It’s important to have credible information sources to pull from for your marketing campaigns. Start with these 10 sources of free data.
Everyone loves free things right?
You’ll find plenty of free information of varying quality and accuracy online, but these ten sources are widely considered to be quite reputable.
If you’re after solid data to help support your digital marketing and content goals, look no further.
1. Google Dataset Search
This enables you to search available datasets that have been marked up properly according to the schema.org standard.
While this could be viewed as a one-stop-shop for datasets that include data from sources like NASA and ProPublica, there are many niche datasets that may be better for certain purposes of course.
You’re shown the results and each one is clickable to tell you the name of the dataset, when it was last updated, and a description.
With certain results, you get more information, such as the formats in which the dataset is available.
2. Google Trends
With this tool, you can search for keywords and see a variety of information about them, including interest over time, interest by region, related topics, and related queries.
You can select options including which country (or worldwide) you want to see, narrow it down to categories, or confine your search to all of the web, images, news, shopping, or YouTube.
You can also compare your search to another topic.
3. U.S. Census Bureau
This site allows you to get information related to population, the economy, and geography. You can browse by topic or search.
It’s a great tool if you need statistics to increase the quality of your content.
They have some great visualizations you can embed within your content, too. It’s also very cool to see the world population updates.
4. The Official Portal for European Data
Available data includes geography, finance, statistics, election results, legal acts, and information on crime, transport, health, the environment, and science research.
This platform is searchable and browseable.
5. Data.gov U.S.
The home of the U.S. government’s open data, this site allows access to information about a variety of topics provided by federal, state, local, and tribal governments.
6. Data.gov U.K.
Similar to the U.S.’s Data.gov, this site allows access to U.K. data on a variety of topics.
Data is provided by central government, local authorities, and public bodies.
7. Health Data
Searchable topics include issues such as public health (especially good for COVID data), medical devices, environmental health, substance abuse, mental health, and others.
8. The World Factbook
Containing information on 267 world entities, this is a treasure trove of data that is updated weekly with information about the world.
You can select a country to view and then click on whatever topic you like (such as Economy or Transportation, for example). The site is also searchable.
9. Altmetric
Altmetric does offer some paid plans but they have a useful set of the top 100 most mentioned articles across 20 disciplines that have been published in a year, too.
2020 is the latest but there are sets going back to 2013. They also offer a few free tools.
10. Open Corporates
The largest open database of companies in the world, Open Corporates gives you access to information about close to 200 million companies.
ou can search by companies or officers and limit your jurisdiction if you need to.
They also offer an API and bulk data plan.
[Source: This article was originally published in www.searchenginejournal.com ]
