Seo is a challenging job for many marketing teams, especially when you have a tight budget. Having said that, you have to think about the final goal. At the end of the day, what makes these efforts worth it? In other words, do you want to increase your traffic and revenue? For this purpose, it’s highly recommended that you should consider hiring an expert SEO agency. And while we’re discussing the topic of SEO, let me talk about search engine optimization tools for small businesses.
SEO is a process that takes time and involves many different steps. Even the best SEO tools can’t offer you instant results, but they can offer you a viable and viable online presence for your business and save you hours and hours of work on a day-to-day basis.
SEO can be an expensive digital marketing channel for small businesses especially start-ups in their early phase, fortunately, there are SEO tools that are available for free or at a relatively low cost that are affordable including tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, Screaming frog and Google search console, that can be used to better optimise your website for SEO.
Best Seo Tools for Small Business
Ahrefs
Ahrefs offers a total of 10 SEO tools including the site explorer, keywords explorer and site audit tools. Ahrefs will allow you to view the backlinks of your website, referring domains, organic keywords it’s ranking for and the amount of organic traffic those keywords are bringing to your website.
Ahrefs also has a site audit tool that shows you the SEO improvements that can be made to your site such as adding meta descriptions, missing alt text to images, noindexed pages and slow pages to better optimise it for SEO.
Pricing
Free to use but also has a paid plan starting at $99 / £72 a month and offers a 7 day discounted trial for only $7 / £5.
RankMath
A powerful SEO plugin for WordPress users, notably great for its schema markup generator allowing users to seamlessly add schema to their website pages, enabling breadcrumbs, automatically adding alt attributes to images, creation of a virtual robots.txt file, generates an XML sitemap, allowing users to edit metadata and meta noindex pages.
Pricing
Free to use but also has a paid version starting at $129 / £95 a month.
SEMrush
SEMrush is a great tool for providing in-depth SEO audits and has a total of 26 SEO tools that can be used to view the SEO improvements you can make on your website including crawlability, click depth, backlinks audit, etc. Also, the on-page SEO tool can help identify improvements that can be made to your pages to better optimise them for SEO such as adding meta descriptions and identifying duplicate content pages.
The local SEO tool can help you to optimise your site for local search, the keyword research tool allows you to discover keywords to target, the link building tool allows you to find opportunities to strengthen your backlink profile and the competitor SEO analysis tool allows you to identify your competitors SEO strategy.
Pricing
Free to use but also has a paid plan starting at $99.95 / £73 a month and offers a 7-day free trial.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog crawls your website and provides a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the on-site SEO improvements that can be made to your website to better optimise it for SEO, including meta description, proper formatting usage (H1, H2, etc), content improvements including identifying duplicate content and thin content pages, missing alt text on images, opportunities to implement schema usage, page speed improvements, etc.
Pricing
Free to use and also has a paid version for $200 / £149 per year; the free version allows you to download and crawl 500 URLs for free and by purchasing a license you can remove this limit and also access its advanced features.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free-to-use tool by Google; it is a must for any business that is looking to optimise its website for SEO.
You can use the tools and reports inside google search console to receive insights about the performance and health of your website including total clicks, impressions, CTR, average position, page experience score, mobile usability score, whether your sitemap has been indexed successfully and any usability errors on your website. Google Search Console provides a complete health report for your website.
Ranktracker
Ranktracker allows you to track the ranking of the keywords of your website on mobile and desktop across all search engines allowing you to see what position your keywords are ranked in the search engine results pages, as well as the search volume and traffic metrics. You can also keep a real-time track of any movement of the position of your keywords and it also has a website audit tool that scans your website for technical on-page SEO issues.
The keyword research tool allows you to discover keyword opportunities to rank for, by showing how difficult it is to rank for a specific keyword, finding long-tail keyword opportunities and identifying whether SERP features are being displayed for a given keyword which you can then use to create a strategy to target those keywords and optimise your content to rank for SERP features.
It also shows in-depth data about your competitors’ websites allowing you to see the estimated traffic they are receiving from a keyword, their page authority, domain authority, referring domains, etc allowing you to create an SEO strategy to outrank them.
Pricing
Starts at $8 / £6 a month and also offers a 10-day free trial option.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is really effective for competitor analysis it provides a great level of insight about your competitors’ websites allowing you to reverse engineer their SEO and content marketing strategies, it allows you to view their backlinks, top keywords and pages that are bringing them the most amount of traffic to their site.
Ubersuggest allows you to view similar websites to yours, as well as the similar keywords you rank for, the keywords that your competitors rank for but your website doesn’t rank for and how many backlinks they have which will allow you to create an SEO strategy to outrank them by building up your sites backlink profile, targeting more keywords and expanding your content marketing strategy.
The keyword discovery tool allows you to find keywords to target by showing the traffic volume, trend changes and the difficulty level to rank for those keywords.
Its rank tracking tool allows you to track where your keywords are ranked on Google on desktop and mobile, across multiple locations and languages.
Pricing
Ubersuggest is a free-to-use tool and also has a paid plan starting at $29 / £21 a month and offers a 7-day free trial.
Bright Local
BrightLocal is an all-in-one tool designed to help local businesses looking to build a presence in search by optimising for local SEO. It allows you to track citations, fix existing citations, remove duplicate citations and can even build citations for you (for a fee). You can use it to monitor your reviews on relevant sites and shows insights from your Google My Business (GMB) profile.
The local search audit tool provides a detailed report about the key areas of how well your site is optimised for SEO including backlink profile and authoritativeness, Google My Business optimisation and how well your GMB is optimised in comparison to the top 10 ranked businesses in your area allowing you to see what you need to do to outrank them, on-site SEO factors, as well as, a rank checker allowing you to see where you rank for important keywords that are relevant to your business on Google & Bing search engine results pages, Google Maps and Bing Local.
Pricing
BrightLocal has a limited set of tools that you can use for free but to access all of its tools you have to purchase a paid plan starting from as low as $29 / £21 a month and BrightLocal also offers a 14-day free trial.
Google PageSpeed Insights
Google PageSpeed Insights is a free tool by Google to help users measure the speed and performance of their websites, it provides detailed insights including first contentful paint, speed index, largest contentful paint, time to interactive, total blocking time and cumulative layout shift which are components of the Core Web Vitals.
PageSpeed Insights also suggests opportunities to improve the performance score to achieve a faster website making it a must-use tool for any business wanting their website to pass the core web vitals, also with Google’s new page experience algorithm update Google has made it clear that the speed of a website on both mobile and desktop are increasingly important ranking factors.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console (formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools) is Google’s free SEO tool. Once you set up your account, you’ll get alerts if Google finds errors on your website and you’ll be able to view key stats like keyword rankings, number of clicks per keyword, number of times your website showed up in the search results per keyword, and your click through rate when your website showed up in the search results.
Plus, you can link Search Console to Analytics to unlock even more reporting tools in your Analytics account. For example, once you’ve linked these two tools, then in Analytics you’ll be able to review keyword rankings, click through rates, impressions, and the landing pages that are ranking in Google.
3. AgencyAnalytics
AgencyAnalytics is our go-to platform for reporting. AgencyAnalytics offers automated reporting, client visible/shareable dashboards, as well as a clean interface for teams to review performance for various different services. We use AgencyAnalytics to report on and review metrics for Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Ads, Facebook, Facebook Ads, Bing Ads, Yelp, LinkedIn, and many others. Whether it’s sending out reports each month in a timely manner or drilling into metrics to review client performance, AgencyAnalytics is one of our most widely used tools and we can’t recommend it enough.
Rank Ranger
Rank Ranger is a robust, all-around SEO analysis tool. But before you get lost in the data, focus on what Rank Ranger does best: tracking your keyword rankings. You’ll be able to track your website’s organic rankings over time in the major search engines, plus your local rankings in the “map” results. This will help you identify trends up or down in your rankings so you can adjust your strategy accordingly.
Rank Ranger also offers automated SEO reporting, competitor analysis tools, and many other helpful features for analyzing the performance of your SEO campaigns.
Conclusion
Small business owners and entrepreneurs can come up with their own ways of getting the job done, but using SEO tools can be more time-efficient and cost-effective. With this in mind, we’ve created a list of the best SEO tools for small business.