With the uncertainty of in-person events and online shopping becoming the norm, in 2021 it will be more important than ever to focus on the one thing you can control: your digital presence.
As we enter the new year, companies need to emphasize their website experience and optimize their conversions.
To help you do this, we’ve rounded up our top six tools for optimizing your website that you should consider for your 2021 tech stack.
Marketing Hub: HubSpot
If you’re familiar with HubSpot’s CRM functionality, you might be wondering why this is on the list. But HubSpot’s CRM offers more than just contact management capabilities.
With HubSpot’s Marketing Hub Software, you have a direct way to attract website visitors through blogging, social media, ads, landing pages, chatbots and more, all while tracking the information directly into your CRM.
Because it’s fully integrated with HubSpot’s CRM, not only can you utilize the features they provide, but also access real-time tracking and reporting data that can lead to more personalized content down the road.
Still on the fence about HubSpot? Check out our platform guide for more information on the features they provide.
SEO: SEMrush
If digital presence is king in 2021, then SEO is the entire royal court.
Having a robust content marketing strategy that’s rooted in SEO best practices and keyword optimization can drive big results – trust us, we know.
A tool like SEMrush allows you to effectively plan your keywords, review your website performance and make informed decisions to set your website up for success.
We use SEMrush for clients and our own site, taking advantage of many of the SEO features, including:
- Keyword research and recommendations to help inform new content
- Traffic analytics to see how your website is performing
- Backlink analytics to get data on what sites are linking to yours
- Site audited and On-Page SEO Checkers
In addition to their SEO features (and many other tools), SEMrush also has competitive research features to allow you to see how you’re performing against your competitors. With competitive research being such an important part of a healthy marketing strategy, the added benefits make SEMrush a great tool for your 2021 tech stack.
Not convinced SEMrush is worth the financial investment? Head to their blog for 12 reasons to check out the platform to see if it’s a good fit for your company.
Local SEO: Whitespark
Whitespark is an important tool for enhancing local search rankings. While the tool offers a long list of features, we use four to enhance our clients’ local search results:
- Local citations and SEO
- Citation building
- Citation audit and cleanup
- Data aggregator services
These features allow you to create, audit and manage local and niche citations, building relevant links for your business across the web. This not only ensures you have a wide digital presence, but also that the information is accurate, consistent and free from duplicates on single websites.
If you’re not familiar with local citations and their benefits, Whitespark offers a great breakdown of how they work and why they’re important.
Website UX Optimization: Hotjar
If you’ve been reading our blog for a while, you may remember us talking about Hotjar. If you missed it, Hotjar provides behavior analytics, heatmaps, visitor recordings and surveys to help you understand how your website is being used and how it can be improved.
The data provided by Hotjar can help you make informed decisions on how to optimize your website design and user experience.
For example, you may use Hotjar to test which button converts best, what the buyer’s journey looks like, which features website visitors are hovering over on your pricing page or which free demo button people hover over the most.
While you can pull a lot of insights from their reports, it’s important to make sure you’re testing things one at a time to measure your results effectively. If you’re looking for tips on how to test, check out our conversation rate optimization tip on testing calendars.
One more consideration if you are going to invest in Hotjar: be careful not to get too bogged down in the data. It’s important to work efficiently in Hotjar so you don’t get lost in irrelevant data.
Chatbot: Drift
Drift is a tool that Simple Machines just added to our own tech stack this past year. The conversational marketing tool offers a robust chatbot that allows you to engage with users in an impactful way and accelerate the conversion process.
In the past, we’ve discussed how chatbots can help you bring in new leads and improve your email marketing campaigns, and that still holds true. But with a conversational chatbot tool like Drift, you can amplify these results.
In addition to allowing for more targeted conversations based on a website visitor’s history on your site, you can also use Drift to pre-qualify visitors and schedule meetings with the right salesperson for their needs.
While tools like HubSpot offer a basic chatbot offering, if you really want to optimize your website for lead qualification and generating sales, then a robust tool like Drift is worth the investment in 2021.
Reporting: Databox
What good is optimizing your website if you don’t have the data and analytics to measure your results?
While there are a variety of platforms that can offer individual analytics reports, this is a time-consuming way to see the results of your hard work.
Utilizing an all-in-one automated reporting tool not only saves your time while providing a comprehensive place to review your analytics and manage your digital efforts.
Our team recently switched to Databox and have been extremely happy with it.
With Databox, you can create custom reports to monitor your organic and paid content and track their performance against your overall company goals. These interactive reports allow you to change your reporting timeframes and update charts and graphs in real-time.
Plus, their built-in reports and 1-click integrations will help you spend less time reporting and more time optimizing your campaigns.
In addition to having admins on the account that can create and edit reports, you can add people with view permissions. This is a great feature if you need to let additional members of your company have access to analytics!
Planning Your 2021 Tech Stack
With website optimization being at the core of many companies’ 2021 goals, it’s important to ensure you have the right tools in place for success.
Whether you need help setting up a new tech stack or organizing and optimizing your current one, our team is here to help.
