Written by Annie-Mai Hodge on 08.16.2020

Best SEO tools every small business should be using

If you are running a small business, employing a specialist to do your SEO for you may well be out of the question financially. However, there are plenty of DIY tools that are easy to use.

These tools won’t break the bank, and you can use to help improve your small business’ SEO to ultimately boost your revenue.

Whatever your business does, there is always plenty of competition out there, so whether you operate locally or globally, you must ensure that you are doing everything that you can to optimize your SEO and boost brand awareness so that your business is seen by your target audience and found online by potential customers.

Luckily, there are plenty of tools that small businesses can use to gain real insight into their SEO.

Google’s own tools

First of all, Google has some great free SEO tools that any small business can, and should, use. Google Analytics is a good place to start to help you do an overall analysis of your website’s data, and evaluate what marketing channels and tactics are working best for your business.

Google analytics will help you to generate information about page visits, where your visitors are located and what devices they are accessing your website from, as well as how many clicks buttons on your site get and what content visitors prefer.

Google Analytics also has useful features such as being able to use custom segments to see how different groups of visitors interact with your website.

It also allows you to set annotations on traffic reports so that you can mark important points in your data, like pinpointing any changes where your traffic went up or down and what you were doing differently at the time.

Google Search Console is another powerful, free SEO tool from Google that will help you with detailed reporting to improve your website’s SEO.

It can assist you with finding errors on your websites and help you to fix issues that affect your SEO, as well as generating stats such as keyword rankings, the number of times your website shows up in search results for different keywords and the number of clicks your site receives for each keyword.

One of the great things about using Google’s SEO tools is that you can link them together and integrate your Search Console data into your Analytics reports.

Having this data all in one place will help you to better understand your website’s rankings and user engagement and how different factors affect each other.

Keyword research and rank tracking to pinpoint your campaign

If you’re looking to do detailed keyword research to find out what keywords you should be targeting within your business niche, Moz Keyword Explorer is one of the best tools out there to help you identify the keywords you should be targeting and what your site could rank for.

Not only will it generate high impact keyword suggestions for your business, it will also help you with features that analyze keyword search volume, help you find long-tail keywords, analyze why sites rank where they do in SERPs for different keywords, and much more.

Best of all, it’s also free of charge, so it’s perfect for small businesses with a limited marketing budget.

Another tool for effective, in-depth keyword research is WooRank. Easy to use and ideal for small businesses, this SEO analytics tool helps to identify keywords with high search volume and track search terms based on language and location, which is handy if you are a small business that operates locally.

It also helps you isolate your keyword competitors, so you can analyze what they are doing right and apply this to your small business’ own marketing strategy. You can obtain a 14-day free trial with WooRank to see if it’s right for your business before paying for it.

Rank Ranger is another all-in-one tool that’s customizable and adaptable to different types and sizes of businesses. It helps you to gather data so that your website can rise through search rankings, allowing you to track your organic ranking over time in different search engines.

In addition, it allows you to track local rankings and comparisons between the rankings of the mobile and desktop versions of your site.

Investigating and auditing

A technical SEO audit is a great way to find errors that may be harming your rankings and hindering your business’ success.

However, as a small business, time is of the essence, and doing a manual audit of each one of your website’s pages is not always possible.

Screaming Frog offers an SEO spider tool that you can download for free that will generate a detailed audit of all your web pages to help you identify problems such as broken links and duplicate content, as well as evaluating your internal linking structure and analysing metadata.

Broken links can seriously harm your SEO, so using an extension like Check My Links will also help you with a quick and easy audit by crawling your site and checking that all links are working properly.

It’s no secret that backlinks are a crucial element of SEO, so any small business will want to ensure that they do plenty of backlink analysis as well as performing on-page auditing.

Finding and removing (or disavowing) any spammy backlinks will help you to avoid any penalties with Google that may harm your rankings, so it’s important to analyze your backlinks and ensure that you have high-quality links pointing to your site from legitimate websites.

The Ahrefs backlink checker is a first-class tool to help you to identify and analyze your links to clean up your link profile.

It is also useful for competitor analysis, to help you find who is linking to your high-ranking competitors and to provide you with ideas of who you should be reaching out to for links to help with your ongoing SEO strategy.

Majestic also offers a free backlink checker with tools that help score links with trust and strength metrics, for easy backlink auditing.

Also for small businesses that tend to operate locally, using a tool like Deluxe Business Listing Scan is useful.

It helps you find out how your business appears in different online directories, which you are listed in, and whether the information is complete and up to date so that potential customers can find your details quickly and easily.

Utilize tools for a more effective campaign

By using different SEO tools to your advantage, you can help to grow your small business and boost your revenue, without incurring too much of a cost or taking up too much of your valuable time. This means you can let the tools do most of the hard work and focus on running your business to the best of your ability.

Posted Under: Blog

Tags:

Comments are closed.