Free SEO tools for small businesses

Posted January 14, 2020 by Lee

Small businesses need to make sure that they are getting seen by as many people as possible, to boost their sales and increase their loyal customer base. Competing at this level is tough, as you have less of a budget but still need to vie with other businesses to be heard.

SEO is one great way to keep your business at the top of search results and increase your exposure, but how can you improve your SEO without paying for it? Here are some top tools which won’t cost you a penny.

Google Analytics

This one naturally has to be at the top of the list because it is so incredibly useful and free to use. All you need to do is install a small piece of code on your website, and you can track all kinds of things: who is visiting your website from where and on what device, what search terms or referral links they used, which pages they looked at and for how long, and so on. It doesn’t get much more robust than this. If you don’t have this installed, go and do it right now.

Keyword Position

This is a simple way to check how your marketing efforts are going. Just put in your web address and the keywords you are trying to rank for, and you will be able to see what number you are at in the ranking list. You can then track these numbers and see if you improve or go down over time, helping you to understand what impact your changes have made.

Screaming Frog

Although you do have to download their software to use it, Screaming Frog is free to use for a few URLs. You can get a full website audit through this software. It will tell if you if there are any broken links or redirects, 404 errors, or missing elements like meta descriptions and title tags. This will identify all of the areas in which you can immediately improve your site, both for SEO purposes and for user experience.

W3C Validator Tool

This is for the more technical among us – or if you have a developer who built your website for you, you can pass the results onto them. It searches your website code and looks for anything that is broken or does not work properly. This will help to streamline your code and will improve loading times, which is great for SEO. Robots can also crawl your website easier with these changes, which is again great for your ranking.

Pingdom

Another way to look at improving your page load time is through Pingdom. It will analyse how quickly, or not, pages on your site are loading and also offer some tips on how to increase the speed. Once you have put the changes into action you can check again using the same tool to see if there has been an improvement.

Tiny PNG

This service will help you to decrease the size of images on your site while still conserving as much quality as possible. That will help your loading times and also decrease the strain on your server, which is always a bonus. If you only have so much storage space included in your hosting plan, this will be a huge help.

All of these tools will help you to improve your SEO in one way or another, and put together as a whole package, they make for a mighty website upgrade. This will shoot you much higher in the rankings – and you can check your results with them too!

Categories: SEO