Google recently rolled out a new update to its Google My Business (GMB) products. The update is designed to give business owners automated suggestions for various SEO optimizations for their listings.
The new GMB SEO Tools feature uses artificial intelligence to provide recommendations on how businesses can improve their search engine rankings, increase customer engagement, and drive more traffic to their website and physical location.
Some of the automated suggestions include adding missing data like categories, descriptions, photos, and services; improving existing content; and creating new posts that are optimized for better visibility.
The update also includes a new “followers” section where businesses can see how many people have followed them on GMB, as well as filter those followers based on gender or age group.
Google My Business Seo Tools
These days, businesses working towards improving their professional online image and visibility in search results have a lot of Google My Business tools to choose from. A wealth of free and paid software is already available, and new solutions are being created every day. But sometimes simple is best – that’s why we will start with Google’s proprietary tools that can help you boost your results for free.
1. Google Ads
Google offers one of the most powerful online marketing tools on the market: Google Ads. This complex advertising system with advanced targeting options will help you reach customers all around the web including Google partners’ websites, Youtube, and, perhaps most importantly, Google’ssearch results.
You can start building your ads step by step by clicking the button in the left sidebar menu of your Google My Business administrator panel. It is fairly easy to set up your first campaign just by following the instructions that are embedded in the ad-building process.
We do, however, recommend that you get a bit more familiar with the mechanics of the Google Ads system to maximize the effects of your ad campaigns and allocate your budget in the smartest ways possible – especially if you run a small business and you’re unable to spend large sums of money on advertising.
2. Google Reviews
Regardless of what you’re selling, customers and prospects will eventually try to contact you about your products or services. And, in the name of great customer service, the best thing you can do is to make it easier for them to reach you.
The first good practice here is to stay connected to your customers by keeping your GMB reviews section alive. Interact with them by replying to their reviews no matter if they’re positive or not. This way you’ll show that you care about what people say about your business and that you acknowledge and act on your customers’ feedback.
Remember that people rely on ratings when deciding on where and how they will spend their money. That’s why it’s crucial to list your products on Google Shopping and encourage users to leave Google shopping reviews.
The other way to make your business more discoverable and approachable is by setting up a custom company email address. Click the Get custom email button on the left side of your GMB administrator panel and follow the instructions. Creating a custom email address will make you look more professional whenever you respond to your customers’ messages.
The last and the most useful tool for business messaging in Google’s offer is the Chat. You can think of it as a GMB Messenger app as it allows you to reply to messages from your clients in real-time.
3. Keyword Planner
Whether you advertise your business through a website, blog, or other forms of content, search engine optimization is definitely one of the most important components of a successful online marketing strategy. You don’t need to become an expert right away as SEO is a complex field of digital marketing. Luckily, Google provides some great tools to make your life easier here. Use them while preparing content for your website to make it more discoverable.
To do so effectively, you’ll need to optimize the copy of your website, publish meaningful blog posts, and so on. Weaving in keywords relevant to your niche and to the search phrases your target audience uses to find businesses similar to yours is a great practice.
Your best friend here is Google’s Keyword Planner – a tool that’ll help you choose the right keywords. Input your business profile, industry, and examples of products and services you offer and you’ll get useful keyword suggestions in return.
This feature is also embedded in the Google Ads creator.
4. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is yet another powerful tool among Google’s numerous products. If you want to grow your business, it is essential that you measure your results and draw conclusions. This process enables you to come up with countermeasures whenever something’s not going as planned and make improvements.
Google Analytics is able to measure the results of your website, mobile app, online store, social media channels, and more. The best thing here is that when you get comfortable using it, you can set up pretty advanced measurements, including cross-platform, user-centric analytics. Proficiency in Google Analytics comes with access to a world of insights that, when skillfully used, can lead to serious improvements to your digital ROI.
5. Google Trends
Getting attention for your business on the internet is about being where your audience is. To achieve that, you don’t need to spend hours digging through online forums and relevant threads on social media. Meet Google Trends, your new assistant for researching trending topics.
Google Trends analyzes all of the searches Google users perform and displays summaries in easy-to-read forms like diagrams and heat maps. Thanks to that you can not only see what is trending on the internet in a certain period of time but also check how frequently phrases connected to your business are searched.
If you ever found yourself not knowing what to write your posts about, Google Trends is a great source of everyday inspiration.
best seo tool for small business
1. Google Analytics
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Google Analytics is a powerful and completely free website analytics tool. Once installed properly on your website, you’ll be able to report on which marketing tactics drive the most traffic, which marketing tactics drive the most leads and sales conversions, how visitors use your site, which content they prefer, and so much more.
2. 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.
4. 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.
5. Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is another SEO tool with lots of bells and whistles. What sets it apart is the free SEO Spider tool that you can use to quickly conduct a technical SEO audit of your website. After downloading the tool, all you need to do to get started is type in your website’s domain name, and click Start.
The best part is that this tool is free (for crawling up to 500 URLs per website.) After downloading the tool, all you need to do is enter the website’s domain name, and click Start.
In just a couple of minutes, you will see a detailed audit of all of your webpages. From meta tags to error status codes, you can spot problems without taking the time to manually audit each and every one of your website’s pages.
6. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is our favorite tool for analyzing backlinks, SEO content opportunities, and SEO keyword research.
The main tool we love at Ahrefs is the Site Explorer tool. Ahrefs is probably best known for the backlink analysis functions within their Site Explorer tool. This tool is very helpful for identifying the different types of websites that are already linking to your website. You can also view trends in the growth of your backlinks over time. In addition, you can use the Site Explorer tool to analyze backlinks to competitors and find new link-building opportunities.
In our experience, the Site Explorer tool is also incredibly valuable for analyzing top-performing SEO content on your website. You can use this tool to identify what pages and keywords are already ranking well in Google and driving traffic to your website. For example, you can see what pages are driving the most SEO traffic, and which particular keywords the pages are ranking for in Google.
And then, you can also use the Site Explorer tool to identify what pages and keywords are working best for your competitors, and then apply those lessons to your own SEO strategy. For example, if you see some competitors have certain types of SEO landing pages that you don’t have, and they are generating traffic on some keywords that you aren’t focused on, you may want to incorporate those types of content ideas into your SEO plan.
In addition to Site Explorer, we also love Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer tool. It provides a fast, easy way to generate dozens of new keyword ideas for SEO content creation.
7. Moz
MozPro (including Link Explorer)
Moz is one of the most popular SEO software suites and we use their tools regularly. Moz is probably best known for their ‘Domain Authority’ (DA) metric. DA predicts how likely a website is to rank in Google, with a range from 0 to 100, with higher scores corresponding to greater likelihood of ranking. The main factor with DA is the quality and quantity of links.
Moz Pro is a suite that includes many tools, including Link Explorer, a backlink analysis tool. Unfortunately, no tool is 100% accurate when it comes to finding all of your backlinks or the backlinks of your competitors. That’s why we recommend using multiple tools (Ahrefs, Moz, among others) to get the full picture.
MozBar
MozBar is a simple tool but saves a tremendous amount of time when reviewing websites. It’s a Google Chrome extension that allows you to quickly and easily view a site’s Domain Authority, Page Authority, backlink information, and spam score. At the click of a button, you can also view a Moz page analysis, as well as followed and no-followed links on a page.
MozLocal
One of the biggest factors in your local “map” rankings is citations. A citation is simply a mention of your name, address, and phone number (NAP) on another website online. The most common citations are business directories like Yelp, Bing Local, and even Facebook business pages.
Moz Local is one of the best tools available to quickly audit your citations. You’ll see if your information is consistent across all directories, if you’re missing any important directories, and if you have duplicate listings that could be dragging down your rankings.
8. SpyFu
SpyFu is an amazing tool that allows you to see how your competitors are performing with SEO (as well as Google Ads). By using this tool, you’ll be able to find out:
- The keywords your competitors are ranking for in Google organically
- Which pages are generating SEO traffic
- What types of inbound links they have
- SEO traffic estimates and trends in SEO traffic
Plus, SpyFu is our go-to tool for Google Ads competitor intelligence. With SpyFu, you can see competitor Google Ads data such as:
- Which of their keywords are performing the best.
- How long their ads ran or have run for certain keywords.
- The clicks and impressions they received from their ads.
- The best performing ads.
- Your competitors’ ad copy.
- Your competitors’ monthly ad spend on campaigns.
So if you’re managing SEO as well as Google Ads campaigns, we definitely recommend using SpyFu to analyze your competitors.
9. SEMrush
SEMrush is one of the most complete all-in-one SEO software packages.
This platform pretty much does it all, including:
- Competitor research
- Keyword research
- Backlink analysis
- Automated On-page SEO audits
- And much more
Our favorite feature with SEMrush is the toxic backlink audit feature. In our view, their backlink audit tool is the best option for quickly analyzing potentially toxic backlinks to disavow via Search Console.
10. WhiteSpark
Citations (directory listings with your business name and contact info) are important for ranking high in Google’s local “map” results. But how do you find citations?
That’s where WhiteSpark comes in…
Citation Finder is one of our favorite tools offered by WhiteSpark. In a simple interface, Citation Finder allows you to add a business alongside some priority keywords. Once you’ve added the business info, the tool will start running and after a few minutes, Citation Finder will present you with a list of citation opportunities that competitors have. At this point, you also have the ability to add additional competitors. Once the list of competitors is set, you can review citations the business you added already has, you can review opportunities in a single list, and finally, you can review opportunities in comparison to the full list of competitors. In particular, we’re big fans of the ability to export these findings as a CSV.
Plus, WhiteSpark also provides the option to pay them to set up the citations to save you time.
Conclusion
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