People working in SEO use a whole range of research tools, some of which are quite expensive. Now high-profile (and very successful) marketer Neil Patel is threatening to shake up the market by creating equivalents to some of these paid services and making them freely accessible to anyone. He’s begun by buying a tool called Ubersuggest, a well-known ‘keyword planner’, and added search advertising cost data to it. The result is very useful, but crucially, really is completely free to use. Try it.

Neil Patel’s target is to increase his own website traffic (he’s moved Ubersuggest there) from a million visitors a month to at least three or four times that many. In a blog post he identifies several paid-for services by name and says that he intends to add their functionality to his site, all with “unlimited usage, no login required, for free.” The cost to him is enormous, but he seems to have a plan, and for now at least, we can all take advantage of it.

• Link: Ubersuggest

It’s amazing how often in IT, a product or manufacturer takes such a dominant position that you can’t see how anything will ever change. But it usually does. Once upon a time, the appearance of a few cheap PC manufacturers seemed the only way that IBM wouldn’t get about 90% of the PC market, yet by 2005 it stopped making them altogether. About that time, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer had something like a 95% share of the web browser market, yet now its percentage share is in single digits. So – hard as it is to imagine – we may yet see the demise of Google as a search engine, or Windows as a desktop operating system.

Meanwhile, the world’s current browser of choice is Google Chrome, and with good reason. It’s reasonably fast and supports standards relatively well. One of its attractions for many professional users is the ability to run specialist extensions, and for that reason alone you should always have it to hand, even if you prefer Firefox, Safari, IE or Edge on a day-to-day basis. In 13 Amazing Google Chrome Extensions That’ll Improve Your Marketing on the Neil Patel blog, there’s a really good selection to look at, from those which will improve your writing to those which will help with SEO. See what you think.