One of the biggest challenges of starting an online business is generating traffic. As millions of blogs are published every day, the chances of your content getting buried forever are greater than ranking first in search engine results. For this reason, understanding SEO optimization practices are crucial to prevent this from happening.

If you are a small business, mastering search engine optimization is a huge challenge. Fortunately, there are tons of SEO tools available for you to use. Take note, some of these tools are free to use which means anyone can use them. 

How can SEO Tools Help Businesses Grow?

Before we get into the best SEO tools, you may be wondering how they can help your business grow. 

We all know that doing keyword research can be tedious work. It takes a lot of time to find the right keywords that align with the content you are making. This is where SEO tools can help you. 

One of the benefits of using these tools is that they can save you a lot of time in finding the right keywords to target. And not just that, it also offers data analysis, broken backlinks and even website audits. 

Aside from this, using SEO tools can help you analyze your competitors. For instance, it can provide you with data on which keywords they are ranking for. You can leverage this data to help give your business a competitive advantage.

All of these are essential to help your business website boost its credibility and brand image to increase organic traffic. 

5 SEO Tools that Small Businesses Should Use

Now that you know how SEO tools can help you, it’s time to talk about which ones we recommend. 

Keep in mind that when choosing a tool it is important to consider a few factors. Among these factors include the following: 

  • Is the tool user-friendly?
  • Does it offer analysis and insights?
  • Your marketing budget
  • Customer support

These are some of the things you want to keep in mind. But most importantly you also need to determine your business needs. Based on this, you may want to carefully assess which tool will work best for your business. 

Here are some of the SEO tools that you can use:

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of the most popular SEO tools among digital marketers. With this tool, you can find out which part of your website needs improvement through its website audit feature. 

This tool also allows you to analyze your competitor’s backlinks and find great link opportunities to help you rank. You can also use Ahrefs to fix broken links and analysis on the best-performing page of your site. 

SEMRush

Another option that you can choose is SEMRush. Similar to Ahrefs, this tool also provides you with detailed competitor analysis, site audit and landing page optimization. 

But what made this tool well-known is its detailed analysis of keywords and content optimization suggestions. This helps you find backlink opportunities to better optimize your website to rank higher in SERP. 

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is one of the best SEO tools in the market. It is known for its Keyword Ideas feature that helps users in finding keywords to make their content SEO-friendly. 

Just like any other keyword research tool, you can also use this tool to analyze traffic, audit website and track backlinks. What’s even great about this tool is that you can access its features for free. 

Answer the Public

Another free platform that you can use is Answer the Public. With this tool, you can find the most searched questions on Google related to the keyword you are targeting.

Answer the Public can also widen your options on which topic you should write for your blog. This will enable you to compile more topic ideas to create in the future for your website. 

SpyFu

Being aware of your competitors is an effective way to gain an advantage in the market. The SpyFu competitor analysis tool offers a streamlined competitor analysis feature that’s more intuitive than the one offered by most SEO tools.

For instance, you can simply input the domain of your competitor and you will be able to find all keywords they are using to rank. It also provides you with the ranking history of every website on a certain keyword. 

Bottomline

SEO is continuously changing, it is not constant. Through these tools, you will be able to stay on top of these changes to keep up with your competitors. It also allows you to easily track your website and assess its performance. 

Need more help to improve your business website’s organic traffic? A full-service digital marketing agency in Portland can help you. 

Here at Talk Out Loud, we ensure to provide our clients with digital marketing strategies that are tailored to their needs. To learn more about our services, visit our website or book an appointment here or call (800) 773-0029.