2 Free Digital Tools To Track Your Competitors (Or Whoever)
Always love to pull back the internet's curtain!
Hey there friends, new and old!
This humble little project grew substantially this week. If you’re new to this project, welcome! I’m so pumped you’re here.
Quick breakdown of what to expect from this newsletter: one email every two weeks sharing two free digital tools to help you do more, with less. That’s it!
Whether this is your first issue, or you’ve been here from Day 1, remember that you can find all past episodes at FreeTools.Digital.
For those who don’t know me, I’m Josh Klemons, a Digital Storyteller/Strategist helping progressive campaigns, brands and organizations win the internet. You can learn more about me and the work my team and I do here.
If you’re interested in hearing my political hot takes (I have many!) or to see me rag on Republican email programs, follow me on TikTok, Bluesky, Twitter, Substack, LinkedIn and YouTube.
I also have two podcasts:
Step Up Your Social — All eps are short (10 mins or less) and provide quick, actionable tips to take your digital marketing to the next level. Listen to all eps at StepUpYourSocial.com or wherever you stream podcasts.
Hello Merge Tag: Where social media and politics intersect. Listen to all eps at HelloMergeTag.com or wherever you stream podcasts.
So excited you’re here. Now let’s dig in!
Know anyone who might appreciate what we’re doing here? Invite them to join us! As you know, we’re all really nice, and cool, and we all LOVE free digital tools!
Today we’re looking at 2 free tools from a company called Plerdy. They also offer paid tools if you want to take things further (learn about their tools and pricing here). But these tools are both free and quite powerful.
SEO Analyzer
Tool type: Chrome Extension
This free Chrome extension will give you a mini-SEO audit of any site you visit. Just head to a website or landing page, enable the plugin and voila: you’ll see a ton of helpful info to help you better understand what folks are optimizing for, where there’s room for improvement and more.
This tool can be helpful for auditing your own site, as well as anyone else’s.
Have a page missing H1 text? This tool will let you know.
Have images without alt text? This tool will tell you.
Want to know how many backlinks a page has? You guessed it, this tool will break that down.
This is not a replacement for a full SEO audit. But it’s a great snapshot, that runs instantaneously, for any site you visit.
FREE or FREEmium: FREE!
Totally free to install and use.
Analyze Websites
Tool type: Chrome Extension
While the last tool helped you understand a site’s SEO, this free Chrome extension will help you understand users’ behavior on any given page.
Install the plugin, visit a site and see heatmaps, scroll depth insights and more.
If you’re not familiar with the concept, heatmaps show you where people are trying to click on a page and scroll depth will show you how far folks scrolled before leaving a page.
Both are great ways to know if and how your site (and your competitors’ sites!) are actually resonating with folks.
They also have an A/B testing tool that seems interesting and you can take screenshots of pages which can be useful.
FREE or FREEmium: FREE!
This is a free tool. Install it and get to spying!
Hope these were helpful.
I provide these free tools because I LOVE helping good people win the internet.
All I ask in return is that you help this humble little newsletter grow. So do me a favor and invite 2 friends to join us today.
They’ll appreciate it… as will I!
See you in a fortnight.
Josh
joshklemons.com