If you’re creating a website for your small business, you’ll be more successful getting your site ranked well in searches if you take advantage of various software tools, most of which are free. You don’t have to be an SEO guru to use these tools, since they have been designed for ease of use, even to a novice. Following is a list of some of the top tools you should use for your website.
1. Install Google Analytics.
This free tool is a must for any website, as it gives you facts and figures about the performance of your site. Once installed, you’ll be able to monitor many things, including how much traffic is coming from your site and from where; which pages are most popular; what the bounce rate of the site is, and more. (A bounce is a visitor who lands on the site and instantly leaves.) This insight can be invaluable in helping you understand your prospects and what’s important to them.
2. Set up Google Search Console.
Another free tool from Google, it provides more data about your site’s status and performance with Google. This tool was originally developed for Webmasters; but as a small business owner, this may be one more hat you wear.
3. Install Bing Webmaster Tools.
Bing is the default search engine for Internet Explorer and Edge browsers, which is why it holds about 10% of the share for desktop searches in the U.S. If your business is domestic and local, it’s a good idea to include this in your checklist of SEO basics.
4. If your site is built in the WordPress content management system (CMS), install the free version of Yoast SEO.
Yoast takes care of lots of little SEO details behind the scenes and is great for non-techy people. It makes basic optimization much easier and faster.
5. Create an XML sitemap and submit to Google.
An XML sitemap is critical in helping search engines understand the structure of your site in order to index it, and find relevant pages.
6. Use an SEO Audit Tool.
An SEO audit tool makes the process of looking for SEO problems much quicker – and offers solutions to the problem.
7. Install SEO-spider software like Screaming Frog, to check for site errors.
Broken links, crawl errors, redirects, and other errors make it more difficult for search engines to find your content, index it, and drive traffic to it. Using software like Screaming Frog, a website crawler, allows you to find and correct errors more quickly.
8. Use Adwords Keyword Planner, KWFinder, and KeywordTool to research keywords.
You may think you know what potential customers would use to search for a company like yours … but do you really? Using these tools takes the guess work out of the process of determining which keywords to focus on in your site’s content. Search engines are much more intuitive today, and can recognize words that are often associated with other, primary keywords. Use of synonyms can be extremely helpful in improving SEO.
9. Use Google’s PageSpeed or Gift of Speed to keep your site running as fast as possible.
Search engines like Google try to deliver search results based on many complex factors, and one of them is the speed at which your site – and individual pages – load. Beyond that, you will lose impatient visitors to the site if pages take too long to load.
10. Use Google’s Mobile Friendly Test.
More and more people are using mobile devices to access the Internet, and Google has taken notice. If your site is not responsive, it will be ranked lower than your competitors’ sites that are. Make sure Google recognizes your site as “mobile friendly” with the use of this tool.
Using these tools won’t guarantee you’ll improve your site’s SEO; but they’ll certainly give it an SEO boost!