SEO can be the most impactful digital marketing channel for small businesses looking to boost their online visibility and attract more customers. Optimizing a website for SEO can feel like an impossible task for small business owners especially with limited budgets. Fortunately there are plenty of inexpensive and even free SEO tools that can allow you to optimize your site for SEO, from assisting with keyword research, technical SEO audits and on-page SEO factors.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs offers a comprehensive SEO toolkit that’s perfect for small businesses aiming to optimize their website for search engine optimisation. With tools like Site Explorer and Keywords Explorer, you can analyze your site, uncover opportunities, and track competitors.
Key Features:
- View backlinks, referring domains, and organic keywords.
- Analyze competitor websites for insights into their strategies.
- Use the Site Audit tool to identify issues like missing meta descriptions or slow-loading pages.
Pricing:
Free plan available with limitations; paid plans (lite) start at $99/month.
Ahrefs also offers a 7-day trial for $7.
RankMath
If you’re running a WordPress site, RankMath is a must-have plugin. It simplifies on-page SEO tasks with an intuitive interface and powerful features tailored for WordPress users.
Key Features:
- Generate schema markup for rich snippets.
- Automatically add alt text to images.
- Create XML sitemaps and manage robots.txt files.
- Easily edit metadata and noindex specific pages.
Pricing:
RankMath has a free version, with premium plans available annually starting at $129 a year.
SEMrush
SEMrush is a versatile SEO platform that provides a wide array of tools for analyzing and improving your website. It’s particularly useful for keyword research, technical SEO site audits, and optimizing your local SEO.
Key Features:
- Conduct in-depth SEO audits to identify technical issues.
- Optimize for local search with dedicated tools.
- Discover competitor strategies and keyword opportunities.
- Enhance on-page SEO by refining metadata and content.
Pricing:
There’s a free version for basic needs but with limitations; paid plans start at a monthly rate of $139.95.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a powerful website crawler designed specifically for technical SEO audits. It’s the most impactful SEO tool you will need to identify technical SEO issues on your site.
Key Features:
- Find broken links, duplicate content, and missing meta tags.
- Analyze site structure and identify internal linking opportunities.
- Detect slow-loading pages and schema markup errors.
Pricing:
Free version allows you to download and crawl 500 URLs.
The paid version costs $259 per license per year, by purchasing a license you can remove this limit and also access its advanced features.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is essential for monitoring and maintaining your website’s health.
GSC offers multiple tools and reports allowing you to receive insights about the performance and health of your site, including the following:
- Total clicks
- Impressions
- CTR
- Average position
- Core web vitals
- Crawlability issues
- Indexability issues
Key Features:
- Track clicks, impressions, and average search rankings.
- Monitor Core Web Vitals and mobile usability.
- Submit sitemaps and troubleshoot indexing issues.
Pricing:
Free
Ranktracker
Ranktracker is a user-friendly tool for monitoring keyword rankings across different search engines. It’s great for tracking progress and staying ahead of competitors.
Key Features:
- Track keyword rankings on desktop and mobile.
- Perform technical audits to uncover SEO issues.
- Discover keywords with high traffic potential.
- Analyze competitor backlinks and traffic trends.
Pricing:
Starts at $24 a month for the starter plan option.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest offers simple yet effective features for keyword research and competitor analysis.
The keyword discovery tool allows you to find keywords to target by showing the traffic volume, trend changes and the difficulty level to rank for those keywords.
Its rank tracking tool allows you to track where your keywords are ranked on Google on desktop and mobile, across multiple locations and languages.
Key Features:
- Analyze competitors’ backlinks and top-performing keywords.
- Discover gaps in your keyword strategy.
- Monitor ranking changes across devices and locations.
Pricing:
Ubersuggest is a free-to-use tool and also has a paid plan starting at $29 and offers a 7-day free trial.
Bright Local
For local businesses BrightLocal is an excellent tool to choose, it is an all-in-one tool designed to help local businesses looking to build a presence in search by optimising for local SEO.
It allows you to track citations, fix existing citations, remove duplicate citations and can even build citations for you (for a fee). You can use it to monitor your reviews on relevant sites and shows insights from your Google My Business (GMB) profile.
The local search audit tool provides a detailed report about the key areas of how well your site is optimised for SEO including backlink profile and authoritativeness, Google My Business optimisation and how well your GMB is optimised in comparison to the top 10 ranked businesses in your area allowing you to see what you need to do to outrank them, on-site SEO factors, as well as, a rank checker allowing you to see where you rank for important keywords that are relevant to your business on Google & Bing search engine results pages, Google Maps and Bing Local.
Key Features:
- Track and manage local citations to boost rankings.
- Monitor and respond to customer reviews.
- Perform local search audits to identify areas for improvement.
Pricing:
BrightLocal has a limited set of tools that you can use for free but to access all of its tools you have to purchase a paid plan starting from as low as $39 a month.
BrightLocal also offers a 14-day free trial.
Google PageSpeed Insights
Google PageSpeed Insights is a free tool by Google to help users measure the speed and performance of their websites, it provides detailed insights about the following metrics:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
Which are components of the Core Web Vitals, which was first rolled out to all users globally on June 15, 2021 as a new algorithm that will be used as a ranking factor for all sites.
Key Features:
- Measure Core Web Vitals including LCP, INP and CLS.
- Get insights to improve page speed and performance.
- Ensure your site meets Google’s page experience standards.
Pricing:
Free
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