More and more people are using the Internet to conduct their shopping, especially with the growing use of smartphones and mobile-based product browsing. For this reason, it is wise for almost any type of retailer to consider having an ecommerce store to help sell more products.

But what’s more than just selling products on the web, is effectively marketing those products to prospective customers. Search engine optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising are two marketing channels that are ideal for ecommerce stores. SEO and PPC are both important because they increase the advertising exposure of certain products of an ecommerce site in search engine results pages (SERPs). The more visibility an ecommerce website has, the more traffic and sales potential the site can earn.

There are several SEO & PPC tools available that will better your ecommerce marketing campaigns. Many of these tools are free, so take them each into consideration when building or optimization your Internet marketing strategies.

SEO Digger

SEO Digger is a free online tool that is used to help optimize websites for Google. To use this handy SEO tool, simply visit the website (seo-digger.com), enter your URL, and click on ‘search’. The tool will give you the top 20 Google rankings of your website.

This tool is advantageous in that it helps you determine if your website is clearly defined in Google. The tool is also nice because it allows you to check some of your top rankings without needing to buy rank checker software. In addition, SEO Digger enables you to know your competitor’s best keywords, enabling you to devise an effective ecommerce SEO strategy.

Google AdWords Preview Tool

Another helpful tool designed for Pay Per Click advertising is the Google AdPreview (Google AdWords Preview Tool). Google AdWords is the most popular paid search advertising platform, and this tool helps you fine-tune and optimize your campaigns. The AdPreview tool will display your text ads, as they will appear in the Google results.

This tool does this without applying the impressions towards your account, meaning a preview will not lead to decreased CTR (click through rate). Google AdPreview allows you to select the location where you are promoting your ads so that you can see the ads as they would appear for a user in a certain location. In essence, the AdPreview tool in AdWords can help you determine how effective your ad placement is with respect to your bid price.

SEO Book’s Firefox Plugin

Yet another helpful tool for search engine optimization is SEO Book’s Firefox Plugin. The Mozilla Firefox plug-in shows 22 different SEO metrics on the standard Google SERP. These include incoming links, Domain age, Technorati Rank, Alexa rank, Cached, DMOZ listing, WhoIs, Bloglines and PageRank.

This data is highly valuable for competitive analyses. With information like incoming links and PageRank, Internet marketers can gauge how powerful their competitor’s pages are with respect to their own.

Google Sets

Google Sets (Google Search Engine Tools) is unique tool from Google Labs. In short, the Sets tool helps marketers get keyword ideas and insights for SEO. All you need to do is enter the keywords you are interested in and Google will give you related search terms. There is word that Google Sets may be shut down, however many professionals are petitioning to have this tool remain because they find it much nicer to use than the Google Keyword Tool.

AdCenter Keyword Mutation Tool

The last tool on our list that helps for both SEO and PPC optimization is the AdCenter Keyword Mutation Tool. This unique tool helps you find keywords that have unique spellings (sometimes misspellings) and typos. This helps you optimize your website since Web users will not find you if you have misspellings or typos in your keywords. This is among a number of Microsoft AdCenter Ad Labs Tools.

Well there you have it – five handy tools for ecommerce Internet marketing. We hope these tools will help you pinpoint opportunities in your strategies and better your overall marketing efforts.