The internet is one of the powerful tools for small businesses. It allows you to reach a large audience, interact with them, and even sell your products and services. But, like any tool, it’s only useful if you know how to use it.
In this article we’ll talk about some of the best tools for small businesses. These tools can help you build your brand and grow your business so that it can compete with larger companies in your industry.
Table of Contents
Seo Tools For Small Businesses
1. SCREAMING FROG SEO SPIDER
A free SEO tool for small businesses with an unforgettable name, Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a web crawler that can perform a basic audit on your site for free. For larger companies, there is a paid version, but most small businesses will find the 500-page free limit enough to get through their entire site.
There are many things this free tool does that can help you optimize your site.
- It finds broken links and server errors, which impact your link authority.
- You can export the errors and fix the problems with a redirect, ensuring visitors are pointed to relevant content.
- Screaming Frog will audit your redirects too, to ensure they are working as well as they can be.
- The crawler looks at content to find duplicate information, low content pages, and issues with titles and metadata.
- It can even make an XML sitemap, ideal for showing search engines exactly what is available on your website.
Those are just a few of this tool’s powerful features. It’s well worth checking out for yourself.
2. GOOGLE ANALYTICS
We have a lot of good things to say about Google when it comes to offering free SEO tools for small businesses. Google Analytics is the gold standard in free metrics tools, giving your business data you can use to monitor your SMB SEO and improve it.
One of the best things about Google Analytics is the ability to set goals, so you can track information, like how much organic traffic a page is getting through SEO and how much of that traffic is converting, such as through people filling in a contact form.
You can also sync Google Analytics to Google Search Console, which we will talk about next.
3. GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE
Make the most of Google Analytics by syncing it to Google Search Console, another free SEO tool. Google Search Console shows you how people are finding your content, particularly the keywords they are using, and where that content is ranking. With the information, you can see how your targeted keywords are performing versus how people are organically finding your site. And you can then adjust as needed.
4. GOOGLE MY BUSINESS
This is a must-have tool for any small business concerned about local results. With Google My Business, you can fill in your information and have it show up in Google maps and searches when people are searching for relevant local information.
5. GOOGLE PAGESPEED INSIGHTS
Yes, another Google SEO tool! PageSpeed Insights does exactly what it says, giving you information about how well your pages are responding on both mobile and desktop devices. It also gives you suggestions on improving a page. This matters for SEO because nobody is going to stick around for a page that is slow or buggy. If you want to convert visitors, you need a site that works well.
6. GOOGLE TRENDS
Google Trends shows you what people are searching for based on the parameters you set. You can use it for keyword research, finding those that are becoming popular over time and getting in on the trend before it truly takes off. You can also do the opposite, looking for trends that are decreasing over time and choosing a different keyword rather than one that is dying off.
7. SEO QUAKE
SEO Quake is a great free SEO tool for when you want something that works on the fly. It’s a browser extension, which means it gives you SEO information and auditing in real time as you navigate through sites. You do not have to worry about a program or interface, and can use the in-browser setup to compare sites quickly.
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PAID SEO TOOLS FOR SMALL BUSINESSES
8. SEMRUSH
In our opinion, SEMrush is the best overall multipurpose tool. It combines a lot of the features of many other tools listed, creating a comprehensive platform that offers analytics, market and advertising research, backlink analysis, and keyword research. SEMrush also comes with tools that utilize that data, helping you find keywords with less competition, create charts and reports, and even optimize your writing for SEO as you create content.
While SEMrush is ideally suited to overall SEO for small businesses, it’s also excellent for managing and monitoring specific projects, from competitor analysis to social media posting and ad building. There is not much this tool can’t do.
9. AHREFS
AHrefs is the best tool for all things related to linking and backlinking. It, too, is an all-in-one toolset, but linking is where this system shines.
It boasts the second-most-active web crawler after Google, meaning it comes with the best backlink database in the industry with over 19 trillion known links. You can monitor domain and page-level metrics, backlink profiles, and get a complete breakdown of all outbound links, among other features.
The broken link checker is as robust, offering an easy way to unbreak what has been broken, eliminate dead internal links, and keep on top of your site with scheduled crawls for new dead links.
10. KEYWORD TOOL
Keyword Tool is perfect for finding long-tail keyword opportunities, using Google Autocomplete to determine what users are searching for based on what actual searchers want. While there is a free version of Keyword Tool, the paid version offers twice as many keywords, on average. It also allows for parameters like search volume, competition level, and cost per click data.
11. MANGOOLS SUITE
Mangools Suite is one of our favorite SEO tools. It is very easy to use. Keyword research, for example, can be as simple as inputting a competitor’s website and letting Mangools evaluate it. When you analyze search engine results with Mangools, you can do it in over 52,000 locations, ensuring local accuracy on top of the already powerful SERPWatcher features. Mine comeptitors’ backlinks, check the SEO authority of any site, and identify the content that offers the most value, all through one robust system.
Overall, this suite of SEO tools offers great bang for your buck. Even better, it comes with scalable pricing options. Choose the free version, which works well, upgrade to the basic paid option, or splurge on premium or agency versions that add more power to the toolset.
12. SEOJET
SEOJet is a great new tool for backlink creation and management. This SEO tool for small businesses creates a link map or backlink plan for every page of your website to show you where to build your backlinks next. Set it up based on other sites who are in the top 10 for your selected key phrase or mimic all first-ranked pages across all categories. Either way, you will not have to guess what anchor text to use, what link to build, or how you can work to create a top-ranked page yourself.
This platform also shows you opportunities to create those backlinks, with outreach tools and potential link partners organized and ranked. A guest post service, built-in and heavily discounted, ensures even more chances to get those all-important backlinks going.
There are countless valuable features packed into SEOJet and it does something we haven’t quite seen any other SEO tool for small businesses replicate so far. It is well worth a look to get your backlinks in the best shape possible.
13. ANSWER THE PUBLIC
SEO professionals and marketers can guess what people want to know, but there are often questions we could never imagine. These are the queries people have that are important to them, but they might not share it aloud. And, these are the queries that will drive the most traffic to your site.
Answer the Public positions itself as a direct line to your customers’ thoughts. It looks at autocomplete data from search engines, listing the phrases and questions surrounding a specific keyword. With this information, you can tailor your advertising, SEO, and web campaigns around the answers people are actually seeking.
Ultimately, Answer the Public helps your company be more relevant to your customers. It helps you monitor how people are talking about your keyword, and how that conversation shifts so you can keep up. You might even find hidden niches as you dive into the questions your customers have.
14. UBERSUGGEST
Ubersuggest is an all-in-one SEO tool, with pricing for individuals, businesses, and enterprises. Its focus is generating new keyword ideas, based on long tail versions of search terms. These are the search terms with low search volume and competition levels. Ubersuggest will also provide stats and data on keywords, like search volume.
Ubersuggest also offers ways to use a keyword in the form of a question. This is helpful in marketing to determine what solutions you can provide to searchers. The tool is also great for comparisons and prepositions, showing how you can extend your keyword into phrases.
Perhaps one of the best features of Ubersuggest, users can reverse engineer competitor SEO. Simply typing a competitor’s domain, users get insight into the strategies they use, including page rankings for popular keywords, top-performing content, and keyword suggestions.
15. LOCAL FALCON
Local Falcon is a great tool for local SEO, displaying Google My Business rankings for listings that show up in maps. Instead of returning results based on a general zip code or central geographic location, Local Falcon represents mobile searches from where they occur. Local search is critical to any small business, catering to a local market.
Local Falcon ensures that your business can take advantage of local search in the way that it should, showcasing your share of local voice and average rank position in Google Maps. With their highly visual interface, you can be aware of how you rank and see it compared to the competition.
If Local Falcon’s visualizations show that your rank is not where it should be, it’s a sign that your local SEO needs work. A lot of that comes down to Google My Business and improving your profile with posts, photos, real-time response to reviews, and more. Knowing how you fare locally is the first step, which is why Local Falcon is so helpful.
Local Falcon pricing ranges from a starter account, up to a premium account, all charged monthly. All options provide unlimited keywords and locations, service area business scans, competitor reports, automated scanning, and variable grid sizes.
google my business
Google My Business (GMB for short) is a free web tool, whose goal is to help local businesses achieve higher visibility on Google Search for relevant local searches.
Through the use of Google My Business, owners of local companies can control and improve their visibility on Google Search. Optimizing your listing and page can help your business stand out against your competitors in your local area.
The more space you occupy on the web, especially on Google Search, increases the opportunities your customers can see and engage with your business.
Most users start their customer journeys on Google Search, especially when searching for local businesses for services. Being found on relevant terms for those services is essential.
Utilizing Google My Business can help improve your results from other online marketing channels and improve return on investments.
Including GMB in your overall marketing strategy, including your website and other advertising channels, is essential.
For example, improving foot traffic for different branches of a business can be enhanced with Google My Business.
While GMB is more geared for local businesses, it can offer unique benefits for other types of companies as well.
For example, A clear listing with detailed information is a useful recruiting tool.
Google My Business benefits:
- Local SEO
- Collecting reviews
- Business info directly from the search engine
- Marketing and communication tool
- Google My Business Insights and its benefits for analytics
- Free of cost
- Ease of Use
Better Visibility From Google Search: Increase Traffic From Google Maps and Local Searches (Local SEO)
Google My Business is strongly visible in local search terms. You can achieve higher search ranking positions (SERP) in related search terms in your business’s local area. Optimizing your local SEO enables smaller companies to compete with companies with a more substantial online presence in your local area.
The optimization of GMB is crucial for standing out and making your services more available to customers near you.
Local search or Local SEO, and it’s optimization, means the search engine optimization of your website and utilization of GMB to improve your local reach on Google Search. It helps customers find you and your services at the right time when they are searching for relevant businesses and services nearby.
Read more about search engine optimization in general.
Visibility on Google Search, and Google Maps
Google My Business listings are visible to the relevant search terms between Google Ads spots and the first organic search results on Google Search.
When customers are searching directly with your company’s name, the listing is visible to the right of the search on desktop and mobile; the listing is visible below the ads and the first organic result.
When customers can find your company on Google Maps, it speeds the process of contacting you for them. Having your address on Google maps with the proper listing makes your business more discoverable and more attractive on the search, and that can drive more sales to you.
Google My Business listings are seen in Google Maps on the left on the desktop, and it displays the crucial information to help customers make quick decisions on-the-go to make them go to you.
Learn more about Google Maps Marketing.
Google My Business And The Local Pack
In the local pack, there will be a few relevant companies (up to three companies) and their profiles, and their locations on Google Maps.
The local pack displays crucial business info of nearby relevant businesses for the customers to help them make a better choice, such as:
- Opening hours
- Company name
- Address
- Reviews
- Relevant Category
- Type of Business
- An image of the business
As we can see from the image, the local pack takes up a lot of space on Google Search when searching with relevant terms. Therefore, it’s crucial to gain these local pack positions for your business to stand out.
Because of the nature of how the local pack works, being first on organic results might not be enough if your website and business aren’t locally optimized.
Being able to see what competitors are in your local pack can help you make better decisions on how to stand out against them.
Google My Business Reviews
Reviews are an essential tool for businesses to use. Reviews build trust, create and show approachable experiences, build brand recognition, and drive sales to your business.
Reviews shown in Google My Business listing improves your local visibility on Google Search. Shopify says, for 93% of customers say that online reviews have influenced them.
In short, online reviews have a strong correlation in building visibility and trust online, especially in Google Search.
Positive reviews that customers have given you are a great way to bring free and positive visibility in the search engine.
Collecting reviews are essential to improve your local SEO, as customers will go to see available reviews first when they are about purchasing something. Especially quickly made purchase decisions such as local retail and restaurants are profoundly affected by the availability of online reviews.
Many customers will read reviews when finalizing their purchasing decisions, and reviews also function as positive endorsements for services.
Collecting Reviews with GMB
Collecting reviews can, at times, be hard or tedious if there’s no proper or easy way to collect them.
For collecting and displaying online reviews, Google My Business is reasonably straightforward for both businesses and customers to use. Using GMB for reviews is also free. Customers can leave a review directly on Google Search on a Google My Business listing.
Integrating the collection of online reviews in your sales funnel can make the process faster and easier for customers. For example, introducing an email-sequence after purchase that would tell your customers to leave a review or in a retail environment say to your customers directly about leaving a review.
Another benefit of online reviews for businesses is that the reviews tell the owners what the customers honestly think of your business and its services.
Negative reviews are a chance to correct customer’s problems and offer an opportunity to fix customer pain points to improve customer experiences.
A fixed negative review shows to other customers that you’re actively trying to make better decisions to improve their customer experiences, and that will lead to improved sales.
Display Business Information In Google Search
With Google My Business listing, you can update and show in real-time your crucial business information for the customers who are searching for you. Updating your details through Google My Business account, your business information will always show the most updated information of your business.
GMB will always show the latest info you have submitted in your listing. For example, if your only updating your information on your website, it might take some time for the search engine to crawl it.
Giving your customers the basic updated info quickly at a glance directly from your profile might save them time when making important decisions when deciding where to buy.
Your customer, when searching your business on Google Search, will see your Google My Business profile with the following information:
- Company name
- Address
- Phone number
- Recent images
- Industry
- Opening hours
- Reviews
- Website
- Google My Business posts
A Communication and Marketing Tool: Google My Business Posts
Utilizing your Google My Business posts within your profile, you can create offers, add products, give news, and other updates directly on Google Search.
Within a Google My Business post, you can choose from different call-to-actions to increase clickthrough-rates such as buy, learn more, sign up, call now, and more.
Inside your profile, you can see what kind of posts your competitors are creating, so you can have a better idea of what kind of content you should make, to stand out.
Published Google My Business posts are visible in the latter part of the profile when relevant searches trigger your profile to show.
Experimenting with different post types can increase your overall clickthrough-rates to your website, which is beneficial when you’re trying to increase traffic to your company’s website.
Keep in mind that posts expire in seven days. Create new posts as old posts expire.
GMB posts can be in your content distribution strategy, and having the ability to recycle content created for Facebook, LinkedIn, or Youtube ads, is beneficial. When reusing content, remember to modify your content to fit the format of GMB posts.
All in all, GMB posts are an excellent addition to your content marketing strategy that can help you reach more customers within Google Search, especially on those lucrative local searches.
Google My Business Cost
Google My Business is a free tool that every company should utilize in their marketing strategy. Its optimization and use won’t take much of precious time either, which makes it a cost-effective addition to any online marketing strategy.
Optimizing and managing a Google My Business listing shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours, and it will benefit your company quickly with improved visibility within Google.
Spend time in the initial optimization, and managing company updates to gain the benefits of Google My Business for yourself.
Google My Business Insights and Analytics
Google My Business Insights provides companies valuable data that businesses can employ to improve their visibility, increase engagement, and ultimately sales. Taking action with the provided data helps you more easily understand and create actionable goals with GMB.
Data gathered with Google My Business Insight is mostly data that is relevant to the profile itself. The collected data is useful to make better decisions when you can see quick summaries of relevant web data of your business.
Learn more about web analytics
Two categories of metrics are available from Google My Business Insight: visibility metrics and engagement metrics.
Visibility Metrics
With visibility metrics, you can see how many views your profile, its images, and posts have gained in a specific period.
Tracking visibility is essential because you can track how different marketing campaigns have affected your Google My Business profile visibility and reach in the Google Search.
To achieve the highest returns for your campaigns, replicate the best performing campaigns again. It’s also crucial to test new ideas all the time alongside the best performing campaigns.
With ‘How customers search for your business‘ – report, you can conclude wherein the search engine your profile was shown and how your customers have found your profile.
The report will tell you what keywords triggered your profile for your customers.
Understanding what keywords have triggered your profile early-on enables you to appropriate the said keywords in your SEO strategy and give you ideas on what keywords you should include in the plan.
The report gives you a simple breakdown of how many searches each category has brought you.
The categories that the report displays are:
- Direct Search
- Customers searched your business or by address.
- Discovery Search
- Customers searched for a service, product, or category that matches your offerings, and it triggered your listing.
- Brand Search
- A customer searched for a brand related to your business.
Total searches combine these three metrics.
Photo views will give you a breakdown of how your images are viewed compared to similar businesses.
Where customers view your business on Google – report, will show you where the customer saw your business inside Google. It will tell you how many views you have gained on Google Maps or Google Search.
Views in GMB are impressions meaning how many times users have seen the profile and its posts.
Engagement Metrics
Engagement metrics in Google My Business will tell you how many website clicks, calls, and direction requests your profile has had.
You can track the following engagement metrics:
- Clicks to the website
- Direction request from Google Maps
- It will tell you from where on a map direction requests were made.
- Amount of phone calls to your business
- Estimate when your business is at its busiest and an average location visit length.
Utilizing engagement metrics helps you improve and optimize your Google My Business profile and your business itself.
For example, tracking direction requests can tell you where your customers are more likely to come. Combining the data with other engagement metrics such as phone calls and time spent on your business can draw a complete picture of how your customer is engaging with your business.
Understanding how your customer engages with your business is a key benefit of Google My Business for any business that is looking to find growth within their current audiences.
How to Track Web Traffic from Google My Business with Google Analytics
To be able to track direct traffic from Google My Business with Google Analytics, and to see how users from the medium are behaving on your website, the use of Google Analytics is required.
- Create a campaign Link with UTM-Builder
- Give your website URL, name the campaign, and name the source and medium. For example, “GMB” or something that you will recognize when analyzing later.
- Add the created UTM-link in your Google My Business profile.
- Finally, test the result. Click the link on your GMB profile and look it up from the Real-time report on Google Analytics. You should see your click registered under traffic sources.
Quick Guide How To Optimize Google My Business Account and Profile
- Add the correct information about your business and keep it updated at all times. Remember to check your spelling and your styling.
- Choose a category that matches your business and its industry the best.
- Decide if your business delivers products and services to the home.
- If yes, add the correct delivery information such as postal codes, neighborhoods, and cities.
- The essential part of Google My Business is to verify the address of your business. Your profile won’t show up in Google before you’ve verified your address.
- Enter detailed information about your products and services.
- Use relevant keywords to your business in descriptions and posts.
- Add relevant images of your business: Inside of your business, outside of your business, logos, etc.
- Manage and answer customer reviews and messages
- For enabling messaging, you will need the Google My Business – app (iOS & Android)
- Use Insights data to improve your business and your GMB profile.
- Lastly, use Google Ads to create local ads to promote your business in your area.
- Learn more about search engine marketing
Conclusion
Any company looking to grow its local reach, visibility, and profitability should be using Google My Business.
As a free and yet simple tool to use, Google My Business is something that companies small and large can utilize in their online marketing strategy.
The benefits of Google My Business are vast, and companies who take the time to optimize and manage their profiles are more likely to gain more reach and sales from nearby customers.
The power of local marketing, especially local SEO, is the free exposure, you achieve.
Managing and responding to questions directly on a GMB profile can increase customer satisfaction and the number of engagements you will receive. The increased customer engagements will result in better relationships and their willingness to share your business with their friends through word of mouth.
Overall, using Google My Business as a tool for online marketing can lower the cost of your online marketing budgets or help to boost results from it.
Conclusion
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