In the new age of digital marketing, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tools are everything to a company. This is especially true for a smaller company that can often have the odds stacked against it.
As a small company, you may sometimes feel like the odds are against you because you have to deal with unrelenting competition and rising expenses, while competing with more developed as well as companies with more experience.
Although SEO is without a doubt very important to your business, getting SEO managers and marketing consultants can get pretty expensive, especially if you are a relatively new company. Plus, the results of investing in SEO could be totally different between a very successful business and one that is fumbling to find a way to stand out from competition.
While, the good news is there are quite a few good SEO tools that can really help you overcome these challenges and assure you to get better SEO results only with minimum expense. Here are 10 must-have SEO tools for your small business to use.
1. Rank Ranger
Let us start with an all around tattoo that can manage all of your SEO analysis necessities, even if not at the level at independent software. However, Rank Ranger does specialize in one thing, tracking your keyword rankings. This rank tracking tool allows you to actively check your website’s rankings on all of the major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Other than search engine results, this tool can also help you see your rankings locally on maps and other tracking services. With the help of this software, you can see all of the ups and downs that your company is experiencing online, and make changes appropriately.
2. SpyFu
Now before you think that this is incredibly shady software that tells you all sorts of secrets about your competitor, it does not. SpyFu instead tells you whom you are competing against in terms of rankings, and through analytics, tell you the strategy that they are using. This alone makes this one of the best tools that you can use as a small company. The best part, the starting package for this tool starts from $40, which gives you unlimited search results, data reports, and 5,000 weekly tracked keywords rankings.
3. Copyscape
As the name implies this software is responsible for spotting duplicate or plagiarized content on your WebPages. While smaller companies do not understand the importance of authentic and real content, plagiarized content can rank your content fairly low in search engine results, which makes it almost essential for you to have unique and original content.
4. Google Analytics
Did you really think that a list about SEO tools wouldn’t have one of Google’s own applications in it? Google Analytics is a free website analytics tool that rivals most fully priced analytics tools. This website plug-in can give you all sorts of information about what are some of the best marketing tactics for your specific website. Google Analytics can choose from the massive pool of information that is at its disposal in order to offer you all sorts of essential information like what makes visitors stay at your site, what content they prefer, and marketing tactics that bring in the most visitors.
5. Screaming Frog
While you may be thinking that the Screaming Frog is just another SEO tool, this software does have a special trick up its sleeve among all its other bells and whistles. This tool comes with its very own SEO spider tool that conducts an SEO audit of your website. In a few minutes, this tool can identify all of the problems that all of your WebPages in the site may have, saving you the tedious process of finding them out yourself. From error status codes to proper to meta tags, if your webpage has a problem Screaming Frog will be able to locate it.
6. Raven Tools
Raven Tools is software that that creates automated marketing reports for your website. It gathers information for its reports from a multitude of popular tracking tools, like Facebook Google AdWords, Google Analytics, and many more. Then it gives you a detailed marketing report for your Social Media, PPC, and SEO, which you can use to see if your marketing strategy is working or not. You can also choose if it should give these reports on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis.
7. Ubersuggest
Making content for your website is often challenging on its own, but finding ideas for content to write on can feel straight up annoying. Since finding the right content can be quite the challenge, Ubersuggest helps you generate content ideas based on keywords that people are searching for on famous search engines. This is also a great tool for keyword research. If you need another reason to get this tool, it searches for SEO keywords in multilingual markets. Hence, you do not have to restrict yourself to English-speaking countries.
8. Moz Local
Moz Locals is a citations tool that ensures your website is able to show up on various search business directories like Google maps, Yelp, and even Facebook Business pages. The tool also audits all of your information to see why you are not on the top listing and how it can help you get there by changing some information.
9. Answer the Public
Answer the Public is an SEO tool that helps you find keywords and other details that people are searching for. This tool also helps you find current trends, keywords, and content ideas that are sure to help you find audience that you are looking for. Best part about this tool is that it is free and works especially well with Google trends.
10. SEMRush
SEMRush is an all in one tool that provides you with SEO information about your website, Social Media reporting, and even analytics tools for your website. Although this may be a little pricey, with its plans starting at $100/month, the quality of the tool speaks for itself.
Conclusion
SEO tools are essential to your business operation and without them, you risk falling to obscurity. In other words, the right SEO tools can shoot your company into the stratosphere. So, expand your business and make the most of your marketing with these SEO tools.
