How to Use Small Seo Tools – Whether you are behind the scenes of a marketing department, or running your own business, it’s important to understand the power of SEO. By optimizing your website for search engines, you can easily increase your visibility in search results, which will give you an advantage over your competition. However, SEO is often misunderstood. There are many myths surrounding search engine optimizations that are simply untrue. Below are three common misconceptions surrounding SEO and ways to successfully integrate it into your marketing plan.
There are many YouTube SEO tricks out there, and while some work, others will make your channel rank on the first page without any help of the algorithm. They will get you views, but they won’t get you subscribers. Getting free views is not important if you get them from accounts that don’t subscribe. That is why I am sharing with you my favourite Youtube SEO tools that work.
YouTube marketing is a fun and easy way to promote your business. The first step is to create a good video for your audience. You don’t have to be a professional, as you can upload a YouTube video using your smartphone or webcam. In the beginning, you will likely want to have a video editor to help with minor editing tasks. But as your channel grows, you may want to consider other YouTube SEO tools so you can begin tracking your progress.
Table of Contents
How to Use Seo in Digital Marketing
1. Create a logical website structure
Here’s what Google says in their article listing steps to a Google-friendly site:
Build your site with a logical link structure. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
In plain English, that means that your site should make sense to navigate. Your homepage should link to your other important pages (about, content, services). Your services page should list and link to pages describing individual services. And so on.
This may sound obvious, but I’ve found that with small business websites especially, this often isn’t the case.
Things usually start pretty logically, but as they add pages over time, things fall apart.
How do you fix this? The trick is to try to look at your website with fresh eyes and make sure it has a logical structure. Start at your homepage and see if you can logically find—and navigate to—all your important pages quickly and easily.
Let’s do this for First Sight Videos. (My brother’s business).
I’ll start on their homepage and check their main navigation menu. Things look pretty good here until we get to the blog menu item…
On rollover, a drop-down appears with links to all blog posts—which is no fewer than 28 posts!
Not only does this look messy, but it breaks down the logical structure of the website.
This is a prime example of what I said about things starting logically and slowing disintegrating over time. I know these guys are filming weddings regularly, which they then blog about. This menu has clearly gotten out of hand without them realizing, and is definitely something to fix.
Your website may not have this same issue but there are probably other similar ones. So the best thing to do is grab a pen and paper and start mapping out an ideal structure for your site. You could also use a free visual sitemap creator like this one.
It should be relatively easy if you have a small site.
Here’s my proposed structure for First Sight Videos:
Made with Slickplan.
Let’s also take a quick look at the site footer—which is present across all pages on the website.
Here, we see another issue that plagues a lot of businesses who’ve been taken in by not so great SEO advice over the years:
There’s an irrelevant link to elsewhere on the site using keyword-rich anchor text.
Such links aren’t always an issue, but it’s clear that this is done solely for SEO purposes.
If you have any links like these, remove them. They’re not helping. They just make your site look spammy to Google and visitors alike.SIDENOTE. Even if you still trust old-school SEO advice, this particular link makes little sense because it links to another page on the site using keywords that are likely more suited to the homepage. LOOKING TO OUTSOURCE?
Not sure how to implement these changes yourself?
You can get a freelance developer to do that. It shouldn’t cost much for changes like these, especially if you’re using a popular CMS like WordPress. I recommend looking on UpWork or People Per Hour.
For example, this guy charges £10/hour (~$13) for WordPress maintenance:
Site structure adjustments aren’t complicated, so 2–3 hours of this guy’s time would likely be more than enough.
NOTE. This is just an example to show how quickly and cheaply you can find freelancers to solve such issues. Always shop around and make sure to check reviews and feedback before hiring anyone.
2. Keep your site free of broken pages and links
Broken stuff on a website is never good. Not for visitors, and not for SEO.
Think about it: what does a website with broken pages and links say to you? Most likely that it’s rarely updated, neglected, and that the site owner doesn’t care about keeping their website functioning properly.
Let’s start by finding broken (404) pages.
Here’s what Google says about these:
While it’s normal to have Not Found (404) errors, you’ll want to address errors for important pages linked to by other sites, older URLs you had in your sitemap and have since deleted, misspelled URLs for important pages, or URLs of popular pages that no longer exist on your site. This way, the information that you care about can be easily accessed by Google and your visitors.
Here’s a simple way to find all broken pages in one fell swoop:
Site Audit > Internal pages > 4XX page
SIDENOTE. Didn’t run a crawl yet? Go to Site Explorer > Best by links > add a “404 not found” filter. Results may not be as accurate as when using Site Audit, so that’s something to keep in mind.
It looks like there is only one dead page on First Sight Videos.
But there’s one other thing you’ll notice there—that broken page has one referring domain, meaning it has backlinks from one website.
Such links are bad because they waste “link equity.“ That effectively means that votes (links) to your site aren’t counted because they lead to a dead end.SIDENOTE. That’s a crude explanation. I’m trying to keep this as straightforward and jargon-free as possible. Read our guide to Google PageRank to learn about more of the reasoning behind this.
You can fix these in two ways:
- Reinstate the dead page (if you deleted it by accident)
- Redirect the dead page to an appropriate alternative (i.e., either the new location of that page or a similar page or post)
If the page has no referring domains, it’s generally okay to leave as is.PRO TIP
Make sure to update any internal links to broken pages that you find.
You can see all internal links to broken pages in Site Audit.
Site Audit > Internal pages > 4XX page > No. of inlinks
NOTE. You can also use the Internal backlinks report in Ahrefs Site Explorer. However, it’s better to use Site Audit if possible.
You should also fix broken outbound links on your website.
Site Audit > External Pages > External 4XX
NOTE. You can also use the Broken links report in Ahrefs Site Explorer. It is, however, preferable to use Site Audit for up-to-date results.
These are problematic for the same reason. You’re linking to dead pages which effectively wastes link equity—or PageRank—and contributes to poor user experience.
Fix them by removing or updating the links.
SIDENOTE. If you’re not ready to get a paid subscription with Ahrefs, you can try our free SEO toolset.
Recommended reading: How to Find and Fix Broken Links (to Reclaim Valuable “Link Juice”)LOOKING TO OUTSOURCE?
Download the CSV for the relevant report in Ahrefs and send it to a freelancer.
Tell them to update each link where possible. Otherwise, ask them to remove them.
This shouldn’t cost much for small websites with few errors. Here’s an hourlie I found in minutes on People Per Hour where the guy will fix up to 100 broken links on a WordPress website for £14 (~$18):
3. Make sure every page has an enticing meta title and description
Every page on your website needs a unique meta description and title.
These are what you typically see in the Google search results:
SIDENOTE. Google sometimes changes these dynamically, so they can sometimes differ from the title and meta description that a website sets.
Not only should every page on your website have a unique meta title and description, but they also need to:
- Not exceed the length at which Google begins to truncate them in the search results.
- Entice search engines users to click-through to your site.
- Contain your target keyword (optional—but recommended)
Check your tags using this tool. Just paste the URL in and hit fetch.
It’ll then show you the meta title and description for that page.
Here’s how to deal with the issues that may arise:
- Non-existent: Add them.
- Too long. If you’re using the recommended tool above, it tells you if your meta title and description are too long (see the red highlighted text in the screenshot above). Shorten any that are.
- Boring/unenticing: Ask yourself—if I saw this in the search results when searching for this business, would I be likely to click it? If the answer is no—rewrite.
- Don’t include your target keyword: This is most important for homepages, product/service pages, and blog posts. It’s not a big deal with contact or about pages, etc. But only include it if it naturally fits—don’t shoehorn keywords in there. Read our full keyword research guide if you’re not sure what keywords to target.
It looks like the homepage for First Sight Videos has a meta title and description, but the description is too long (indicated by the red highlighted text).
I’d also say that they’re not so enticing—they’re stuffed with keywords.
In other words, they both need rewriting. I won’t go into the nuts and bolts of doing this in this article as we already have a full guide to crafting the perfect title tag, but here’s one that would almost certainly be better:
SIDENOTE. I’m not lying about the places they’ve been featured. They really have been covered on all of those sites. Never lie to entice the click—that’s clickbait, and it’s straight up unethical.
That’s one page sorted but what about the rest?
The issue with the method above is that it’s time-consuming. You have to check meta tags, by hand, across all the pages on your site. Let’s solve that.
If you started a site crawl in Site Audit at the start of this guide, it should now be done.
To view issues related to meta titles and descriptions, go to:
Site Audit > Internal pages > HTML tags
Here, you’ll see any problems related to your HTML tags—including titles and meta descriptions. Click on each issue to see affected pages.LOOKING TO OUTSOURCE?
No time to rewrite 30–50 meta titles and descriptions? Hire a freelancer to take care of it.
Here’s a gig on People Per Hour—15 title tags and meta descriptions for £40 (£2.66 each):
That took me all of two seconds to find. There may be even better offers out there.
4. Polish your written copy
Most pages on your website will have some written copy—and this needs to be on point.
Google looks at the content on a website to help understand whether that website or web page is a good result for a particular query. If there is little or no content on your web pages—or if that content isn’t well-optimized—then they’re going to have a difficult time doing that.
That’s not to say that you have to write 2,000-word essays on every page.
Some pages might warrant that, but others might be okay with a couple of hundred words.
Generally speaking, here are some SEO “rules” for website copy:
- Include some copy on every page. How much? That’s up to you—I’d personally recommend at least 100–200 words as a general rule of thumb.
- Use one H1 tag on each page. This serves as the heading of the page. Quite often, this is the same as the meta title—but it doesn’t have to be.
- Use H2-H6 tags as appropriate. These are subheadings. Use them to create a hierarchical structure of importance on each page. Learn more about these tags here.
- Don’t shoehorn keywords into your copy. Be aware of the keywords you’re targeting, but don’t force them where they don’t belong—and certainly don’t overuse them!
- Make sure spelling and grammar are on point. More on this in a moment!
PRO TIP
Don’t forget that all copy should be engaging and well-written if you actually want to attract new clients or customers. If that isn’t currently the case, you may wish to hire a professional copywriter to rewrite it.
This isn’t so much an SEO tip as a conversion rate optimization and branding tip.
For most small businesses, the homepage is going to be the most crucial page copy-wise.
Let’s audit the existing copy on firstsightvideos.co.uk.
First impressions—there doesn’t appear to be much copy at all.
It’s not until you scroll way down that you see some more…
Let’s break this down:
First, the format of that header (“welcome and thanks for visiting first sight videos”) looks worrying. I doubt it’s an H1 tag—as it should be. I’ll use this tool to check.
Suspicions confirmed; the H1 is actually in the footer! That’s not great.
Second, the main chunk of copy on the homepage looks out of place. It’s about a specific wedding they’ve filmed and would make more sense as part of a blog post. It’d make more sense to have something like this on the homepage:
Third, the copy includes no keywords, synonyms, or anything that might boost “topical relevance” on the page. (No clue what this means? Read our on-page SEO guide.)
If you have any of these issues on your site, they need fixing.
But there’s one more issue that often plagues small business websites—spelling and grammar.
Now, in the interest of transparency, here’s what Google’s John Mueller said when asked if spelling and grammar impact SEO:
Not really. […] It is more a matter of how it is received from a user point of view. If you are a banking web site and you have terrible English on it, then I assume users will lose trust in your web site. But for other things, it is the way the web just comes.
I’ve highlighted that middle part because it sums up why grammar and spelling are crucial.
If your website is riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, nobody is going to trust you. Not only does that have a direct effect on business, but it will also lead to poor user engagement signals like low time on page, low dwell time, etc.LOOKING TO OUTSOURCE?
Not great with spelling and grammar?
You can hire someone on People Per Hour or another freelancing website to polish your copy. This usually isn’t too expensive. Here’s a gig where the freelancer charges £10 (~$13) to proofread 800 words:
Say that you have ~20 pages on your site with 400 words each on average, you’re looking at ~£100 ($130) for the lot. Not bad!
5. Get citations by listing your business in relevant places on the web
Google doesn’t only look at the copy and structure of your website when determining where you should rank. They look at many off-page SEO factors too—one of which is citations.
Here’s a definition of citations from our guide to local SEO:
Citations are online mentions of your business, which usually display your business name, address, and phone number—collectively known as NAP (Name, Address, Phone).
For example, here’s a citation for First Sight Videos on Yell.com:
Here’s why you should care about citations from an SEO point of view:
- Citation signals are one of the top local ranking factors. Moz says that this is the case for Google’s “snack pack” and “regular” organic search results.
- Google isn’t the only search engine people use. Imagine that you’re looking for a local plumber. You might use a search engine like checkatrade.com, which specializes in helping users find trusted tradespeople in their local area.
So where do you start?
Perhaps the most important citation of all—at least from the perspective of ranking and appearing in Google for relevant terms—is Google My Business.
Why so important?
Have you ever Googled a business and seen something like this in the search results?
That’s known as the “map pack,” and there are two things you should know about it:
- It often appears at the top of the search results for local terms. This means that it pushes down the “regular” organic listings. Even if you rank number one in organic search, you will often still get beaten by the map pack.
- It pulls data from Google My Business listings. These are free business profiles from Google. In their words, “Your Business Profile appears right when people are searching for your business or businesses like yours on Google Search or Maps.”
I wrote this guide on the assumption that you already have your Google My Business profile set up (go here if not!), but setting up a basic profile isn’t everything. You also need to make sure it’s optimized.
That means doing things like:
- Choosing the right category (very important!)
- Adding more categories
- Uploading relevant photos
- Adding your opening hours
- Adding details about individual services
- Adding additional phone numbers
- Adding relevant amenities
- Etc.
I’m not going to go any deeper into Google My Business optimization here as I go into a lot of detail in chapter 2 of our local SEO guide. Check that out if you want to learn more.
Still, Google My Business isn’t the only place you should be listed.
It also pays to list your business in the other “big” directories (Hotfrog, Acxiom, Thomson Local, etc.), and also relevant industry-specific directories that are likely to send business your way.
For the big directories, you can use a service like Moz Local.
Just enter your business name and Moz will check which of the “big” recommended directories you’re already listed on, and which you should create profiles on.
Here are the results for First Sight Videos:
It looks like they’re missing listings on quite a few of the major directories.
As for industry-specific directories, one of the easiest ways to find these is with the Ahrefs Link Intersect tool:
- Go to Link Intersect
- Paste in a few of your top-ranking competitors’ homepages
- Select URL mode for each of them
- Add your site to the “But doesn’t link to…” field
- Hit “show link opportunities”
That will unveil sites that link to multiple competitors, but not you.
Most of the time, a lot of these sites will be relevant industry or local directories where you should also be listed.
Via Ahrefs Link Intersect Tool
Looking for more ways to build citations? That’s something I cover in-depth in chapter 3 of our local SEO guide.
Best Seo Tools for Small Business
Ahrefs
Ahrefs offers a total of 10 SEO tools including the site explorer, keywords explorer and site audit tools. Ahrefs will allow you to view the backlinks of your website, referring domains, organic keywords it’s ranking for and the amount of organic traffic those keywords are bringing to your website.
Ahrefs also has a site audit tool that shows you the SEO improvements that can be made to your site such as adding meta descriptions, missing alt text to images, noindexed pages and slow pages to better optimise it for SEO.
Pricing
Free to use but also has a paid plan starting at $99 / £72 a month and offers a 7 day discounted trial for only $7 / £5.
RankMath
A powerful SEO plugin for WordPress users, notably great for its schema markup generator allowing users to seamlessly add schema to their website pages, enabling breadcrumbs, automatically adding alt attributes to images, creation of a virtual robots.txt file, generates an XML sitemap, allowing users to edit metadata and meta noindex pages.
Pricing
Free to use but also has a paid version starting at $129 / £95 a month.
SEMrush
SEMrush is a great tool for providing in-depth SEO audits and has a total of 26 SEO tools that can be used to view the SEO improvements you can make on your website including crawlability, click depth, backlinks audit, etc. Also, the on-page SEO tool can help identify improvements that can be made to your pages to better optimise them for SEO such as adding meta descriptions and identifying duplicate content pages.
The local SEO tool can help you to optimise your site for local search, the keyword research tool allows you to discover keywords to target, the link building tool allows you to find opportunities to strengthen your backlink profile and the competitor SEO analysis tool allows you to identify your competitors SEO strategy.
Pricing
Free to use but also has a paid plan starting at $99.95 / £73 a month and offers a 7-day free trial.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog crawls your website and provides a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the on-site SEO improvements that can be made to your website to better optimise it for SEO, including meta description, proper formatting usage (H1, H2, etc), content improvements including identifying duplicate content and thin content pages, missing alt text on images, opportunities to implement schema usage, page speed improvements, etc.
Pricing
Free to use and also has a paid version for $200 / £149 per year; the free version allows you to download and crawl 500 URLs for free and by purchasing a license you can remove this limit and also access its advanced features.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free-to-use tool by Google; it is a must for any business that is looking to optimise its website for SEO.
You can use the tools and reports inside google search console to receive insights about the performance and health of your website including total clicks, impressions, CTR, average position, page experience score, mobile usability score, whether your sitemap has been indexed successfully and any usability errors on your website. Google Search Console provides a complete health report for your website.
Ranktracker
Ranktracker allows you to track the ranking of the keywords of your website on mobile and desktop across all search engines allowing you to see what position your keywords are ranked in the search engine results pages, as well as the search volume and traffic metrics. You can also keep a real-time track of any movement of the position of your keywords and it also has a website audit tool that scans your website for technical on-page SEO issues.
The keyword research tool allows you to discover keyword opportunities to rank for, by showing how difficult it is to rank for a specific keyword, finding long-tail keyword opportunities and identifying whether SERP features are being displayed for a given keyword which you can then use to create a strategy to target those keywords and optimise your content to rank for SERP features.
It also shows in-depth data about your competitors’ websites allowing you to see the estimated traffic they are receiving from a keyword, their page authority, domain authority, referring domains, etc allowing you to create an SEO strategy to outrank them.
Pricing
Starts at $8 / £6 a month and also offers a 10-day free trial option.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is really effective for competitor analysis it provides a great level of insight about your competitors’ websites allowing you to reverse engineer their SEO and content marketing strategies, it allows you to view their backlinks, top keywords and pages that are bringing them the most amount of traffic to their site.
Ubersuggest allows you to view similar websites to yours, as well as the similar keywords you rank for, the keywords that your competitors rank for but your website doesn’t rank for and how many backlinks they have which will allow you to create an SEO strategy to outrank them by building up your sites backlink profile, targeting more keywords and expanding your content marketing strategy.
The keyword discovery tool allows you to find keywords to target by showing the traffic volume, trend changes and the difficulty level to rank for those keywords.
Its rank tracking tool allows you to track where your keywords are ranked on Google on desktop and mobile, across multiple locations and languages.
Pricing
Ubersuggest is a free-to-use tool and also has a paid plan starting at $29 / £21 a month and offers a 7-day free trial.
Bright Local
BrightLocal is an all-in-one tool designed to help local businesses looking to build a presence in search by optimising for local SEO. It allows you to track citations, fix existing citations, remove duplicate citations and can even build citations for you (for a fee). You can use it to monitor your reviews on relevant sites and shows insights from your Google My Business (GMB) profile.
The local search audit tool provides a detailed report about the key areas of how well your site is optimised for SEO including backlink profile and authoritativeness, Google My Business optimisation and how well your GMB is optimised in comparison to the top 10 ranked businesses in your area allowing you to see what you need to do to outrank them, on-site SEO factors, as well as, a rank checker allowing you to see where you rank for important keywords that are relevant to your business on Google & Bing search engine results pages, Google Maps and Bing Local.
Pricing
BrightLocal has a limited set of tools that you can use for free but to access all of its tools you have to purchase a paid plan starting from as low as $29 / £21 a month and BrightLocal also offers a 14-day free trial.
Google PageSpeed Insights
Google PageSpeed Insights is a free tool by Google to help users measure the speed and performance of their websites, it provides detailed insights including first contentful paint, speed index, largest contentful paint, time to interactive, total blocking time and cumulative layout shift which are components of the Core Web Vitals.
PageSpeed Insights also suggests opportunities to improve the performance score to achieve a faster website making it a must-use tool for any business wanting their website to pass the core web vitals, also with Google’s new page experience algorithm update Google has made it clear that the speed of a website on both mobile and desktop are increasingly important ranking factors.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console (formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools) is Google’s free SEO tool. Once you set up your account, you’ll get alerts if Google finds errors on your website and you’ll be able to view key stats like keyword rankings, number of clicks per keyword, number of 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.
Plus, you can link Search Console to Analytics to unlock even more reporting tools in your Analytics account. For example, once you’ve linked these two tools, then in Analytics you’ll be able to review keyword rankings, click through rates, impressions, and the landing pages that are ranking in Google.
3. AgencyAnalytics
AgencyAnalytics is our go-to platform for reporting. AgencyAnalytics offers automated reporting, client visible/shareable dashboards, as well as a clean interface for teams to review performance for various different services. We use AgencyAnalytics to report on and review metrics for Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Ads, Facebook, Facebook Ads, Bing Ads, Yelp, LinkedIn, and many others. Whether it’s sending out reports each month in a timely manner or drilling into metrics to review client performance, AgencyAnalytics is one of our most widely used tools and we can’t recommend it enough.
Rank Ranger
Rank Ranger is a robust, all-around SEO analysis tool. But before you get lost in the data, focus on what Rank Ranger does best: tracking your keyword rankings. You’ll be able to track your website’s organic rankings over time in the major search engines, plus your local rankings in the “map” results. This will help you identify trends up or down in your rankings so you can adjust your strategy accordingly.
Rank Ranger also offers automated SEO reporting, competitor analysis tools, and many other helpful features for analyzing the performance of your SEO campaigns.
Conclusion
Small business owners and entrepreneurs can come up with their own ways of getting the job done, but using SEO tools can be more time-efficient and cost-effective. With this in mind, we’ve created a list of the best SEO tools for small business.