Best SEO Tools For Small Businesses
Best SEO tools for small businesses can greatly assist in creating an effective digital marketing strategy, automate time-consuming tasks and maximize return on investment (ROI). Such tools provide deep keyword research with relevant suggestions and competitive analysis; accurate rank tracking covering multiple locations; valid positions overview; as well as many more features that make these tools invaluable to growing a digital strategy for any small business.
SEO software like SE Ranking and Ahrefs offer comprehensive website audits, advanced backlink profile analyses, AI-powered content optimization services, search volume data and much more. Call tracking software also gives an insightful glimpse of the impact your SEO is having on phone calls received by your company.
Google Business Profile
Google My Business, also known as Google Business Profile, is a free service offered to businesses to display important details such as contact details, business hours and location as well as services offered. This feature appears in local search results on both Google Search and Maps to make it easy for customers searching for specific products or services to find your company more quickly.
This feature can have a dramatic impact on local SEO. Optimizing a Google Business Profile is one of the most essential tools a small business needs for improving local search rankings; in fact, according to research conducted by Google and Ipsos in January 2017, optimizing it may result in increasing clicks to your products or services on Google search results pages.
Google Business Profile features include helpful information, reviews summaries, photos and more to give customers an understanding of your business’s offerings. While traditional local listings may only provide general contact details and working hours information about businesses, this feature enables companies to showcase more details relating to current promotions or events taking place in their location.
Restaurants can use Google Business Profile to showcase their menu and give customers the option of ordering delivery or picking up the food at the location – this makes making decisions faster and less stressful for consumers.
Business Profile also features a Questions and Answers feature that enables owners to directly engage with people who submit inquiries through their listing. This feature can help business owners build customer engagement, trust and drive traffic back to your website or physical store – it’s vital that business owners check and reply as quickly as possible so as to not miss this valuable opportunity!
Google Business Profile offers businesses access to a set of powerful analytics tools that help them gain better insight into their target audiences and make smarter marketing decisions. For instance, this tool shows which words or phrases are most frequently searched, providing valuable data that allows businesses to adjust keyword usage within GBP description or website to rank higher on local searches.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC) is a free set of tools and reports that enable webmasters and publishers to optimize their websites, and often used in conjunction with other SEO tools to ensure search engine optimization efforts and digital marketing initiatives are successful. GSC features sitemap submission, backlink monitoring, security alerts, link disavowal files upload capabilities as well as managing penalties or any messages from Google related to websites they own or publish.
GSC stands out from other SEO tools by enabling you to monitor how your pages appear in search results and identify any errors that could be hindering performance. Understanding these errors allows you to make necessary changes on your website; for instance, errors like missing meta tags, incorrect permalinks and broken links could prevent visitors from finding it and harm its overall appearance.
GSC makes life easy when errors arise on websites by notifying administrators when there are errors to correct immediately – giving you time to fix any potential problems before they have an adverse impact on performance and helping keep tabs on an SEO campaign’s progress.
GSC provides businesses with several other features that are helpful, such as identifying keywords with high traffic but low clicks or analyzing how searchers interact with your site. Furthermore, it helps improve search presence by showing relevant keywords for your business and testing different title tags and meta descriptions.
GSC is a free tool available to anyone with a Google account, making it accessible and usable by anyone looking to enhance their online presence and expand their reach. In order to make the most of it, set up an account and verify site ownership before beginning to use GSC to enhance it and expand reach.
Though there are a variety of tools for SEO available today, the most efficient ones will provide accurate and useful data. The right tools will allow you to analyze the structure and content of your website to identify improvements which can enhance user experience.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics (GA) is a free website tracking tool that offers insights into visitor activity on your site. This includes information such as how visitors found you, which pages they visited and keywords they searched. Using GA to set goals for your content – for instance if a goal measures whether or not a customer made a purchase, filled out a contact form or even called you (call tracking software required) would allow you to know whether or not its working.
GA provides invaluable competitive intelligence that allows you to identify which keyword phrases your competitors are targeting and their ranking performance for them – information which you can use to fine-tune your own SEO strategies.
AnswerThePublic is another useful Google tool, helping you discover what people are searching for when it comes to your product or service. By understanding which type of questions your customers or clients are searching for on search engines, this allows you to craft more relevant website content and better serve potential customers or clients.
Screaming Frog, a desktop software, can also provide valuable SEO tools for small businesses. It conducts an in-depth website audit that highlights issues with meta tags and headings, duplicate content and broken links; furthermore it also offers comprehensive backlink analysis to discover opportunities to optimize SEO rankings of your website.
BrightLocal is an SEO tool designed specifically for multi-location businesses that makes managing local SEO simple. You can use BrightLocal to monitor citations, reviews and listings for all business locations on the web; monitor Google Maps rankings; create review request campaigns via email, SMS and links to social media; generate sitemaps automatically submit them directly to GSC; analyze website content to optimize for SEO optimization – it even comes equipped with its own built-in sitemap generator; offers an affordable free trial period – making BrightLocal an ideal option for small businesses with multiple locations!
Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is a free tool designed to help you discover keywords for Pay Per Click (PPC) ads, but can also provide valuable SEO insight. For instance, it can tell you about monthly search volumes as well as competition level and cost per click of terms you’re targeting – providing invaluable data.
Step one in using Keyword Planner is entering some keywords or phrases into the field at the top of your screen, then choosing your location, language and search networks of choice – these options help determine your demographics as you target specific audiences with ads that correspond to demographic data. Finally, filter results either including or excluding specific terms like if you sell blue t-shirts you could include “blue t-shirt” and/or “t-shirt.”
Another useful aspect of this tool is that it provides invaluable insight into your competitors’ advertising strategies. With it you can view how many impressions, clicks and costs each competitor is likely to receive in 30 days; helping you devise a campaign which can defeat them effectively.
Ahrefs’ keyword tool, Ahrefs Keyword Explorer is especially effective at analyzing long-tail keywords. According to their research, 40 % of search traffic comes from these long-tail terms and it’s therefore vital that content creators use this tool as part of their optimization strategies in order to discover as many long-tail terms as possible in their on-page optimization processes – this tool makes that easy! You could quickly discover thousands of these long-tail phrases using it!
Keyword Planner’s one drawback is its requirement of having an existing Google Ads account; however, keep in mind that Google Ads provides tools that are invaluable for both SEO and PPC advertising, so this may be worthwhile investing in.
Although it does have its share of drawbacks, this tool remains one of the best ways to identify new keyword opportunities. You’ll discover untargeted by competitors keywords which are most suitable to your products or services; in addition, this tool helps you understand how much it will cost bid on each keyword and its performance potential.