Completed building a brand new website for your small business? But still waiting to see your website in the top 10 results of search engines? Or waiting for the stats to show you the expected results? Then you need to work on SEO, and for that, you need to use the right SEO tools for website performance analysis. These analytics tools will help shape your SEO strategies to attract traffic and conversions, boosting your business.
Keyword research, marketing strategy analysis, competitors analysis, SERP tracking, traffic, and conversion trends, identifying technical/website problems, and implementing effective content marketing are all things that can’t be done without the right tools.
With so many tools in the market, how do you know which one to choose? Don’t Worry, We have compiled the top 7 SEO tools for effective for boosting small businesses.
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a powerful and completely free tool for analyzing your website. Once you install it right, you can track what marketing tactics drive the most traffic, leads, and sales, how visitors use your site, which content they prefer, and so much more.
2. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is Google’s free SEO tool. Google alerts you if it finds mistakes on your website. You can see your keyword rankings and how many times each keyword got clicked. It also shows how many times your website showed up in the search results per keyword, and your click through rate when your website showed up in the search results.
And, you can connect your Analytics account to Search Console to access even more reporting tools. For example, once you link these two tools, you can check keyword rankings, click-through rates, impressions and landing pages ranking in Google.
3. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is our favorite tool for backlink analysis, content opportunity analysis, and keyword research. The best tool at Ahrefs is the site explorer tool. Ahrefs is probably most well known for their backlink analysis functions in Site Explorer. This tool will help you find out what other websites link to your site. You can also see trends in your backlinks over time. You can also use this tool to find new link-building opportunities.
The Site Explorer tool is useful for analyzing top-performing SEO content on your website. This tool can help you identify the pages and keywords already driving traffic to your site. For example, you can see which pages are driving the most SEO traffic and which keywords they’re ranking for in Google.
Then check out the Site Explorer tool to see what pages and keywords work well for your competitors, and apply those lessons to your own strategy. For example, if you notice that some of your competitors have specific types of landing pages for SEO that you don’t have, and they’re bringing in traffic for some keywords that you’re not focused on, you may want to incorporate those types of ideas into your own SEO plan.
Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer tool is also awesome. It generates dozens of new keyword ideas for SEO content creation.
4. Moz
MozPro (including Link Explorer)
Moz is one of the most popular SEO software suites. Moz is probably best known for their Domain Authority (DA) metric. DA measures how likely a website is to rank in Google, with higher scores corresponding to greater likelihood of ranking. DA is mostly about the number and quality of links scoring as 1-100. Moz Pro is a suite that includes Link Explorer, a backlink analysis tool.
MozBar
MozBar is a cool tool that saves a lot of time when reviewing websites. It’s a Chrome extension that gives you Domain Authority, Page Authority, backlink info, and spam score for any site. Click on a button, and you can see a Moz page analysis, as well as followed and no-followed links on a page.
MozLocal
A citation is simply another website mentioning your name, address, and phone number. The best sources are usually business directories like Yelp and Facebook business pages.
Moz Local is an awesome tool for quickly checking citations. You can check if your info is consistent across all directories, if you’re missing any important directories, and if you have duplicate listings that could be dragging down your rankings.
5. SEMRush
SEMrush is one of the most comprehensive all-in-one SEO software packages. This platform does pretty much everything, including Competitor research, Keyword research, Backlink analysis, On-page SEO audits (automated)
The favorite feature with SEMrush is the toxic backlink audit. Their backlink audit tool is the best option for quickly analyzing potentially toxic backlinks to disavow via Search Console.
6. WhiteSpark
Citations are important for ranking high in Google’s local “map” results. How do you find citations?
WhiteSpark is what you’re looking for…
WhiteSpark offers a great tool called Citation Finder. Citation Finder’s simple interface lets you add a business with some focus keywords. Once you enter the business info, the tool will take off and present you with a list of opportunities. You can also add competitors at this point. You can see a business’s opportunities in a list, and you can see how its opportunities stack up against the opportunities of the other businesses you’ve added.
Additionally, WhiteSpark also offers to set up the citations for you, saving you time.
7. SpyFu
SpyFu is a pretty cool tool that lets you see how your competitors are doing with SEO (and Google Ads). With this tool, you can figure out:
- Pages getting the most SEO traffic
- SEO traffic estimates and trends
SpyFu is our secret weapon for Google Ads competitor intel. It lets you see competitor Google Ads data, such as
- Which keywords are performing the best for them?
- How long they’ve been running certain keywords.
- The number of clicks and impressions they got from their ads.
- Types of inbound links of competitors
- The ads that perform best.
- The competitors’ ad copy.
- The competitors’ ad spending.
If you’re managing SEO and Google Ads campaigns, we recommend using SpyFu to analyze your competitors.
With these free tools, you can get most of your SEO optimization. Sure, you need expertise to run them effectively and generate the data. You need SEO experience that impacts your business, and strategize your SEO plans. At CTS, we channel this data and work on SEO optimization to boost your business in terms of SERP ranks, traffic and the best ROI.
Need more information on linking, digital marketing, SEO, website development? Contact our team today.
