SEO Tools For Small Businesses

Without a smart approach to search engine optimization, it’s nearly impossible to improve your company’s digital visibility. By 2021, the number of digital buyers is going to surpass 2 billion. Meanwhile, the majority of people searching for offline products and services do preliminary research online.

The goal of SEO is to improve your company’s rankings on search engines, thus making it available to the right searchers at the right time. With Google algorithms getting more and more sophisticated every day, it’s imperative to adjust your strategies continuously. Doing so is only possible when you have the right SEO tools.

Let’s take a closer look at how to choose SEO tools for small businesses and browse the list of best SEO tools on the market today.

1. Google Analytics

Many marketers believe that Google Analytics (GA) is the top SEO tool available on the market today. This software is designed to gather data and analyze it to give you an insight into the efficiency of your marketing efforts. The tool can:

• Measure website traffic
• Track website conversions and user activity
• Provide audience reports
• Make custom reports based on your KPIs
• Do site search
• Set goals
• Create customized metrics
• Track campaigns
• Do event tracking
• Provide real-time reporting
• Create custom reports
• And much more

This powerful tool is completely free. If you want additional functionality, you can buy Google Analytics 360. However, it’s only good for websites that get more than 10 million visits per month.

Google Analytics 4

In October 2020, Google launched a new tool called Google Analytics 4 (GA4). This software is based entirely on machine learning, helping you gain a better understanding of buyer behavior across different platforms. GA4 is a polished version of Google’s App+Web property.

Today, it is still a beta version. However, the program has all the chances of becoming the best SEO software for small business in the nearest future.

Price: You can use the free version to get maximum functionality.

2. Google My Business

Google My Business is a highly efficient SEO tool for small businesses. Whether or not you have a brick-and-mortar location, listing your company online can bring the consumers to your virtual or offline doorstep.

Google My Business allows you to set up a detailed profile for your company so it shows up as search results when internet users are looking for products and services that you offer. With this tool, you can decide how your company appears on Google search and map. You can also see how customers interact with your business and get valuable feedback from them.

Your business listing with GMB is easy to set up and maintain. Your profile there requires regular updates to stay on Google’s radar. It can help improve organic search rankings while raising brand awareness and providing a place for reviews.

GMB is a free Google tool, which is a must-have for any local business that wants to beef up their SEO campaign and stimulate organic traffic with top-notch business listings.

Price: Free

3. Moz Local

Moz Local is one of the best SEO tools for content marketing and backlink analysis. It has a wide SEO functionality, which can help a small business obtain higher rankings on SERPs. One of its most demanded features is keyword research.

The keyword research tool offered by Moz provides suggestions to help find all keywords necessary for improving your SEO efforts. The keyword generator offers phrases that are likely to increase traffic to your website.

Moz Local also provides a keyword difficulty tool that helps you understand which sites are ranking for your focus keywords. It shows you how easy or difficult it is for your website to rank for a certain term.

Other features offered by Moz Local are:

• Competition tracking tool
• Citation auditing functionality
• On page recommendations
• Rank tracking

The software provider also offers excellent support as well as online marketing guides. It has a large community and Q&A forums. Moz provides a variety of different SEO tools, including Moz pro.

Price: Starts at $129 per year

4. Ahrefs

Using backlinks is the key to improving your SEO campaign and attracting organic traffic to your webpage. Ahrefs is an excellent all-in-one software for small business, which does exactly that.

The tool analyzes your website to make sure all your backlinks are in good shape. It pinpoints broken links and evaluates the authority of third party websites that provide backlinks. Additionally, you can use this software to analyze the competition’s sites to see where they get their backlinks.

Ahrefs also offers such functionality as:

• Site audit
• Keyword search
• Content analytics
• Rank tracking

With Ahref’s, you can choose the number of tools you need for your SEO efforts. The price of this tool depends on how many options you need.

Price: Starts at $99 per month.

5. Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools)

Google Search Console is a set of highly efficient SEO tools. By using it, you can get information about search appearance, traffic, crawl data, and technical status updates. Features included in this tool are:

• Performance – to see which keywords your website ranks for on Google.
• Clicks – how many times people click on your website in Google’s search results.
• Impressions – how often your website or specific pages show up on the search results.
• Average CTR – average click-through rate.
• Index coverage – how many of your pages are in the index of Google since the last update.
• URL inspection – analyzes specific URLs.
• Enhancement – shows what you can do to improve the website’s performance.
• Links – shows how your link building strategy is working out.

Google Search Console has many other functionalities for both beginners and experts in digital marketing and search engine optimization.

Price: Free

6. SEMRush

SEMRush is another one of the high-quality all-in-one SEO tools for small business. It offers a variety of solutions like:

• Keyword research
• On page SEO
• Local SEO
• Rank tracker
• Competitor analysis
• Social media management
• Link building
• Paid search tools
• And much more

This tool is easy to use. The majority of functions are intuitive for both newbies and experts. Even though it works with a large amount of data, it’s highly logical user interface makes operation simple.

SEMRush has a highly efficient SEO audit feature with simple instructions on how to improve your technical SEO and other on-page elements of your website. Meanwhile, you get plenty of data for your paid search tactics

The downside of this tool is that it provides data for Google only. So if you are working with other search engines, you may need to buy additional SEO software for wider digital marketing efforts.

Price: Starts from $99 per month. You can try this SEO tool for free for 14 days.

7. Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a keyword research tool provided by Neil Patel – one of the most famous experts in SEO and other aspects of digital marketing. For new website owners that are stuck looking for keyword ideas, this software can generate hundreds of suggestions for head terms to target keyword extensions.

• Traditional keyword research
• SEO difficulty and SERP analysis
• Competitor analysis
• SEO audit
• Keyword suggestions
• Backlink analysis

It also offers a keyword analysis tool. You can find out which keywords are working for your competition when people are searching for certain terms on Google.

Ubersuggest is one of the best tools for keyword search and tracking. It’s designed for website owners of all skill levels.

Price: starts at $12 a month, a 7-day free trial is available.

8. AnswerThePublic

This free SEO software can be an irreplaceable assistant when it comes to generating ideas for your content. It allows you to type in your target keyword and learn what topics related to this term people are looking for on Google.

Whether you’ve just created a new website or looking for high-quality content ideas for your landing pages, this tool is right for you. While it doesn’t offer any extensive insights into target audience behavior, it shows you what people are interested in.

By using AnswerThePublic, you can improve the quality of each web page with related content. The tool is easy to use. It takes only several seconds to generate ideas while improving your SEO strategy.

Price: Free

9. WooRank

WooRank is an excellent SEO tool that provides digital marketing insights, keyword analysis, and website audits. It can help you figure out which SEO aspects of your website require your close attention, such as:

• Headings
• XML sitemap
• Schema.org markup
• Links
• Mobile aspects
• And more

The software offers a powerful keyword solution that shows how each web page, or website as a whole, ranks for terms relevant to your niche. It can also suggest keywords based on the content already on your website. This tool can help you discover keywords you may have never even considered.

WooRank monitors your website and sends comprehensive reports over email. Such reports can help you adjust your on page SEO strategy.

The tool is easy to use. It’s also cloud-based so you don’t need to install anything.

Price: Starts at $59 per month. Doesn’t have a free trial.

10. Screaming Frog

This SEO software is suitable for large and small businesses. It’s a spider that crawls your website and discovers SEO issues that can keep it from ranking high on Google. It helps you see all the core SEO elements quickly and adjust them accordingly. The tool can also generate a comprehensive sitemap.

The program crawls your website just like Google does. So you know exactly what your web pages are lacking. Once the crawling is done, you’ll get access to valuable data for each page. The tool checks the technical aspects of the website, which can be tough to audit manually.

While Screaming Frog isn’t one of the cloud-based tools, it’s fast and easy to use.

Price: About $190 per month, the free version is available with limited functionality.

11. Google Trends

Google Trends is one of the underused tools for small businesses. Many marketers don’t understand the depth of this particular tool, thus ignoring it when beefing up their arsenal. Google Trends shows the relative popularity of a search query, unlike Google Keyword Planner that shows exact search volume data.

One of the most useful features of this tool is that it eliminates repeated searches from the same person, thus giving you a better understanding of the keyword trends.

Google Trends allows you to identify seasonal trends, find relevant content topics that are trending at a certain moment, plan your content calendar, and much more.

The tool may need some exploration and getting used to, but it’s highly efficient for your keyword planning and content optimization tasks.

Price: Free

The Takeaway

A huge variety of SEO tools exist for marketers today. A big part of them is either free or come with a free version. While you’d need to make a certain investment in SEO software, it won’t have a big impact on your marketing budget.

Google offers a variety of free and useful software for small businesses like Search Console, Trends, Google My Business, and Google Analytics. All of these programs are easy to use and can give your SEO campaign a good start.

By taking advantage of the best SEO software available on the market today, you can streamline your SEO strategies and gain a competitive edge.