For a new business, search engine optimization (SEO) is an absolute must. It can help you attract traffic to your website via improved search engine visibility. In addition, it can help improve your marketing campaigns build your brand.
SEO is an important piece of any online marketing strategy. For small businesses that do not possess the resources of their larger competitors, the reality is they may struggle keeping up if they do not devote enough towards their SEO campaign. There are many tools available online that can help with this. Here is a list of SEO tools that are worth your attention.
Raven Tools
Raven Tools was created by SEO experts to help other SEO experts, so you can be sure that it will give you all the information you need. It collects data from many sources, such as Google Analytics, Adwords, and other tools we will mention further down on our list. Then it gives a report on your overall SEO performance. This includes content management, backlink reporting and social media monitoring. This tool will provide a report on your competition, just by entering in the URL of their website. You can use this information to track where you are strong, and where you could use some improvement.
SEMrush
SEMrush will help you keep track of your competitors, and see where you rank among them. It collects information from multiple sources, not the least of which are Google and Bing, and provides a report on where your competitors rank. It will allow you to see how effective certain keywords are for any website. The database is constantly being updated, so you can track all of this information in real time, allowing your SEO strategy to adapt with new information. It can track the performance of any ads you’ve paid for, so you know what’s working and what isn’t at all times.
WordTracker
Keywords, and using the right ones, is incredibly important to your SEO strategy. WordTracker tracks over 160 million of them, along with another 95 million from SEMrush. You can enter a seed word, such as the product you sell, and WordTracker will then give you up to 1000 potential keywords for you to use. Along with this, it will tell you how many others are using each keyword, and what the value has been for it so far. Along with those suggestions, it can suggest other keywords from similar topics that might be useful. WordTracker will provide you with options for finding backlinks, and ranks those options based on several factors to give you the strongest links possible. One of the neatest features is that it will search the web for everywhere that is linking to you, and will delete links that aren’t helping your SEO. Bad links can affect your ranking, and they can be nearly impossible to sift through, so WordTracker can save you a ton of time.
SEO PowerSuite
SEO PowerSuite contains four tools that you can buy as a package or a la carte. Rank Tracker will analyze all of your keywords and tell you where your website ranks for each of them. It’s automatic, so once you’ve entered your keywords, you can let it do its job. It will give you suggestions of the most effective keywords to optimize for, so you can be efficient with your efforts. Website Auditor does just what its name implies. It audits your website for errors and issues and gives you a report giving you suggestions for how to fix them. LinkAssistant scours the web to find you partners to create the strongest backlinks possible. Finally, SEO Spyglass will allow you to “spy” on the competition by analyzing their backlinks and how they are performing. You can’t put a price on knowing what the enemy is doing, and adjusting your strategy accordingly.
Investing in software when you have a small business, especially if you have a limited budget, can be a hard decision. Using these tools to help you get the most bang for your buck.
Google’s SEO Tools
Google is the grand-daddy of all search engines, so why not use the tools it provides to help you get the most out of your SEO efforts? For instance, Adwords can help you select the most effective keywords based on current searches. There is Google Analytics, which will tell you if those keywords are being successful at producing traffic for your site. Google Trends provides you with information on current search trends and history. Search Console generates reports and data that will help you see where your SEO efforts could use improving.
Übersuggest
Sometimes, the hardest part of the SEO process is finding the right keywords. Übersuggest, can give you thousands of potential keyword options. All you have to do is enter in a search term, and it will provide you with different keywords and phrases that might work for you. For instance, if you sell widgets, you can enter “widgets” into the Übersuggest, and it will provide suggestions such as “widgets art”, or “widgets and doohickeys” or any other combination that might be relevant.
Quick Sprout
Not everyone can hire SEO consultants. Quick Sprout is designed to be that consultant for your small business. All you have to do is input your URL, and the program will analyze your site and provide suggestions for improving your SEO. There are many factors that it will consider, and it will provide advice on any or all of them. It will give you an SEO score, so you’ll have a baseline to work from going forward.
RankSense
SEO can be a lot of work, and a lot of monitoring and keeping on top of things. RankSense aims to help ease those burdens. It monitors your site 24/7,will catch issues right away, and will provide recommendations immediately to help improve your SEO. It can optimize all of your pages, which means it will save you massive amounts of time if you are currently manually optimizing every page of your website.
Scoop.it
Content marketing can be a big part of not just SEO, but of your business’s branding strategy. Scoop.it will help curate effective SEO content for you to post on your site, social media accounts, or blogs. This is perfect for those small businesses that do not have the manpower to be able to produce enough of their own content.
Moz Pro
When it comes to SEO, everything about your online presence is covered. That includes your social media, your website, and everything else. Moz Pro allows you to monitor everything by logging into a single service. It will track everything about you online, including links to your page, social media campaigns, brand awareness, SEO, and content marketing. It can provide data to show how you are comparing to the competition. It can save you a lot of time and energy from having to log in and use several different accounts.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool
This tool can audit all of your webpages to check for any errors or problems that can be fixed. Correcting errors can be a tremendous boost to your SEO. Things that might hurt your SEO that may be difficult to detect include server errors, blocked URLs, content that’s duplicated, and broken links. Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider Tool will recommend any changes to page titles and descriptions if they are not a good length. It will integrate with Google Analytics and produce reports on errors so you have a quick reference guide to what you need to work on.
If you are not familiar with it, SEO can be an intimidating concept. There is so much to consider, and so much to track and monitor. Luckily, there are tools available to help you get the most out of your SEO efforts. Use the ones that are right for you, and reap the benefits.
