8 free SEO tools every small business should use

A common issue for small businesses is how to maintain your search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign without spending a fortune on software and reporting tools. To be successful, you need to implement the right tools but the costs can quickly add up. There are so many SEO tools out there, but choosing the best option for your small business can be daunting.

Here, I’ve listed some of the best free SEO tools that small businesses like yours can use in 2019 to help create amazing content, improve search engine rankings and get more visitors to your site.

1. Google Analytics

This is one of the best tools for analysing your website and measuring SEO performance. It’s freely available and once installed on your website – you may need a web developer to do this for you – it will prove invaluable.

You can implement a million changes to your site but what good is it if you can’t measure the results and prove success? Analyse things like page views, time on site, returning visitors, how visitors are reaching your site, and information about your audience and then use the data to make informed business decisions.

What is your top converting page? Which pages are getting the most traffic? What pages are underperforming? You can learn all of this through Analytics.

2. Google Search Console

Another free tool from the behemoth that is Google. Google Search Console lets you see how healthy your website is and can help inform your SEO strategy. Use it to find websites that link to you, get alerts when there are indexing or page errors, and get keywords and ranking positions.

The Search Analytics report is a valuable resource within Search Console that shows how often your site appears in Google Search results. You should use this information to improve your site’s search performance.

In this report, you can see how your search traffic changes over time, where it’s coming from, and what search queries are most likely to show your site. You can also see which pages have the highest, and lowest, click-through rate from Google search results. Take the time to review this information, it should influence your decisions about what areas to focus on and can also direct you towards other aspects of your site that may need further work.

3. Google PageSpeed Insights

Page speed can have a massive influence on SEO and user experience. If your page takes too long to load, visitors will just bounce back to the search results page and click on the next result, most likely your competitor.

Google PageSpeed Insights is really helpful in terms of helping you assess the performance of your website. It reports on the real-world performance of a page on mobile and desktop devices and provides suggestions on how that page could be improved.

How do you use it? Simply enter your website URL, the tool will check if your website has applied common best practices, score you out of 100, and suggest some best practice that you can apply to improve site speed.

4. Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a tool that allows you to quickly conduct a technical SEO audit for your site. It crawls your website and gathers key onsite data that you can use to make informed decisions. You can conduct a site audit manually, but unless your site is just one page, it will take a lot of time to manually audit each and every one of your site’s pages.

A crawl will highlight broken links (404s) and server errors, analyse page titles and metadata, generate XML sitemaps, audit redirect, discover duplicate content, and more. The results will be full of actionable insights that you can directly apply to your site.

There is a paid option at £149.00 a year but the free version is a great option for those of you doing SEO for your own site.

5. Yoast SEO Plugin

Yoast is a free SEO plugin that, if used correctly, can help your site rank higher in search engines. This is only an option if your site is self-hosted on WordPress.

The free version enables you to optimise your content for a keyword, see a Google preview of your page, check the readability of your copy, and set your meta description without needing to edit code.

Yoast is a great tool to make sure your pages are as search engine-friendly as possible. The plugin is constantly adapted in response to Google algorithm updates so you can be confident that you are using best practice and giving your site the best chance to rank.

6. Moz Link Explorer

Links are an important part of off-site SEO. Links on other sites that link back to yours act as a powerful vote of confidence to Google, get referral traffic to your site, and will improve your ranking in search results.

Link building is one of the most difficult and time-consuming aspects of SEO but you can make it a bit easier by using a tool like Moz’s Link Explorer. It will help you to create a solid link building strategy, uncover content and link building opportunities, and track your site’s link profile over time.

Discover all the websites that have links back to your site, identify the top pages on your site, and see the anchor text that has the most followed links using this free tool.

Moz also have a really comprehensive link building guide if you’re looking to learn more about the process.

7. Ubersuggest

Use this free keyword tool to get an overview of any keyword including volume data, seasonal trends, and cost per click data (useful if you’re thinking about running pay-per-click campaigns). Ubersuggest will also give you some more keyword ideas, you’ll get hundreds of suggestions that you could implement into your content.

This free tool also shows the level of keyword difficulty too so you can gauge how hard, or easy, it will be to rank organically. This can also inform your PPC decisions as it suggests how expensive a keyword will be too.

8. Bing Webmaster Tools

While Google is no doubt the biggest player in the search engine game, Bing proudly takes second place with over 11% of the market share. As the second largest provider of search engine traffic, it can’t be ignored.

Sign up for free and get more insights into your website. In the main dashboard, you’ll get a summary view of how well your site is performing and identify what needs attention. Use Bing’s reporting tools to understand how visitors are finding your site and discover which areas you need to focus on to increase traffic. Bing also has diagnostic tools to help you identify any issues that could negatively impact your site.

Use this as a guide along with Google’s tools to give you the most information and insight that will guide you towards making the right decisions that will benefit your site.

Just a starting point

This list of free SEO tools is a good starting point for any small business wanting to conduct a successful and cost-effective SEO campaign in-house. If you’d rather someone else did this for you, contact me to discuss my SEO services.

jade gillham