When you’re running a small business, you don’t have the time or resources to spend hours on SEO. You need tools that do the work for you—tools that can find opportunities in your content, and help you implement changes that optimize your website for search engines.
We’ve compiled a list of our top 10 favorite SEO tools for small businesses, so you can spend less time worrying about SEO and more time doing what matters most: running your business!
Table of Contents
small business seo tools
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.
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.
seo search tool
SEO tools save you from tedious keyword research and data analysis. With these tools, you’re able to see what’s working and which parts of your strategy could benefit from some tweaking. The best SEO tools also provide reports about how you measure up to competitors and where the greatest opportunities lie. What’s more, they allow you to measure search performance countries, regions, or languages.
It gets better. If you’re managing more than one website, SEO tools can help you assess each site’s performance on the fly. Many entrepreneurs with multiple websites end up putting a lot of data in spreadsheets and analyzing it manually. But that soon becomes overwhelming and raises the risk of the reports being inaccurate. Fortunately, you can use SEO software to save hours of effort and generate accurate reports at a click.
best seo for small business
1. Ahrefs: SEO Keyword Tool
Ahrefs is one of the most recommended SEO tools online. It’s only second to Google when it comes to being the largest website crawlers. SEO experts can’t get enough of Ahrefs’ Site Audit feature as it’s the best SEO analysis tool around. The tool highlights what parts of your website need improvements to rank better in search engines. From a competitor analysis perspective, you’ll likely use Ahrefs to determine your competitor’s backlinks to use them as a starting point for your own brand. You can also use this SEO tool to find the most linked to content within your niche, check and fix broken links on your website,and get an overview of your best-performing pages (so you can see what information is drawing in the visitors).
Syed Irfan Ajmal, a Growth Marketing Manager at Ridester, loves the SEO keyword tool Ahrefs. He shares, “Ahrefs is surely our most favorite tool when it comes to various facets of SEO such as keyword research, rank tracking, competitor research, SEO audit, viral content research and much more. We add our site and those of our competitors to it. The tool then shows us the sites which have backlinked to our competitors but not us. This helps us find great link opportunities. But this wouldn’t have been so easy if Ahrefs didn’t have the largest database of backlinks. Ahrefs has been instrumental in getting our site ranked for several major keywords, and getting us to 350,000 visitors per month.”
2. Google Search Console: Top SEO Tool
Offered for free to everyone with a website, Google Search Console lets you monitor and report on your website’s presence in Google SERP. All you need to do is verify your website by adding a code to your website or going through Google Analytics and you can submit your sitemap for indexing. Although you don’t need a Search Console account to appear in Google’s search results, you can control what gets indexed and how your website is represented with this account. As an SEO checker tool, Search Console can help you understand how Google and its users view your website and allow you to optimize for better performance in Google search results. It’s especially useful for new websites as it lets site owners submit web pages for search indexing.
3. SEMRush: Marketing SEO Tools
Marketing SEO tools like SEMRush tend to be fan favorites in the SEO community. Experts love that they let you easily assess your rankings as well as identify changes and new ranking opportunities. One of the most popular features of this SEO tool is the Domain Vs Domain analysis, which allows you to easily compare your website to your competitors. If you’re looking for analytics reports to help you better understand your website’s search data, traffic, or even your competitors, you’ll be able to compare keywords and domains. The On-Page SEO Checker tool allows you to easily monitor your rankings and find some recommendations on how to improve your website’s performance.
Liraz Postan, Senior SEO & Content Manager at Outbrain, recommends SEMRush as one of the best SEO tools. She says, “My favorite SEO tool is SEMrush with the feature of “organic traffic insights”. This feature lets me see all my leading articles with one dashboard, along with related keywords, social shares and word count. This gives me a quick overview of what’s working and where to optimize. I generally use SEMrush on my daily work, love this tool, and love using its site audit to optimize our site health. We improved our site health by 100% more since we started using SEMrush, and we increased conversions by 15% more from our content pages.”
4. KWFinder: SEO Keyword Tool
An SEO keyword tool like KWFinder helps you find long-tail keywords that have a lower level of competition. The experts use this SEO tool to find the best keywords and run analysis reports on backlinks and SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Their Rank Tracker tool helps you easily determine your ranking while tracking your improvement based on one key metric. Plus, if that’s not enough, you’ll get a ton of new keyword ideas to help you rank your website even higher.
George Perry, an SEM Specialist at Bandwidth, raves about KWFinder. “I like that not only does it show me information on the keyword that I was searching for, but pulls in good suggestions for related terms, and how they compare (volume, CPC, difficulty, etc.) to the term I originally looked at. I’ve been able to help my clients target not only those big, pie in the sky vanity terms, but to better target those terms that are lower in the funnel and more likely to convert, allowing me to target them through focused content that answers the questions they’re actually asking.”
5. Moz Pro: SEO Software
SEO software Moz Pro keeps popping up as one of the best SEO tools that experts actually use. Some specialists raved about how Moz was always up to date despite Google’s regular algorithm changes. Others praised Moz’s chat portal that allows them always to get an insightful response to every question asked. Whether you’re looking for keyword recommendations or a site crawl, Moz is a full-service powerhouse. You can get great insights into how your website is performing but also how to improve it. They also have a free MozBar toolbar that you can download to see your website’s metrics while browsing any page. If you’re looking to learn more about SEO, you should also consider checking out MozCon, their annual conference.
Keri Lindenmuth’s, Marketing Manager at Kyle David Group, go-to SEO tool is none other than Moz Pro. She says, “My favorite feature of the tool is its ‘page optimization feature.’ It tells you exactly what steps you can take to improve the SEO of every single page on your website. For example, it will tell you to ‘Include your keyword in this page title’ or ‘Add an image with a keyword alt tag.’ This tool has substantially improved our client’s business simply by the fact that it gives increased transparency. We can compare their site’s traffic and optimization to that of their competitors. We can see which pages and search terms their competitors perform well in and alter our web practices to compete against theirs. Without a tool like Moz, SEO really becomes a guessing game. You have no idea where you’re doing well and where you can use improvement.”
6. Ubersuggest: Keyword Tracking Tool
Ubersuggest, developed by Neil Patel, is a free keyword finder tool that helps you identify keywords and also the search intent behind them by showing the top ranking SERPsFrom short to long-tail phrases, you can find the right terms to use on your website with hundreds of suggestions from this free great keyword tool. Metrics Ubersuggest includes in its reports are keyword volume, competition, CPC, and seasonal trends. Great for both organic SEO and paid PPC, this tool can help you determine if a keyword is worth targeting and how competitive it is.
7. Answer The Public: Free SEO Tools
Free SEO tools like Answer The Public allow you to easily find topics to write about for your blog. I’ve used this tool in the past to create content around specific keywords to better rank online. Say you’re in the ‘fitness’ niche. You can use this free SEO tool to create content around keywords like fitness, yoga, running, Crossfit, exercise and cover the entire spectrum. It’s great for finding featured snippet opportunities. Say you hire a freelancer to create content for you, all you need to do is download this list and send it over to them. And it would only take you five minutes, making it one of the most efficient ways to come up with SEO topics for new websites.
Matt Jackson, Head of Content at Wild Shark, loves free SEO tools like AnswerThePublic. He shares, “One of my favorite tools when compiling SEO content for a site is AnswerThePublic.com. The best feature of the tool is that it presents a list of the questions that web users are asking about a particular keyword. If I’m running out of genuinely useful content ideas, or if I’m compiling an FAQ page, it provides invaluable guidance as to what, exactly, people are searching for. It is not only useful for SEO content, it means that our clients can answer questions on their site, minimizing the number of customer service calls they receive and giving greater authority to a page and the overall business. And here’s a quick tip: prevent neckache by hitting the Data button, rather than straining to read the question wheel.”
8. SpyFu: Free SEO Tools
While SpyFu has an amazing premium version, many of our experts raved about its free features. If you’re just starting out, you can easily grow into the paid features as you start succeeding. You can easily view the number of times a keyword gets searched each month while easily determining the ranking difficulty for that keyword. You can also do some research on your competitors to determine which keywords they use. Additionally, you can search your competitor’s, or your own, website to easily see how many organic keywords they have, how many monthly clicks they get, who their paid and organic competitors are, the campaigns they’re running with Google Ads, and more. It’s one of the most detailed SEO analysis tools on the market.
Adele Stewart, Senior Project Manager at Sparq Designs, can’t get enough of SEO software SpyFu. She shares, “I have used SEMrush and Agency Analytics in the past, but SpyFu has the one-up on my client’s competitors. All of SpyFu’s features are great, but my absolute favorite is the SEO Research feature. You’re able to plug in a competitor’s domain and pull up information on their own SEO strategy. You can see what keywords they pay for vs. their organic standings, review their core keywords, and even assess their keyword groups. Using SpyFu has been integral to my client’s SEO successes. There’s so much more to track and report on, plus I don’t have to put in as much effort in research as I did with other SEO software. SpyFu pulls the information I need and organizes reports in a way that is presentable and understandable to my clients. I’ve already seen increases in indexing and rank for keywords that we didn’t even think of.”
9. Woorank: SEO Ranking Tool
As a top SEO analysis tool, Woorank offers free and paid options to track and report your marketing data. You can plug in your competitors to discover which keywords they are targeting so you can overlap with theirs. Try understanding how keywords perform over time to optimize for users and search engines in the best way possible. And most importantly, understand the things your website is lacking from both a technical and content perspective. Woorank can help you identify duplicate content, downtime, and security issues and provide guidelines on how to fix them.
10. Majestic: Marketing SEO Tools
Majestic is one of the best marketing SEO tools according to experts. It has countless useful features like The Majestic Million which lets you see the ranking of the top million websites. Did your website make the cut? The Site Explorer feature allows you to easily see a general overview of your site and the number of backlinks you have. It also works as an SEO keyword tool to find the best keywords to target while also having features geared to site comparisons and tracking your rank.
Ryan Scollon, SEO Consultant at RyanScollon.co.uk recommends the SEO tool Majestic. He says, “My favorite SEO tool is Majestic, with its main feature allowing you to check the backlinks of a website that you specify. My favorite feature is the ability to add your own client’s site and a bunch of competitors, allowing you to easily compare a variety of SEO metrics such as trust flow, referring domain count, and external backlinks count. Not only does it help us understand the [client’s optimization] weaknesses, but it also provides a simple table that we share with our clients, so they too can understand the problems and how they stack up to their competitors. We also use Majestic to audit competitors’ backlinks, as we can sometimes find a handful of easy opportunities to tackle before moving onto other link building tactics.”
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