Small Business SEO Tools

With their large teams, seemingly limitless resources, and expensive SEO tools, as a small business, it can seem impossible to keep up with the big guys.

Thankfully, though, there are several free and inexpensive tools available to small businesses that can be leveraged to compete with large companies and high domain authority websites.

To help you out, here we:

1. define what SEO tools are,
2. why SEO is so integral to the success of a small business,
3. and we’ll even list the best free and paid tools for you to take advantage of when developing your next SEO strategy.

What are SEO tools? (+ how do they help small businesses?)

Search engine optimization (SEO) tools are software or plugins that help website owners, SEO practitioners, and digital marketers improve a website’s visibility and search engine ranking.

Often browser based, SEO tools can help analyze a website’s traffic and performance, identify potential areas for optimization, and track the results of optimization efforts.

Why is SEO important for your small business?

There are many reasons small businesses should invest in SEO services.

These include:

1. Reach new customers. By improving a small business’s website ranking on search engines like Google, businesses can attract more visitors to their site.
2. Compete with larger businesses. Through optimizing a website’s content, structure, and on-page elements like titles, meta-tags, and anchor text, it will make it far easier for small businesses to compete with large enterprises.
3. Increase website traffic. By improving a site’s content, structure, and relevance, small businesses can make it clearer to search engines what pages need crawling and indexing. This will better fit a search engine’s algorithm requirements, which boosts the chances of attracting a larger proportion of organic traffic.
4. Improve online visibility. Through SEO tactics like content optimization, Google My Business (GMB) registration, and link building, small businesses can improve their rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs), which will lead to greater online visibility.
5. Generate more leads. SEO can also help improve the quality of leads by ensuring that, amongst the traffic it attracts, the most relevant and interested prospects reach a small business website.
6. Improve online sales. High-quality leads mean an increase in online sales as customers are more likely to find a small business’s website, products, and services more fitting to their search intent.

10 SEO Tools for Small Business (Free & Paid)

The right set of SEO tools is the perfect combination with an accomplished SEO marketing agency. Take note though, while there are many SEO tools available, not all of them are created equal.

To help, here we’ve done the hard work for you.

Check out these 10 best SEO tools for small businesses.

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is Google’s homegrown analytics tool. The platform is a free service that gives insights into your website’s traffic and demographics. This makes it easy to see which of your site’s web pages are most popular and which may need improvement.

With Google Analytics, you can track endless metrics, including where your visitors come from, what devices and browsers they use, how long they stay on your site, their geographic location, track historical data into Google Sheets, and much, much more.

This information will allow small businesses to determine which of their marketing campaigns are most effective and help identify unique opportunities that a local SEO strategy should leverage.

Features:

• In-depth analysis. Analyze your site’s traffic and understand how people interact with your content on mobile devices.
• Search breakdown. See how your top organic search sources contribute to your overall traffic.
• XML sitemaps. Easily submit your xml sitemap to Google Analytics so that crawlers can better index your website’s content.

• Rank tracking. Track user engagement and conversions on a website.

Pricing:

FREE

2. Google Search Console

Google Search Console (GSC) provides small businesses with a wealth of information. When used, these insights facilitate improvements to a website’s visibility and performance in Google search results. GSC also provides data on how often a business’s site appears in Google search results, what keywords people are using to find your site, and how users are interacting with on-page content.

Additionally, GSC offers tools to help diagnose and fix problems with a site’s appearance in search results, as well as provides suggestions for improving a website’s content and structure.

Features:

• Web page performance. Displays how webpages are performing in search results.

• GSC insights. Ensures website content meets the standards for quality, relevancy, and accuracy of Google’s Search Central guidelines (previously Webmaster Tools).
• Indexability breakdown. Ensures Google indexes new and updated content.
• Mobile optimization checker. Provides mobile optimization insights, such as how well a website’s design and content display on mobile devices.

Pricing:

FREE

3. Google My Business

Google My Business (GMB) is a free and easy-to-use tool for businesses to manage their online presence. GMB lets businesses create a free local citation, which includes basic information like a business’s name, address, and phone number. Business owners can also add photos, hours of operation, and connect their website’s homepage URL and social media accounts. Additionally, GMB listings appear in Google search results and Google Maps.

GMB also allows businesses to connect with their customers by posting updates, responding to reviews, and answering customer questions.

Features:

• Free local business directory. Google My Business allows you to promote your business, connect with customers, and manage your business information all in one place.
• Geographical organic search optimization. Get found in Google Search and Google Maps organically for local search queries.
• Metric and analytical insights. View analytics, respond to reviews, and edit your business information.
• Local search optimization. View your store location and business hours, add photos, videos, and more.

Pricing:

FREE

4. Google PageSpeed Insights

Google PageSpeed Insights is a tool that evaluates the performance of a web page and provides suggestions to improve it. The tool measures how quickly the page loads and provides feedback on factors that affect page speed, such as image size, hosting server performance, and overall web page design.

A slow loading website can negatively affect a business’ bottom line by causing customers to leave the site before they bounce out of frustration or impatience. Google will also penalize websites that load slowly. Therefore, by optimizing a website’s page speed with tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, small businesses can boost rankings, improve their online presence, and attract more customers.

Features:

• Site audits. Audit your website for mobile, desktop, and tablet devices.
• SEO issues. Discover load time-related issues with your website to improve your SEO.
• Site explorer. Get recommendations on how a site can be optimized to improve its overall performance.
• On-page SEO insights. Identify which web pages require page speed optimization and where you should focus your efforts.

Pricing:

FREE

5. Google Trends

Google Trends is a web service provided by Google that shows how often a particular keyword or phrase is searched for on the internet. It can track the popularity of a particular topic over time or compare the relative popularity of two different topics.

Small business owners use Google Trends to better understand how often their company, product, or service is being searched for online. This information will facilitate greater decision making around how to better allocate marketing resources.

Features:

• Trend tracking. Simply enter a search term to see a list of related trends, related search queries, and their popularity.
• Keyword ideas. Compare search interest between categories and time to spur inspiration for unique and fresh content.

• Geographical search volume. See the search volume for Google trends compared to other trend data.
• Accurate data. Google Trends uses a variety of sources to provide the most accurate data possible.

Pricing:

FREE

6. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a website that offers users a suite of tools to research and analyze the competition in their industry. Through the use of crawlers, Ahrefs collects data from the web and provides reports on website traffic, backlinks, and keyword research. This data can help small businesses improve their website’s SEO, find new customers, and track their competition.

Features:

• Backlink analysis. Find out who links to your competitors, find new link opportunities, monitor your backlink profile over time, and imitate the best performing link strategies.
• Real-time analysis. Find search volume, cost per click, and competition for different search terms.
• Competitor analysis. Track both competitor rankings and your own site rankings.
• Perform SEO Audits. Finds broken links, duplicate content, redirect chains, and more with in-depth site audits.
• Keyword research tool. Find the Google search volume and AdWords competition for any keyword.

Pricing:

$99-999/month or $83-833/month when paid annually

7. Keywords Everywhere

Keywords Everywhere is a chrome browser extension that helps you research and track your website’s rankings on various search engines. It also provides data on estimated traffic, cost-per-click, and competition for the keywords you’re targeting.

Keywords Everywhere provides useful information such as how often keywords are being searched for and how the competition shapes up. This data can help small businesses make informed decisions about their online content marketing strategy.

Features:

• Search engine tracking. Track keyword ranking on Google, Bing, and Yahoo search engines.

• Keyword tracking tool. Find and track the best keywords for short- or long-tailed keywords.
• Discover new keywords. Monitor the keywords your competitors are using and implement their strategies in your own SEO campaign.
• Content ideas. Discover keyword opportunities and write high-quality content that will increase your traffic and leads.

Pricing:

FREE

8. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a free SEO tool that crawls websites and extracts key data to help analyze and optimize a domain. Screaming Frog can crawl a website’s images, CSS, JavaScript, titles, metadata, audit a site’s internal linking structure, and analyze other important on-page elements.

Small businesses can use Screaming Frog SEO Spider to help identify technical issues with their website that may prevent them from ranking higher in search engine results pages. Its SEO audits will also return a list of errors and warnings, as well as information on how well the website is performing from an SEO perspective.

Features:

• Diagnostic capabilities. Quickly crawl your website and detect errors and issues.
• Analyser. Find out how well your website is optimized and discover how to improve your SEO.
• Data analysis. Understand how your website is performing and discover which pages are performing best and which are not.
• Algorithmic update alignment. Improve your SEO rankings by following the latest Google algorithm updates.

Pricing:

• Free version available-approximately $200/year

9. Answer The Public

Answer the Public is SEO software that uses Google autocomplete to generate long-tail keyword queries based on questions that people are asking. The results are displayed in an interactive visual graph, which allows users to explore the data and find new long-tail keywords.

The platform provides businesses with access to data that can help them understand what topics are most relevant to their customers and how they can improve their content strategy.

Features:

• Industry insights. Build audience personas using the most common questions people ask about your business niche and industry.
• Longtail keyword research. Find long-tail keywords to target, and source fresh ideas for new blog posts and content.
• FAQ generation. Identify the most-searched questions related to your industry and business.
• Automate content inspiration. Quickly brainstorm ideas for social media posts, blog post ideas, Google ad copy, email subject lines, and more.

Pricing:

Free version available-$99/month

10. Yoast

Yoast is a WordPress plugin that helps site owners optimize their content for search engines. The plugin does this by providing feedback on how well a post is optimized, as well as provides suggestions on how to improve on-page SEO. Yoast also includes a readability score, which gives site owners an idea of how easy their content is to read.

Additionally, Yoast provides small business owners with guidance on how to improve their website content and structure, as well as how to make sure their website is set up for optimal performance in Google search results. Yoast offers a paid version of its plugin that includes additional features, such as the ability to create multiple sitemaps and track website traffic.

Features:

• All in one SEO Plugin. Yoast is a complete WordPress SEO solution, including the best page analysis functionality available.
• Share worthy content. Improve your social media reach by writing more shareable content.
• Search rankings. Improve search engine rankings and get more traffic thanks to your newly optimized post titles, meta descriptions, and meta keywords.
• Premium features. The Yoast SEO Premium plugin is one of the best ways to optimize your site for search engines to increase organic traffic.

Pricing:

• Free version available-$229/year

Summary

Using an SEO tool is a great way to optimize your website, but it’s important to remember that SEO is an ongoing process. For that reason, you’ll need to keep up with the latest changes and trends to stay ahead of the competition.

That’s where Loganix comes in – we offer comprehensive SEO services that’ll complement a new SEO tool and help you achieve the results you’re looking for. Contact us today to learn more!