5 Free SEO Tools for Small Business Owners

The common question among small business owners – How to maintain SEO campaign without breaking your account to spend on software and reporting tools? Though they may understand the value of SEO, they often think it is too expensive or too time-consuming to implement and learn. With the right use of online tools and reading discussion boards, articles, and YouTube videos, SEO can actually be done fairly easily. Even though the practise of SEO may be difficult to begin with, the concepts will eventually  make sense and you will be much closer to ranking your website on Google’s first page.

Here is a list of best free SEO tools on the market (in no particular order) to help small businesses, bloggers, including e-commerce website owners to perform some of their own SEO tasks. Each tool offers various results, so the more information you have, the better you can improve your search engine results! Let’s start to understand SEO and create an SEO strategy for your business.

Google Analytics

This is a must have tool if you are building a website, or at least make sure your developer installs this tool for you. As the best web analytics tool, it has more functionalities than you will ever know. Besides giving you a unique insight on who is visiting your page, you will also know which pages are most often being viewed, and how your visitors get to your page. This tool can let you know if your traffic comes mostly from social media channels or from organic Google searches.

On the traffic flow, you can even understand if the traffic is coming from desktop, mobile or tablet and accordingly flow can be managed effectively. Lots of useful information can be drawn from this data. You can understand which pages are favored by visitors while navigating to our site, allowing us to modify our pages which are rarely being visited and changed it for better-improved navigation. Also, we can focus to improve pages to increase visitor retention and generate more leads.

Search Console

Used to be named as Google Webmaster Tools, Google has rebranded it to Google Search Console. This is another must have tool to be installed on your website. Helping you to manage your site’s presence in Google search results, you can get a visual on how healthy your website is on Google level. This tool is best used to monitor what Google search engines think of your site from the backend.

Through Google Search Console, you can request that Google index your site, meaning changes you’ve made will show up in search results sooner. Also, with this service, you will be notified by Google directly regarding any issues or required actions to be taken against, your website. For example, a detected hack attack, a penalty for bad linking practices, a malware warning, or other technical notices which the search engine may send via Google Search Console.

Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is designed as a paid search tool. It helps to find related keywords and ad groups relevant to your business. It is the ultimate source for search volume data, as you can see which terms people are searching and how often. Therefore, its data is extremely useful for SEOs. There are two main categories that breaks up the keywords – search volume and keyword competitiveness. The search volume is the number of times searched in a month while the keyword competitiveness is how many other sites are targeting the same keyword.

This tool is accessed through AdWords, but you do not need to have or start a pay-per-click campaign to use the Keyword Planner. From Adwords homepage, go ahead and log into your Gmail account, bypassing the AdWords campaign by clicking “Tools” on the top bar.

Incognito search

An incognito browsing window can enable you to browse on Google “undercover” or anonymously. So this is a great tool to assist you in analyzing search engine page ranking more accurately. The incognito ensures that any customized search data Google stores when you’re signed in gets left out. With Google’s core search app, searching incognito can be performed from the main screen. Although the incognito window is not exactly a tool for SEO purposes, you can certainly make the most of it to boost your organic traffic.

Have you ever noticed that when you start typing a word into Google search, it will autofill with pop up suggestions? These suggestions are SEO gold because they are exactly what people are searching. But the problem with this method is, it will call up your search history to give you suggestions based on your previous web browsing activity. This is where incognito window steps in. In order to get an unbiased view, just open an incognito window and type your search in there. An incognito window can be opened from your Chrome Browser by pressing “ctrl” “shift” “N”.

Google Trends

Another goodie from Google, this tool is a very useful and often underrated instrument for search engine optimization. Use it to understand what people are Googling in real time. It also allows you to compare topics and gain awareness of industry trends beyond the scope of your direct competitors and in other countries. This will help you discover trending keywords because it fetches data that can be especially insightful for business owners wanting to keep up with current events and stories. Type in a phrase and you will easily see if it is a phrase that is growing. If it is, then you know you will want to use that term. And if you see it falling, you may want to redo your search to find other keywords or opportunities.

As a fairly new or small business owner, most likely you have a new website too. So if you plan to build authorships for yourself on the industry standard websites, this tool will help you get ideas for blog posts and articles you can write for your websites.

The PORTMAN Education Group