Free SEO tools small businesses can use to improve their rankings

Have you ever wondered why other businesses in your industry come up on the first page of search results and not yours? Well, it’s not magic but even as a small business you can improve your page rankings. 

You’ve got a great website. Check. But if you aren’t using search engine optimisation techniques (SEO), you’re still going to be sitting somewhere on the twentieth page of search results. 

What’s SEO, you ask? Essentially it involves making certain changes to your website so you can organically increase web traffic and Google recognises you as a trusted source for your product or service.

To boost your rankings, here are five free SEO tools to help small business owners:

Technical SEO tool – Screaming Frog

https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/

Technical SEO is where search engine spiders crawl and index your site more effectively. Essentially, this is important because search engines give websites preferential treatment over others if they display certain technical characteristics – a secure connection, a fast loading time or a responsive design.

Screaming Frog is a company that has an SEO Spider Tool, which allows you to crawl your business’ URL to analyse and audit technical and onsite SEO. This is a great tool as it finds broken links, analyses page titles and meta data, plus finds any duplicate content.

It’s like an SEO audit for your website. The tool then generates a report so you know what the SEO roadblocks are and which pages of the website need improvement.

Keyword Research tool – Ubersuggest

https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/

Keyword research involves identifying popular words and phrases people type into search engines. It’s worth investing time into researching keywords as it gives businesses a better understanding of which keywords are in high demand and how hard it is to compete for those terms in an organic search result.

There is a tool called Ubersuggest and all you need to do is answer some brief questions about your business, such as what you sell, what services you provide, etc. After that someone from Ubersuggest will call you to gather more information so they can help you grow your website.

Ubersuggest is a great tool small businesses can use to get insight into the strategies that are working for others in your market so you can take them onboard, improve them and gain a competitive edge.

On-page SEO tool – Rank Math

https://rankmath.com/

On-page SEO is the practice of optimising individual web pages to rank higher. Title tags, content, internal links and HTML source code are all important as Google looks for web pages that contain the same keywords as a search query.

Rank Math is a WordPress SEO plug-in tool you can install that verifies your site’s settings and recommends the ideal settings for best performance. It highlights important information about your posts as well as the post itself.

This tool allows you to instantly improve your post’s SEO by optimising your content for search engines and outranking your competitors. Rank Math will also find and fix dead links on your site.

Link Building SEO tool – SourceBottle

https://www.sourcebottle.com/

Link Building is the process of getting other websites to link back to your websites. When other websites link to yours, it tells Google that you are a reputable source of information so sites with more backlinks tend to rank higher.

SourceBottle is used by journalists and bloggers to find knowledgeable sources but it’s also great for website owners to find publicity opportunities to help them gain brand awareness for themselves or their clients.

This is a very easy PR tool to use as it’s straightforward and if you’re looking for blogging opportunities all you need to do is send a call out and wait for an email to come back. It’s a great way to find backlinks. Now the hard part is that you have to write the content!

Reporting SEO tool – Google Search Console

https://search.google.com/search-console/about

An SEO report gives an overview of how a website is performing in search engines. A good SEO report not only shows what work has been done but how it’s been done. It also provides commentary on any fluctuations and insights to make changes.

Google Search Console is a service that helps you monitor, maintain and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google search results. It will help you understand why your site is performing badly (or hopefully well!) in organic results.

Google’s free tool is great to find and fix technical errors, plus submit sitemaps. What’s a sitemap? It’s a listing of all the important content on your website. Any page or file you want to show in search engines should be in your sitemap.