17 Most Effective SEO Tools for Small Businesses

SEO for small businesses is getting more complex with each passing day and to be successful, you need a combination of the right tools. However, finding the best SEO tools for small businesses is a daunting task for many.

To help ease your trouble, we have come up with an extensive list of the most effective SEO tools you can use to gain vital insights and take action to improve SEO rankings. Before we get into this long list, let’s understand what factors you should consider when selecting the tools.

Factors to Consider While Selecting the Small Business SEO Tools

Factors you should consider for your small business SEO tool selection:

• Budget to spend on quality tools
• Tools that suffice for researching and gaining important audit data and insights
• Keywords and rank tracking capabilities for locations you serve
• Audit and outrank your competitors in traffic, content, keywords, ranking, and backlinks
• Helping you enhance your SEO score
• Managing and updating your business listings and local SEO
• Provide you reports and insights on your SEO performance

There are several SEO tools available in the market. While some are free to use, others are paid as they include special features. Also, there’s no single tool to help with each aspect of SEO, and so you’d have to use a combination of multiple small business SEO tools.

Apart from the 3rd-party vendors, Google also offers several tools to help small business owners like you to advance your SEO game. Let’s glance over what these tools can do for you:

Free Google Best SEO Tools for Small Businesses

As we know, Google dominates the search engine market and due to that, most marketers and business owners have to bend their knee to Google SEO algorithms and guidelines. However, it offers several best SEO tools for small businesses to get better at their SEO. Let’s get to know some.

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics (GA) is a free web analytics tool from Google for webmasters to get vital insights into their website traffic, source, track goals/conversions, and do a thousand other things. It’s one of the effective tools to better understand visitor behaviour after they land on your site.

The tool allows you to create 100 accounts and add up to 50 properties to track the performance. Here are some unique features of GA:

Google Analytics Features

• You can track and monitor traffic sources e.g. organic, social media, paid, direct, and others from where visitors find your site.

• Analyse the traffic location data like country, city, and other to create targeted campaigns

• GA educates you with data to explore how visitors use your site and uncover insights like pages per session, bounce rate, new & returning traffic, time on page, etc.

• It offers real-time reports, acquisition reports, engagement reports, monetisation reports, and many others to dive deep into customer data.

2. Google Search Console

Using Google Search Console (GSC), businesses can monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot technical issues on their site. It further helps you manage the presence of your small business on the web by detecting and notifying issues to resolve.

The tool allows you to add up to 1000 properties to track and monitor. Here’s more what this tool can help you with:

Features of GSC

• Allows submitting custom XML sitemap for Google to crawl and index instead of the default one.

• Option to request indexing of new website pages or content for Google Search.

• Identify pages bringing high traffic, impressions, & CTR from search result pages.

• Helps you to monitor which keywords or Google searches drive more impressions & traffic

• Provides tools to check loading performance, mobile-friendliness, and other aspects.

• Sends alerts for the issues with page indexing with affected URLs to fix them for better results.

3. Google Keyword Planner

Keyword Planner from Google is a keyword research SEO tool for small businesses to discover some potent terms that can drive high demand for their products or services. The tool is housed under the parent tool called Google Ads and one can only get access to keyword planner if you sign up for the parent tool.

The keyword tool serves several purposes and offers features as listed below.

Features of Google Keyword Planner

• The tool helps you discover new and unique keywords people and webmasters use for searching & creating targeted ad campaigns respectively.

• Allows you to discover new and unique keywords and phrases by entering competitor URLs.

• It’ll show search volume in the range of 1 to 10k except if you have an active ad campaign running through Google Ads.

4. Google Trends

Google trends is another keyword and trend research tool to help you capitalise on the current market trends. It’s a free tool to get custom location-based search demands and interests of users in a particular topic to drive more traffic.

You can even compare different trends for specific periods of time and gauge their competitiveness and uniqueness to make them part of your campaign. Let’s see some features of the tool.

Features of Google Trends

• Allows you to monitor trends in Google Web Search, Shopping, News Search, Image Search, and YouTube Search.

• Compares and displays various search queries for different locations in a more interactive way.

• Provides insights for seasonal interests and search demands to help better serve businesses.

• Helps discover popular topics and queries to plan and create your content marketing calendar.

5. Google Business Profile

Formerly known as Google My Business, Google Business Profile (GBP) is a free business listing tool to help local businesses get more traction from regional searchers. We have utilised this tool to help one of our plumber clients build & optimise their local presence and visibility.

Doing so ensured the client gets enough local customers for their plumbing services when searching on Google or Maps. Let’s look at some of the features of GBP that helped our clients.

Features of Google Business Profile

• The tool helps you list your business, contact details, open hours, images, products, and other info for customers to find and reach out to you.

• Visitors and customers can leave a review that helps boost the reputation of your listing on local search and map.

• Built-in analytics to track and improve your business listings in local searches.

6. Google PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights provides a quick view of how your page performs with respect to different page experience signals known as Core Web Vitals and other notable metrics. Page speed has been a ranking signal for so long now, which is why Google offers this free SEO tool for small businesses.

It helps you check how the search engine perceives your website performance and what it suggests for improvement. Here are some features of the PageSpeed tool.

Features of PageSpeed Insights

• Can analyse the performance of your website and individual pages.

• Offers diagnostic reports and issues for page performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO.

• You can also check page experience for mobile and desktop devices and resolve any hindrance to improve your SEO rankings.

Free Small Business SEO Tools to Use

Now that we have glanced over the free SEO tools offered by Google, let’s see some more free tools to fast-track your SEO.

1. Supple Site Audit Tool

Supple provides a free SEO audit tool for small businesses to find opportunities to drive more customers. The tool offers a high-level overview of your website SEO in one report to gain actionable insights and SEO performance score.

For instance, a financial services provider used this tool to get an overview of how well-optimised their website SEO is. After gaining the basic actionable insights, they went for a detailed SEO audit that includes technical SEO, local SEO, and on-page/off-page SEO. Moreover, you can connect with our SEO experts across Gold Coast for the same.

Let’s see what this free site audit tool offers.

Features of Supple Site Audit Tool

• It's a capable tool to audit any website within minutes to provide a high-level SEO overview.

• The report will include an SEO audit score, traffic analysis, basic SEO audit checklist, website usability issues, backlink audit, social media audit, and keyword report.

• The tool offers actionable insights and recommendations to improve your small business SEO and drive more customers.

2. Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a free SEO spider tool to quickly audit technical elements of your and competitors’ websites. You can download the tools for your Windows, macOS, or Linux system to get started with it.

The free version of the tool allows you to crawl up to 500 URLs per website. Here are some other features of this SEO tool.

Features of Screaming Frog

• Scans your website pages for page titles, headers, meta tags, and more.

• Can quickly detect broken links, server errors, and unnecessary redirect issues on your website.

• Checks for internal linking structure and anchor text to see if the internal linking needs improvement or minimisation.

• Tree graph site visualisation to evaluate internal linking and URL structure.

3. SEO Quake

SEO Quake is a free extension you can install on your Chrome, Mozilla, Opera, and MS Edge browsers to keep watch on your website and SEO metrics. Even though it’s not so deep and feature-rich, the tool is useful enough to get vital insights and helps you perform basic web page audits. Let’s see what the tool is capable of.

Features of SEO Quake

• Conducts a basic SEO audit to diagnose issues on your website and recommend tips for improvement.

• Helps examine the internal and external links and compare domains and URLs in real time.

• Provides a SEObar for an instant summary of page details.

• Offers an SEO dashboard on the search results pages to see a compact yet informative box with a brief SEO overview of any website.

4. Ahrefs Backlink Checker

While Ahrefs is renowned for offering best-in-class paid SEO tools, it does offer a free basic tool called Backlink Checker. This free tool shows the top 100 backlinks for any website and also displays vital stats about the domain and URL. Let’s see what else it offers.

Features of Backlink Checker

• The tool allows you to track the top 100 backlinks for your and your competitors’ websites.

• It’ll display URL rating, domain rating, total backlinks, referring domains, and dofollow links in %.

• Apart from backlinks, you can check the top 5 anchor texts used for acquiring backlinks.

• The tool also lets you know the top 5 pages that bring the most backlinks.

5. Keyword.IO Tool

As the name suggests, Keyword Tool helps small businesses find unique and important keywords to target in their campaign. It comes in free and paid versions, however, the free version is sufficient enough to get keyword ideas for Google, Bing, YouTube, Amazon, and others. Here are some other features.

• Uses Google Autocomplete and behind-the-scenes for submitted queries and presents a list of keywords that include different keyword variants, long-tail keywords, and related phrases.

• The tool provides search volume, trend, average Cost Per Click (CPC), and competition level for the top five keyword suggestions.

• It also allows you to see what questions and prepositions people use for your entered query.

6. Whatsmyserp

Whatsmyserp is a rank tracker and keyword research extension tool that directly integrates with your google search result pages (SERP) in Chrome browser. It’s one of the easiest and most effective small business SEO tools available for free. Here’s what this tool can do for you.

Features of Whatsmyserp

• The extension will display a simple indicator in the Google search bar to analyse the entered keyword.

• You can have a clear view of the keyword data of any country as shown in the above image.

• It provides you with search volume and CPC data for “related keywords” and “people also ask for”.

• You can also export these data for further analysis and use it to include on your website.

7. Rank Math

Rank Math is a free plugin for WordPress — one of the highly used content management and eCommerce platforms. Once integrated, it provides content optimisation and SEO configuration suggestions. The plugin is simple to set up for a strong SEO foundation for your website. Here’s what else it offers.

Features of Rank Math

• SEO analysis and built-in optimisation suggestions based on the 30 known factors.

• Creates default XML sitemap and robots.txt file for better crawling and indexing.

• Detects and notifies broken links and helps in managing link redirects.

• Allows you to add structured data markup and shows previews for pages & rich snippets in the SERP.

Paid Small Business SEO Tools to Use

The list of free & best SEO tools for small businesses is a starting point but there’s a limit to what you can do with them. That’s where paid tools can swoop in to help you get better insights. Let’s see the list of paid small business SEO tools.

1. Ahrefs

Ahrefs has been the go-to tool for all your SEO analysis requirements. It has an unmatched site explorer tool and the largest database of backlinks after Google to help you gain a comprehensive understanding of your small business SEO. Here are some of the features that make it worth every dime.

Features of Ahrefs

• Ahrefs is bundled with several other tools such as site explorer, backlink analysis, website analysis, keyword research, and advanced site audit features.

• The keyword tool consists of a large database of search terms for you to explore and export.

• With site explorer, you can find top-performing pages and content to see what works better.

• You can also perform competitor analysis to see what they are doing better and implement the same for your small business.

2. SEMRush

SEMRush is also a leader in the SEO tools category and consists of several tools under the hood to offer small businesses as much insight into their website SEO as possible. Apart from SEO, it also includes tools for Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC). Here’s what else you can get out of it.

Features of SEMRush

• This paid tool offers an excellent database to research new keywords relevant to your niche.

• Detailed on-site audit tool to ensure your website pages do justice to Google SERP features for higher rankings.

• Tool to search and analyse competing sites in your industry to find improvement opportunities in keyword rankings, backlinks, and traffic.

• Content gap analysis to discover new topics to target and reach new audiences for your small business products/services.

3. Moz Pro

Moz Pro is another powerful SEO tool small businesses can capitalise on to increase their online visibility and search presence. This tool also includes a bundle of other tools such as keyword research, site audit, competitor analysis, and gaps in link-building strategies. Let’s see what else it includes.

Features of Moz Pro

• Moz Pro offers reliable insights on keywords, backlinks, rank and position tracking.

• You can save and export keywords and questions people use to find your small business services.

• Site audit to find crawl and other index problems to fix them for higher SERP ranking.

• Content audit to help optimise your pages for maximum rank potential.

• Backlink profile analysis to find further opportunities.

4. BrightLocal

BrightLocal is a one-stop local SEO tool for small businesses to monitor their local presence and find opportunities to boost rankings. It also offers a suite of several tools small businesses can use for local search audit, rank tracking, citation and business profile audit, review management, and others.

Features of Brightlocal SEO Tools

Let’s see some features of BrightLocal SEO tools.

• Most affordable citation builder and data aggregator tool for improving your local search rankings.

• Local Maps rank tracking for different keywords with a unique grid view.

• Reputation management tool to help with review request campaigns.

• Best local SEO tool for small businesses with multi-location.

Conclusion

With this, we conclude the list of the most effective SEO tools for small businesses that help you save time and resources, plus improve the bottom line for your business. This extensive list of SEO tools is all you need when you are in your startup phase of SEO.

The Google tools mentioned above are a must for businesses that are keen to improve their results and build a solid foundation for their SEO. However, you must also use several free and paid tools in combination to achieve greater results and keep an eye on what your competitors are doing.

However, there's a limit to what these tools can do for you and an expert eye becomes a compulsion to take actions based on insights collected from tools. You can always rely on a professional team of an expert SEO agency to bolster your small business SEO.

Contact us to consult with our team of experts and delegate all your SEO problems to us now.