SEO can be a very beneficial marketing strategy for small businesses to be outstanding among competitors. But to plan, implement, and track SEO activities, one needs the assistance of the right SEO tools. Even though many such tools are available, choosing the perfect one for different analysis purposes can be confusing.
Our team has performed detailed research to come up with the best SEO tools that small businesses can use to enhance their SEO efforts. We will discuss below everything you need to know about them, including their features and pricing. These tools perform the heavy job for you, assisting you in identifying areas where you can improve in order to potentially enhance your website's organic rankings and traffic.
Before we discuss this any further, you must first understand what are the factors you should pay attention to when choosing a tool
Factors To Consider When Choosing an SEO Tool For Business
While some of the tools are more specialized, offering niche solutions, several others are comprehensive in nature. So, you must always use a tool based on your SEO requirements.
Here are some things to think about while selecting the finest SEO software for your company :
- Keyword research and monitoring capabilities for a specific geographical location you serve.
- Tools for checking and evaluating the ranks and backlinks of competitors' websites.
- Tools to audit a website’s technical, on-page, and off-page SEO issues to optimize your website for search engines.
- Tools for managing and maintaining local complaints and company listings.
- Tools for keeping tabs on your internet reputation and reviews.
- The ability to assess the performance of a website's traffic and content.
- The ability to generate reports in order to monitor your SEO performance.
30 Best SEO Tools For Small Business
Now an SEO campaign consists of different elements like performing keyword research, website technical analysis, backlinks, tracking SEO KPIs, etc. And to do all the activities well, you would need to refer to different tools. So, to make things simpler for you we have divided the tools based on the actions they can perform best. The tools will be segregated below based on the following:
- All-in-one SEO Tracking
- SEO Analytics Tracking
- Technical SEO Tracking
- Keyword Research Analysis and Tracking
- SEO Rank Tracking
- Local SEO Tools
- Free SEO Chrome Extension Tools
- Content Ideas Tools
Let's get started.
Tools For All-In-One SEO Tracking
1. SE Ranking
SE Ranking is a cost-effective all-in-one SEO software that includes keyword rank trackers, website audits, keyword analysis tools, link tracking, competition analysis, and other features. Due to its customizable price options and all-in-one functionality, it comes up with a one-stop SEO tool for a lot of small business owners and SEO professionals.
Features:
- Ability to perform extensive keywords and competitor analysis for finding better keyword and backlink opportunities.
- Invaluable website audits, as well as recommendations for solutions for on-page, off-page, and technical SEO.
- The SEO tool has a one-of-a-kind page change tracking feature, allowing you to set up notifications for any changes to your company's website or competitor's websites.
- Ability to create and schedule thorough SEO reports.
- Measure social media metrics and let's publish content on Facebook and Twitter.
Pricing:
SE Ranking offers three set monthly or yearly plans, each with multiple price choices based on the number of keywords to follow, how frequently ranking data is updated, and the subscription length. Annual billing offers 20%. It also comes with a one-month free trial with limited features. Plans based on annual billing are as follows
- Essential: $31.20/mo
- Pro: $71.20/mo
- Business: $151.20/mo
2. Moz Pro
Moz Pro is an all-in-one SEO tool for small and mid-sized businesses. Features like site inspections, rank monitoring, and local SEO reporting from Moz are superior. Moz Pro also includes a dependable keyword research tool, that suggests the best phrases to target for better rankings. The Link Explorer by Moz lets you monitor and analyze your backlinks, linking domains, keywords associated with links, etc.
Features:
- Discover new keywords and queries that your target audience is searching
- Moz's Search Visibility score helps to track local and national searches and get an overall view of how you rank.
- Receive alerts when your pages are crawled and audited for bugs and faults.
- Drag-and-drop modules for customizing reports and templates.
Pricing:
Moz Pro offers four monthly or annual subscription levels. If opted for annual billing you can save 20&. Plans and pricing annually are
Basic: $79 per month — For inexperienced SEOs and digital marketers.
Medium (for small enterprises and teams): $143 per month
Large: $239 per month — For expanding companies and agencies.
Premium: $479 per month — For large marketing teams and agencies.
3. SemRush
SemRush is among the top SEO tools trusted by businesses and SEO experts in the industry. SemRush offers a range of SEO software that includes keyword research tools, backlink analysis, competition analysis, site auditing, and keyword rank tracking, among other features.
Features:
- Semrush has a great database for finding new keywords linked to your company and sector, including projected local SEO volumes and how tough the terms are to rank.
- A comprehensive on-page site audit to ensure that your site pages are optimized for search engines.
- Find new chances by searching, analyzing, and comparing competitor sites in your niche or business in terms of keyword ranks, backlinks, and predicted site traffic.
- Gap assessment capabilities can help you identify subjects and keywords for which you can enhance or add content on your site depending on the content of competitors.
- Create SEO reports for one and/or your employees that are automatically generated.
- Semrush is a profile management add-on that delivers your public business information to directory sites, allows us to manage your Google and Facebook listings from within the program, and keeps track of reviews and customer recommendations.
- Semrush is a suggested collection of SEO tools for small businesses looking for a comprehensive set of tools and services that includes industry-leading keyword analysis, rank tracking, and competition data.
Pricing:
Semrush offers three monthly or yearly fixed subscriptions. Annual billing might save you up to 17%. It offers a 7-day trial offer.
- Pro: $119.95 per month for in-house teams and new advertisers.
- Guru: $229.95 per month for small businesses and marketing consultants
- Business: $449.95 for major agencies or organizations.
4. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is an SEO tool that is widely used by business owners and online marketers. It is a great resource capable of performing competitor analysis, backlink research, rank tracking, keyword analysis, and website audit. With Ahrefs' site explorer tool, you can determine estimated organic search traffic for the website and its pages. Additionally, it's a perfect tool to unveil competitors' backlink sources.
Features:
- The keywords explorer tool provides phrases that are relevant to your search term, including monthly search volumes, keyword difficulty levels for ranking, search demand patterns, and more.
- The rank-tracking tool has a user-friendly interface for tracking keywords and compares keyword rankings over time with competitors' websites.
- The Ahrefs content explorer can help you with content ideas and suggest new link-building opportunities relevant to your business niche.
Pricing:
Ahrefs offers both monthly and annual plans. With a yearly payment, you'll get two months free.
Lite (for novice digital marketers and freelancers) costs around $83 per month
Basic: $166 per month for small businesses and marketing departments.
Advanced: $333 per month for marketing teams and expanding enterprises.
Agency: $833 per month for big businesses and agencies
5. Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is an all-in-one SEO solution that enables businesses to improve their overall SEO efforts. The tool comes with price options suitable for individuals, small companies, and large corporations. It primarily helps to generate fresh keyword suggestions, backlink analysis, competitor analysis, website audit, etc.
Features:
- Domain Overview: To provide an overview of domain details such as DA, age, and so on.
- Top SEO Pages: To examine the website's top-performing pages based on keywords.
- Keyword Suggestions: suggestions for keywords depending on your industry and competition.
- New content ideas based on trends and competition.
- Backlink data: gives a list of rivals' backlinks in order to outperform them.
Pricing:
There is a 7-day free trial and three premium options
Individual – $12/month
Small Business – $20/month
Enterprise /Agency – $40/month
Tools For SEO Analytics Tracking
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the heart and soul of all SEO tools for businesses. Every small company owner should make sure their website is integrated with a Google Analytics (GA) tag. Google Analytics is a free tool for analyzing website traffic and tracking user behaviour. Using Google Analytics you can track your daily or monthly website traffic, how users navigate your site, the most visited pages, the average session duration on a page, bounce rate, and more.
To use Google Analytics, all you need to do is signup and add a property, i.e your website to it. Once you add your website, it provides you with a tracking code. Add the code on the backend of your website. As soon as the code is added and verified, you can configure your Google Analytics tool and start tracking your website.
Features:
- You can observe which channels visitors come from using Google Analytics, such as organic search traffic from Googling and other search engines, social networking sites, and other websites.
- You may also see physical location data such as city and state, which can be useful for determining traffic quality and effectiveness for local or service-area firms.
- Google Analytics makes it simple to see how visitors interact with your site, such as which web pages they visit, in what sequence, and for how long.
- Google Search Console (GSC) can be connected to Google Analytics, allowing you to access insights for pages and phrases from GSC in Google Analytics.
- You may use Google Analytics to measure transformation actions including online form responses, as well as whether a certain webpage or set of product pages was visited, a link was visited, or a call was made (call tracking software required).
Pricing:
Google Analytics comes with a free as well as paid service. A free Google Analytics account is sufficient for small businesses. However, for large corporations, Google offers Analytics 360, a subscription version with more advanced capabilities such as limitless data and information.
2. Google Search Console
To monitor the performance of any website, Google Search Console is the most sophisticated tool. Another free SEO tool that small organizations should use to monitor, manage, and troubleshoot site visibility in Google Search results is Google Search Console (GSC), previously Google Webmaster Tools. Google Search Console offers data regarding your website presence and the performance of the keywords on Google. Apart from these metrics, it helps in the detection of any SEO-related technical errors on your website. It also allows you to upload sitemaps, update pages, check whether your pages are appropriately crawled in Google Search, ensure your pages are mobile-friendly, examine keyword rankings, clicks, and engagements detected by Google, and more.
To use Google Search Console, simply log in to your Google account and sign up. Add your website property and then validate your site using one of the ways offered.
Features:
- Using the URL inspection feature, you can track the indexing status of your pages on Google
- To speed up or smoothen the page indexing process, you can submit your website's XML sitemap file.
- The Search Results section on GSC offers data on total page impressions, total page clicks, average ctr, and average position.
- You can track also different metrics of your website like top queries, top ranking pages, devices used to access any page, countries, etc
- Search Console detects and finds issues that may be blocking any page from being indexed by Google.
- Google Search Console determines if your site's pages are smartphone-friendly and contain tools to assist you to identify loading and performance concerns.
- You can check the backlinks pointing to your website using Search Console to maintain a good link profile. In case of any spammy website linked to your page, Disvow tools let you ignore the link and avoid any penalties.
Pricing:
It is completely free of cost.
3. Google Data Studio
Google Data Studio can be a very effective SEO tool for business firms to interpret and analyze website performance data. Google Data Studio is an all-in-one reporting tool that gathers data from a variety of sources, including Google Analytics and Google Search Console, as well as SEMrush and Salesforce. You can create new reports and customize them based on the KPIs of your campaign.
Features:
- Data from many sources are combined into a single report.
- Data can be filtered based on locations, devices, and channels.
- Reporting is automated using customized schedules.
- With built-in templates, it generates several sorts of data visualization.
Pricing:
Google Data Studio is available for free.
SEO Tools For Technical SEO
1. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Screaming Frog is an SEO crawler tool that can crawl and analyze any website to find on-page and technical SEO issues. Heavy-size images, missing alt tags, status code errors, missing sitemap, redirects, etc. are some of the common issues it can track. The screaming frog can be used for website content optimization and to check the average number of words per page, meta titles and meta descriptions, and internal and external links. To use this software. you must first download its file and install it to your Windows, Mac OS X, or Ubuntu system.
Features:
- It can crawl the data of thousands of pages for page titles, headers, and meta tags like meta description, picture tags, and word count, among other important SEO elements
- Screaming Frog detects page URL problems quickly, including broken links (404s), needless page redirects, redirect chains and loops, and possible server failures.
- It can be helpful to analyze the website’s internal links and anchor texts. This can be crucial to improve the website's internal link structure.
- Screaming Frog’s free edition allows you to crawl up to 500 URLs, while the paid version allows you to crawl an unlimited number of page URLs.
Pricing:
Screaming Frog offers both a free and premium version (crawl up to 500 URLs). The annual fee starts from £239 Euros per licence.
2. Google Pagespeed Insights
Google’s PageSpeed Insights is an effective tool to analyze web page speed and find issues related to it. Page speed has a huge impact on the customer experience. It is also one of the primary ranking factors for Google. Additionally, a page that takes too long to load could have an increased bounce rate, lowering conversion for the business. This tool can be super useful for an SEO campaign, to understand page speed and enhance it for a better user experience.
Features:
- It provides a page with a score between 1 to 100, based on the time it takes to load for a user. A higher score means better page load time, whereas a lower score signifies the page load time is poor.
- Offers suggestions to make your website pages load quicker, such as high-resolution images, page caching suggestions, and other CSS or Javascript code optimization tips.
- Find any third-party code that is being processed while your page loads, such as WordPress plugins, which might slow down your site's performance.
Pricing:
It is free of cost.
3. GTMetrix
Just like PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix is another great resource to check your website speed and performance. GTmetrix functions as an objective proxy, evaluating the time it takes for a website to load. The latest version of GTMetrix uses Lighthouse to generate a comprehensive analysis of a website's performance. By using GTmetrix, small businesses can check their website speed for different locations where they offer their services.
Features:
- Get an overview of important performance metrics.
- Monitor performance via monitoring, graphing, and alerts.
- Test your page from various locations.
- Examine your website on mobile devices.
- Options for advanced analysis for even more insights
- The video playback page loads.
Pricing :
GTMetrix offers four monthly or annual subscription levels. Annual billing might save you up to 15%.
Basic: Free — The basics to start your performance journey.
Solo: $10.67 per month — A minimal plan for those who need more features and on-demand tests.
Starter: $21.25 per month — Great for freelancers or small businesses to start monitoring performance.
Premium: $42.50 per month — Best for those who need more monitoring for multiple pages and scenarios.
4. Xenu’s Link Sleuth
Xenu’s Link Sleuth is an SEO tool that can help business websites to crawl and examine their internal and external links. The tool scans your whole website to find broken links. With this tool's help, you can fix such links and avoid offering a poor experience to the users landing on a broken page.
Features:
- Can crawl even on SSL-enabled websites.
- Displays an updated list of broken URLs and has the ability to recheck on demand.
Pricing :
- Xenu’s Link Sleuth tool is free to download and use.
5. W3C Markup Validation
W3C Markup Validation is a tool that small businesses can use for technical SEO analysis. It is a free tool offered by World Wide Web Consortium. W3C Markup validator validates the markup of HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, and other Web pages of your website. By using the tool to validate your HTML codes, you can make it easy to crawl and understand search engine bots. It can be beneficial to improve your SEO rankings as well.
Features:
- HTML Validator: This validator verifies the markup validity of online documents written in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, and other markup languages.
- CSS Validator: This validator verifies the CSS correctness of HTML, XHTML, and other online pages.
Pricing:
This tool is free to use
Tools For Keyword Research
1. Google Trends
Finding new trending topics can be extremely valuable to make content plans. Google Trends is such an SEO tool for businesses that can generate trending keyword phrases for any topic. It can find trending keywords for Google Web Search, Image Search, News Search, Google Shopping, and YouTube Search. Once you search for any term, it comes up with a list of keywords that are in demand for any selected region.
Features:
- Offers different keyword phrases with a graph representing interest over time.
- Compare the level of interest between keywords
- Check keyword interest for any particular region, sub-region, or city
- Check historical data for any term
- Offers a list of keywords similar to your query
Pricing:
It is a free tool.
2. Keywordtool.io
Finding keywords that have higher relevance to your business can be a boon. Keywoordtool.io is a tool that uses Google Autocomplete to produce a list of long-tail keywords related to your search phrase. It can be an effective SEO tool for companies that mainly focus on driving traffic using unique keyword targeting methods.
Features:
- Find long-tail keywords fetched from Google.
- Find keyword ideas based on your target platform. It can suggest keywords for Google, YouTube, Bing, Amazon, eBay, Play Store, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter.
- Get up to 750+ long-tail keyword ideas for free service
Pricing:
You can use the basic features for free. For businesses with higher needs, this SEO tool comes with a Pro version that is paid. They offer three paid plans -
Pro-business: $159 / month,
Pro-plus: $79 / month
Pro-basic: $69 / month
3. Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is a keyword research SEO tool that allows businesses to analyze existing keywords and discover new ones. Keyword planner is an integrated part of Google Ads and is mostly used for PPC keyword research. But if used smartly, it can add a lot of value to your SEO project as well. During the initial stage of keyword research, this tool can help you to get started by offering ideas to dig deeper.
Features:
- Search and find keywords based on the target country
- By entering your competitor's page URL on the tool, you can unveil their target keywords
- Offers crucial metrics like monthly search volume, keyword difficulty, etc for given phrases that can help in SEO keywords strategy.
Pricing:
Google Keyword Planner is free to use with a Google Ads account.
Tool For SEO Rank Tracking
1. Nightwatch
Nightwatch is a cloud SEO rank-tracking software for businesses that includes link tracking, keyword tracking, SEO audits, etc. It can track a large number of keywords and URLs for a website. Tracking competitor keywords also gets very simple with Nightwatch. Overall it's a very effective tool to keep track of different SEO elements based on any location.
Features:
- Nightwatch gives daily keyword position updates across a range of search engines, including Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and DuckDuckGo.
- It can compare keyword rank history over time by tracking keywords across multiple locations
- Assists in tracking and analyzing your backlink profile and finding new backlink opportunities
- Track a website and find technical SEO issues.
Pricing:
Nightwatch offers 14 days of a free trial. The basic feature starts at $32/month to track 250 keywords, 50 websites, 5 competitors, and more.
Tools For Local SEO
1. Google My Business
Google My Business (GMB) profile is an SEO tool useful for locally based businesses. It can be used to enhance the online presence of any business. By optimizing your GMB profile, you can drive traffic to your website or store from Google searches and maps in your area. People looking for a business similar to yours can find you easily if you have a GMB profile.
Features:
- Collect customer reviews to improve your online brand reputation
- Add valuable information about your business that can help customers know more about your business
- Create posts to share the latest updates and offers about your business
- Enables users to call, book appointments, find business directions, etc.
Pricing:
You can create an account on Google My Business at zero cost.
2. BrightLocal
BrightLocal provides a suite of local SEO tools that companies can use to monitor their local search efforts. Brightlocal can be used to track online reviews, citations, and local search activities.
Features:
- Local Search Grid: provides local rankings at particular locations around your business.
- Local Rank Tracker: Monitor local rankings with pinpoint precision and identify the greatest prospects for traffic growth.
- Citation Tracker: Identify problems with business listings and possibilities to improve exposure.
- Google My Business Audit
- Local Search Audit.
- Monitor Reviews.
- Citation Builder.
- Local Data Aggregators
Pricing:
BrightLocal offers 14 days of a free trial. It has 3 paid options.
Single business: $29/ mo
Multu business: $49/ mo
SEO pro: $79/ mo
Free SEO Chrome Extension Tools
1. MozBar Extention
MozBar Extention is one of the most widely used SEO tools by professionals to analyze a website’s quality. It displays a site's domain authority, page authority, and a number of backlinks once you click on the extension. MozBar determines the authority of any website based on the quality and relevancy of the backlink the site possesses. It coins the term DA & PA to define the authority of a website on a scale of 1 to 100.
Features:
- Displays SEO on-page elements, link metrics, status codes, etc. on a page
- Defines the quality of a site by offering Domain and Page authority score
- Export the results of your SERP study to a CSV file.
Price:
MozBar is free for basic functions, but for premium features, you must upgrade to Mozpro. The standard pricing starts from $99/mo.
2. SEOquake
SEOquake is a free-to-use SEO tool offered by SEMrush for businesses. It comes in handy to perform an SEO audit of any website. It offers data on different on-page and technical SEO elements, keyword difficulty, keyword density, etc. in just one click.
Features:
- SEOquake gives on-page SEO data like page titles, meta tags, headings, alt tags, etc
- Provides information on internal and links on a page
- Finds the density of keywords used on a page
- Lets you import the data on a CSV file
Pricing:
It is a free plugin.
Content Ideas Tools
1. Surfer
Content is the most important aspect of any SEO strategy. For any website to rank and drive traffic, having a content plan is mandatory. This is where Surfer can help. Surfer is a comprehensive SEO software that businesses can use for content planning, content ideas, and content auditing. Surfer also helps in keyword research and SERP analysis.
Features:
- Suggests 500+ SEO parameters and the top 50 ranking pages for your target keyword.
- Assists in generating a blog outline for any given title
- Surfer’s Content editor tool enhances your blogs by recommending which keywords to target, topics to cover, the estimated number of words, etc.
- Content SEO audit provides a report on keyword density, page load quality, words to bold, etc.
Price:
Surfer has three set monthly or yearly subscriptions with a 7-day money-back guarantee. Annual billing might save you up to 17%.
Basic: $59 per month, which includes 10 content editors and 20 content audits each month.
Pro: $119 per month — 30 content editors and 60 NLP-enhanced audits.
Business: $239 per month - 70 content editors, 140 audits, NLP, white labelling, and API access.
2. Answer The Public
Another SEO tool that every business should adopt for their content strategy is Answer The Public. This tool extracts data from search engines' autocomplete and offers tons of question-type keywords. You can leverage it to find out what people are searching for on the topic and create content around it. It can assist you in identifying long-tail keywords that can be implemented in SEO content strategy.
Features:
- Offers a list of interrogative keywords related to the searched term
- Provides CPC and search volume for keywords.
- Phrases are segregated based on alphabetical, prepositions, questions, etc.
- Has the ability to compare keyword history over time
- Ables to organize your research in different folders
- Provides the feature to export results to a CSV file
- Offer team workspaces within the tool
Price:
The free feature allows up to 3 searches per day. The paid version has three plans
Individual: $9 USD/month
Pro: $99 USD/month
Expert: $199 USD/month
Conclusion
By using the right SEO software for your business, you can save time and money by increasing your search engine visibility and traffic. This comprehensive list of the best SEO tools for smaller firms should provide you with everything you need to build a good SEO strategy and foundation, measure progress, and achieve exceptional digital marketing outcomes for your company.
