Best SEO Tools & Software for Small Businesses

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is essential for every small, E-Commerce, and medium sizes business to create a fast, healthy, and a user friendly website, gain leads, convert them into potential customers, build brand’s acceptability, and eventually increasing conversion rates.

It helps in every small business’s online presence because search engine users are most likely to trust a site that is on the first page of Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) and without SEO you are just wasting money on content. 

Whether you are looking to attract more customers to your home based bakery business or your part time photography business, or you want to close more deals for your commercial cleaning company or real estate business, Search Engine Optimization is the long term solution for constant new clients.

However, SEO is not easy and it does require specialized skills and expertise. Ideally, a business should hire an SEO expert right from the beginning, and hiring a local Search Engine Optimization company is always the best option, but if due to budget constraints you cannot hire a professional, investing in the right SEO tools and software is a must.

How Using SEO Tools Can Save Time and Money for a Small Business?

SEO takes time and money but if you are short of it so use these tips to boost your site’s organic ranking.

• Improve Title Tags.
• Dominant Keyword Research.
• Understand Your Competition.
• Use Long Tail Keywords Theme.
• Optimize On-Page SEO
• Produce Regular Content 
• Boost Link Equity (high quality and relevant sites )
• Build your Social Media Network.
• Understand Analytics. (Basic understanding of Google Analytics or equivalent).

There are literally hundreds of SEO tools and software available online. Many of these are free to use with limited features, while some are very high end products and are heavily priced. Once, small business owners could afford trial and error and in fact, there’s no harm in availing trial offers. However, the business landscape is changing very fast, and timing is crucially important for small businesses.

As a small business owner, you may not have enough time to examine all search results for SEO software or test all the tools and software available online. Since not SEO tools and software and ultimately are created equally many may not fit your particular business model.

This article will list the best SEO tools and software that every small and micro business must use. Most of them are free to use, and the paid ones also come with a free edition with limited features.

The following best SEO tools and software discussed in this article will surely help you get started with your SEO efforts and let your business grow organic traffic and save your time and money. 

Here goes the list:

1- Google Analytics

Google analytics is 100% free, important to small businesses, and the most comprehensive analytics platform on the web. It lets you know how visitors are interacting with your website and from where your traffic is coming.

Key Uses

• Track how many people are visiting your site every day, where they are coming from, i.e. organic search, referrals, direct traffic etc., how much time users spend on your site, which pages they explore and a lot more. 
• Track trends over time to influence your online marketing decisions.
• Tracking for conversion points on your website to check top referral traffic sources.
• Check conversions and transactions by organic channels.
• Tells about what keywords people used to find your website which can influence your website’s SEO strategy.
• Tells you which third party websites sent you traffic. You will be able to see which sites are spending more time on and also if any new sites have started linking to yours.
• Creates semi-custom dashboards for analytics.
• Find high traffic/low conversion pages.
• Diagnose the sources of organic traffic and also monitor branded vs. non branded organic traffic growth.

2- Google Search Console

Google search console is a free service offered by Google to help you monitor, maintain and troubleshoot your small business’s presence in Google Search Results.

Key Uses

• Confirms that Google can find your E-commerce site.
• Fix indexing and crawling problems and request re-indexing of new or updated content.
• View Google Search Traffic data for your site, how often your site appears on google search.
• Receive notifications when google encounters indexing, spam or other issues.
• Show you which sites link to your website.
• Troubleshoot issues for AMP, mobile usability and other search features.
• Identify pages that don’t have many internal links e.g. orphan pages.
• Integrate with Google analytics and google Data studio for reporting. 

3- SEMRush 

It is one of the best digital marketing SEO tools that help you run SEO categories including keyword research, competitor analysis, link building, PPC (pay-per-click), and content marketing campaigns. SEMrush offers a free account using which you can run up to 10 queries per day, however, a paid subscription is worth trying as it can help you dig deep to identify problems and develop a growth strategy. There are three subscriptions plans, starting from $99.95month.

“Liraz Postan, Senior SEO & content manager at OUTBRAIN, recommended SEMrush software as best and also said my favorite SEO tool is SEMRush for its feature of “Organic Traffic Insights”.

Key Uses

• Diagnose and audits your on page SEO issues and helps you improve your site.
• Monitor and manage your organic rankings to know where you stand against the competition.
• Develop compelling and creative PPC (pay- per- click) campaigns with PPC tools from SEMrush.
• Analyze your competitor’s traffic strategy across different channels and devices with Traffic Analytics tool.
• Find which domains, URL’S and keywords motivate the most organic traffic to your website.
• Over view domain, present easy to read data and graphs on organic search traffic, paid search traffic and backlinks of your website or your competitor’s through Domain Overview Tool.
• Use Backlink Audit tool to classify and eliminate harmful backlinks.
• With SEO Writing Assistant, analyze content quality, readability, originality and check for potential optimization related to keywords.
• Run practical content audits with the Content Toolkit.

4- Ahrefs

Ahrefs is another amazing tool that offers a good deal of SEO insight with its free account and there’s a whole new world that you can explore with the paid subscription. SEO keyword tool of AHREFS is probably the best for keyword research, rank tracking, competitor analysis, SEO audit, viral content research and much more.

Ahrefs has 4 subscription plans starting from $99/month. A paid subscription is worth considering if you are planning to grow your online store to the next level.

Key Uses

• Highlights which parts of your small business website needs improvement to rank better in search engines.
• With site explorer it determines your competitor’s backlinks, organic traffic and keywords.
• Go beyond keyword research, search volumes and estimated no. of clicks with keyword explorer.
• Use SERP overview to check estimated monthly organic traffic to qualify keyword opportunities.
• Update backlinks graphs daily.
• Uncover content gaps between you and your competitor’s with Content Gap Analysis.
• Track your keyword ranking progress across your website with Rank Tracker.

5- Yoast SEO

Since, WordPress is the preferred choice for most small and micro businesses, your WordPress site needs to be loaded with high end SEO features and automation to save time and money. Yoast SEO is SEO plugin for WordPress using which you can optimize your website for search engines without spending a lot. Basic Yoast SEO is free to use and it has almost everything that your website needs to gain search engine visibility.

The premium version, however, has many specialized features like content insights, internal link suggestions, and free support which is much needed when you plan to scale your business growth. 

Key Uses

• Make sure that your site has official URLs to avoid duplicate content.
• Generate XML site maps and generate to Google Search Console.
• Boost relevance of your content by optimizing for related keywords.
• Spot pages without links, improve your internal linking and clean up underperforming content.
• Make sure that your technical configuration rolls out the red carpet for search engines.
• Apply Meta robots tags (no index, no follow) to selected pages.

Bottom line:

With so many components to building out a successful small business, SEO is noteworthy but can be hard and impossible to manage everything without the right SEO software/ toolset especially when you’re just starting out. Check out the above mentioned SEO toolset to make sure you’ve got all your bases covered also discover what you need to improve to rank higher in SERPs.

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