By Alyssa Udall (@udallyss)

It is too often the case that when starting a paid search marketing campaign, people tend to lose sight of the main point.  What’s the main point, you ask?  To get people to click, right?  Wrong.

Yes, it’s true that Pay-Per-Click ads provide quality leads most of the time.  However, no matter how interested the “clicker” is in your products, services or niche, if your site is poorly designed or organized, your marketing would have been in vain.  There is no point marketing a site that is difficult to use, messy, or otherwise messed up!

Make sure that your PPC ads are really being effective by testing your site for usability, attractiveness, etc.  There are hundreds of free and low-cost tools for this purpose!

Here are some online tools to test the quality of your site:

1. Five Second Test: With this nifty tools, website owners can upload a screen-shot of their landing page which will then be viewed by users for five seconds.  There are two different versions of the service, one where the viewers view your photo, then list everything they can remember from it.  The second is a click test, where the viewers click on the areas they find most prominent or interesting.  This tool can really help you test how first-time viewers are seeing your landing page.  Then you can cater the page around those findings to make your ads more effective!

2.  Website Grader: Website Grader is a simple and effective website tester tool.  Once your site is entered in, Grader will measure your site’s marketing power through SEO statistics, traffic and marketing strategies.  Once finished, they will even give you tips to improve the areas where you may be lacking.  This is a great tool for those “less-expert” of us in the field of development and marketing.

3.  Google Analytics: Without fail, Google Analytics has proven to be one of the most powerful marketing research tools.  Easy enough for beginning users, but with tons of extras and plugins for experts, it suits most online marketing levels.  On top of all this, it’s free!

To capitalize on all of your internet marketing campaigns, use free tools like these to see how people are viewing your site.  This will greatly increase the productivity of your PPC ads, SEO strategies and social media marketing.