Best SEO Tools for Small Business Owners

If you are spending any time on trying to optimise your website, to get more traffic and leads, to search for most relevant keywords - you naturally want to know how well you are doing. Have there been measurable improvements? What else can you do next? My best SEO tools and reports can help you analyse and track performance of your SEO campaigns - and many are free to use as well!

If you missed the post from last week on how to SEO your blog post, check this out as well. It's all well and good to have the tools, the secret ingredient lies in applying the tools and the insight they give you to your particular business.

A lot of the information in SEO reports is numbers-driven or technical, so you will need to put your Maths hat on and take some time to work out what different terms mean and how they apply to your business website. But obviously, if you are lost or need some help - just give me a shout in comments below.

So here we go.

Keywords Research Tools

There tools and websites help you select the best keywords and keyphrases to optimise your website against. You can research and track over time what keywords perform better and what keywords generate more traffic. My favourite tool to use is Google Keywords - it's part of the AdWords package, but you don't need to pay for anything to use it or run any active Ads.

Tools that require subscription (or a free trial) are marked with a * in this and next list.

Google Keywords Tool
Wordtracker
Google Trends
* SEOmoz
* Raven Tools
On-page SEO Review Tools

On-page SEO techniques refer to activities and improvements you can do on your website and that you are fully in control of. As opposed to off-page SEO, which focuses on building quality backlinks on other websites that point back to you.

Let me ask you a question. Is your website SEO-friendly? Has it been built according to the best SEO practices?

>> TWEET THIS <<

Just because your website designer said it was, it might not be the case - or fully the case. And SEO Review tools will help you find out exactly that.

They can quickly check and tell you if your site has an active sitemap, what keywords are most prominent, what your Page Rank is, how popular the site is on social media, and so on. You can then use the report as a checklist for future improvements as part of your on-page SEO campaign.

When I start working with a new client, I always review their website using some of those tools. This informs the marketing plan that we will implement for the client and how their website can be improved.

SEO Site Checkup
SEO Report Card
* WOO Rank
* Raven SEO Tools
Quick Sprout
* SEOMoz
Another tool worth mentioning here is BrowserShots - you can check how your website looks on different browsers, mobile clients and operating systems. Therefore you spot that your website is broken for example in Firefox (which is quite a popular browser), or that the latest version of Internet Explorer makes it look weird - you can contact your website designer and ask them to fix the theme for you.

If some of those tools and reports tell you that your website is slow - you can independently check it via PageSpeed (another free Google tool). PageSpeed's report will then list all the necessary modifications and improvements you can make to get your website to load faster. And the faster the site loads = the more likely the visitor will stay on and engage with your content.

Backlinks Review and Tracking Tools

Finally, when you are happy with the keywords you have selected and you have optimised your content against those, and you are happy that you've done as much as possible on the website itself to achieve higher rankings - you can start looking at building your external backlinks profile.

To analyse where you are with backlinks at the moment (who links to you, how, where) and compare it with your competitors, you can use the following tools below. Most of them are not completely free, but you can get some information about your website during the free trial and cancel thereafter if you don't want to continue.

>> TWEET THIS <<

This super-groovy video explains what link research tools do and how they can help with your SEO campaigns.

AhRefs
SEMRush
Raven Tools
Open Site Explorer from Moz
SearchMetrics
Link Research Tools
Finally, SEO and Marketing Tools are just that - Tools!

You could spend days collating data from all of the tools I mentioned. But without action, your insight will be worthless. Tools are only useful when you use the information they give you and apply it in your business.

If you feel overwhelmed with the amount of data and all the potential changes you need to make - book a free Marketing Strategy Session with me to go through it and create a step-by-step plan on how your website can be optimised.

Over to you...

If you liked this post - share it with your friends using social media buttons on the site. Make sure to enter your details below as well, so that you can receive other training and marketing strategies directly to your inbox. There are more posts to come - about SEO and social media marketing!

And in the comments below, tell me: what do you think of SEO and SEO tools? Have you tried any? What are your faves and why? How SEO-friendly is your website?