Few creative entrepreneurs start their businesses because they love SEO. Many sidestep the issue altogether, relying heavily on social media to market their businesses with varying degrees of success. Can you relate to that feeling? Driving more organic traffic to your website doesn’t have to be confusing and expensive. At Brandcendent, we use SEO tools for small business are fairly user-friendly and mostly free.

3 SEO Tools for Small Business

These SEO tools for small business can help you with everything from keyword planning to monitoring website traffic and Google rankings. 

1 Keyword Research: Ubersuggest

Good SEO starts with keywords. Keywords (or key phrases) are the terms people enter into Google when they do a search. If you want potential clients to find you on Google, you need to optimize your website and blog with relevant and related keywords. For example, if you want to be found in searches for “New York City wedding photographer,” you’ll want to post pages optimized for related terms such as venues and other New York-specific information. The thing is, potential clients aren’t always using the search terms you might think. That’s where keyword research comes in.

We use Ubersuggest for keyword research. Among the SEO tools for small business, we’ve found that it’s the easiest to use for this purpose. Simply enter a search term to see the number of people who search that term monthly (Search Volume) and how difficult it is to rank for that term on Google (SEO Difficulty). Since Brandcendent’s copywriting services include SEO strategy, we pay for a subscription, but you can research a handful of keywords for free each day.

(For a more in-depth guide on how to use Ubersuggest, you can check out this blog post.)

2 Website Traffic: Google Analytics

Once you’ve started to implement your SEO strategy, Google Analytics can monitor your website traffic. It takes some patience and persistence to link Google Analytics to your website. After that, though, you can really sit back and watch the data roll in. You can see how many users come to your site, how they find you, where they’re located in the world, and what they do when they’re on your website. 

Google Analytics is a powerful SEO tool for small business because it gives you detailed data about user engagement. You can see which pages get the most views and how long users stay there. This is important because it tells you where you could improve the user experience on your website and drive more leads as a result. 

It also gives you clues as to where you should spend your marketing resources. In our experience, users who find Brandcendent’s website through organic search spend more time on our site than anyone else. Content marketing through blogging remains an important part of our strategy, and we don’t sweat it if we slack on social media now and then.

3 Google Rankings: SEO Edge

You may be wondering where exactly you rank in Google’s search engine results pages (S.E.R.P.s) for different keywords. Enter SEO Edge. Of all the SEO tools for small business, this is the most straightforward in showing where you rank for a keyword. The interactive charts even show how your rankings change over time. Having concrete proof that your SEO efforts are making a difference is very gratifying. 

This app has a free version and a paid version. Since we track our clients’ rankings long-term at Brandcendent, we have the paid version that allows us to track unlimited keyword. If you’re really focusing in on a small handful that will make a difference for your business, the free version will work just fine for you.

All three of these SEO tools for small business are important because they help give you a full picture of your SEO strategy from its creation to monitoring its effectiveness. SEO is a long game. Periodically evaluating your data helps you keep your strategy on track. In the end, that clarity takes the guesswork and some stress out of content marketing.

Do you want to learn more about sustainable marketing strategies for your small business? SEO is baked into everything we do at Brandcendent. Get on our mailing list to get weekly tips to your inbox!