, with different levels of urgency.

Purify CSS

In addition to the HTML checker, Purify CSS can not only identify errors in the CSS code, but also resolve them immediately. You simply enter a URL, and the tool returns the optimised code. This means that redundant code with no function has been filtered out. Perfect for speed optimisation!

10. GA Debug

You can use GA Debug to check whether the correct information is being sent to Google Analytics. This tool sends useful information to the JavaScript console by enabling Google Analytics’ debugging feature. This extension loads the debug version of the Google Analytics script for all sites you visit using Google Chrome. These messages contain error messages and warnings that can alert you if your analytics tracking code is configured incorrectly. It also provides a detailed overview of every tracking beacon sent to Google Analytics.

11. Wappalyzer

Wappalyzer is a multi-platform tool that identifies the technologies used on websites. It detects content management systems, e-commerce platforms, web frameworks, server software, analytics tools and much more. This is very useful if, for example, you want to know which CMS a website is built on, as this isn’t always obvious.

12. Lighthouse

Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool created by Google to improve the quality of web pages. You can run it on any web page. It offers audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps and more. You can run Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools, as an extension, from the command line or as a Node module. How does it work? You provide Lighthouse with a URL to check; it carries out a series of audits on the page and then generates a report on how well the page is performing. The following aspects are examined:

• • Overall performance: the speed at which a web page loads is of great importance to users. The longer it takes for a web page to load, the greater the likelihood that the visitor will leave the page. The audit provides performance reports on the site’s performance across various categories, including metrics, opportunities and diagnostics. Metrics covers three key aspects of the loading process and shows you which page features are causing delays.
  • Accessibility: this part of the audit examines user behaviour. Accessibility focuses on visitors with some form of disability or impairment. This section of the audit tool analyses screen readers and other assistive technologies on the page.
  • Best Practices: we already know that Google has many rules. This feature ensures that web developers follow the rules and implement best practices when it comes to web design. It also helps users to avoid performance pitfalls and modernise their pages.
  • Progressive Web Applications: Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) are assessed on the basis of three key factors – speed, reliability and engagement. The Lighthouse audit helps developers to improve a PWA using a checklist of features.

Would you like to find out more about the ‘one-purpose’ tools?

Would you like to find out more about the ‘one-purpose’ tools mentioned above? Please feel free to contact us and we’ll be happy to help.