In a recent small business “search engine optimization starter guide,” Marcus Miller, a search engine consultant and columnist at Search Engine Land, shared the following list of seven SEO tools. According to Miller, none of these tools will DO SEO for you, rather they provide you information and direction. A word of caution, however: Many of the tools Miller suggests have a monthly fee. Subscribing to several of them could end up costing you as much as hiring a consultant. However, some of them provide free features or, in the case of Google, are completely free.
Miller calls this the SEO Swiss Army knife, and it will give you intel on broken links, page titles, meta descriptions, URLs and so much more. The tool is free for up to 500 pages, so most small businesses should have no costs here. However, at around $190 per year, it comes in way cheaper than any of the typical SEO tools.
2 | Moz.com
Moz builds on the crawling tool of Screaming Frog and presents issues in a prioritized format. There are features that will do keyword research, rank tracking, and link analysis. The Moz Pro version has a 30-day free trial. Work fast and you can make lots of improvements to your site without generating any costs.
It’s free and provides diagnostic information directly from Google. It won’t rank your site, but iwill help you identify potential areas for improvement.
4 | Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a keyword research tool that taps into the myriad search suggestions to help you identify a broader range of keywords to target.
Answer the Public uses keyword search data, but it uses where, which, who, what, when and why prefixes to provide commonly asked questions.
6 | Google
Often the best source of information is simply the search engine itself. Who are your competitors? Where are they mentioned? Who are the biggest ranking sites in your industry? To truly understand which sites Google finds authoritative in your space, what better way to answer that question than to Google it?
Both of these tools will give you information on who links to your competitors, and this can provide some simple direction for a link- and authority-building campaign.
VIA | Search Engine Land, “Small business SEO: Your questions answered”