The most versatile digital marketing strategy for small and medium businesses is search engine optimization. SEO allows businesses to receive a steady flow of organic traffic and relevant leads. Depending on the type of business you run, the complexity of the SEO strategy needed to succeed can vary. To get started, you’ll need to invest in the right SEO tools for small businesses.
This guide will walk you through the five most useful SEO tools that a small or medium business might need.
#1 SE Ranking
The best SEO tool for a small business is one that combines an affordable subscription price with a wide range of features. A multifunctional SEO tool beats highly specialized ones for a small business because it lowers the cost and simplifies the payment structure for your tools.
One great tool that provides the foundation for an SEO plan and does not compromise on quality is SE Ranking. It combines multiple SEO tools in one subscription and provides enough room for growth should you need to expand your SEO efforts.
One of the most important SEO tools in this kit is the keyword research tool by SE Ranking. It lets you discover new keywords, analyze them, and improve your keyword optimization strategy. The data is based on scraping over 6 billion keywords. This large and constantly updated data set also lets you analyze competing pages in SERPs.
A rank tracker tool will help you monitor how well your website performs across multiple keywords, record drops and increases in your ranking positions over time, and study the competition. It’s a necessary tool to understand whether your on-page optimization is working properly. It also works for AI Overviews. The rank tracker will monitor which pages appear as sources on AIO and track your site’s positions in AI results.
SE Ranking also has an audit tool to help you with technical optimization. It can scan your website and highlight problems that can lead to Core Web Vitals underperformance, crawling issues, and other technical faults. It will also suggest SEO tips for small businesses to help improve the situation.
For off-page optimization, you can use the backlink checker tool. It provides quality metrics for websites and shows which websites link to your competitors. The data is gathered by SE Ranking, which has analyzed 2.9 trillion backlinks.
All of the data on your site will be used in SE Ranking’s AI analytics system, which will provide personalized insights and SEO suggestions. This makes SE Ranking perfect for SEO beginners because it can suggest strategic data-based decisions.
All of this and the automatic reporting feature are available on regular SE Ranking plans. The pricing starts at $65 per month. You can also purchase content editor and local marketing add-ons. The local SEO add-on can integrate with your Google Business Profile to track your position in local map pack search results and help you manage reviews.
The content editor add-on helps with not only writing but with the whole process of SEO content creation. It can help you create outlines and find suitable keywords to add to your article. It can also handle draft generation with an AI-writing assistant.
This collection of tools for a single subscription makes SE Ranking one of the best choices for small and medium businesses.
#2 Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest offers a versatile toolset, but its main selling point is the keyword research tool.
The keyword research tool can provide thousands of similar keywords in multiple forms, including questions, prepositions, comparisons, and more. For each keyword, there are metrics like search volume, cost per click on Google ads, and difficulty estimation in both paid and organic searches.
Ubersuggest helps with one of the largest SEO tasks for a small business — keyword research and the creation of a keyword strategy. Ubersuggest also provides content ideas based on a keyword by parsing article names that rank for that keyword.
In addition, Ubersuggest offers a suite of other SEO tools.
Based on the keywords your competitors rank for and their positions, Ubersuggest can estimate the traffic they attract. It also has an experimental tool that can generate keywords based on what your competitor websites rank for.
The site audit tool helps you find technical problems with your site and provides suggestions to fix them.
The backlink research tool helps you discover which websites link to your competitors and view backlink metrics to find high-quality backlink options. It also can show you backlink opportunities by comparing the links that lead to your site with those of the competitors and providing a list of websites that don’t link to you. The backlink data comes from Moz, another SEO tool.
Overall, Ubersuggest has a strong keyword suggestion tool and a basic set of SEO tools for small businesses. Their data is not as accurate as some other tools, but with the prices starting at $29 per month, it can be a worthwhile investment.
#3 Screaming Frog SEO Spider
The basic SEO audit software offered by many tools available on the market is great, but it often does not dig deep enough into the technical aspects of your site. Screaming Frog is the tool that does.
Screaming Frog provides only one feature — crawling your website and identifying any issues that may be hurting your rankings. It will find broken links and redirects and analyze duplicate content, your robots.txt file, and your website’s metadata. It will also help you visualize your website’s structure and generate sitemap files.
These features are available in the free version of the tool, which will crawl up to 500 URLs. You’ll have to download the program first; it’s available for MacOS, Windows, and Linux.
The paid version is available at $259 annually and includes features that help you identify similar content that may be hurting your rankings and audit website accessibility. It also provides multiple integration options, including Google Analytics, PageSpeed Insights, and Looker Studio.
The most interesting feature you’ll get access to is custom data extraction from your site. For instance, you can export all the page metadata for a set of specific pages. This allows you to customize how you analyze your site. Since this is a more advanced tool, you might not need it at the beginning stages of creating an SEO strategy. But it can help you refine your site for ranking success.
#4 Rank Math
Rank Math is a handy SEO tool for small businesses that run their website on WordPress. It’s a WordPress plugin that provides easy-to-follow SEO advice and integrates with the WP admin panel.
This tool provides SEO audit features, content optimization tools, and plenty of support for the creation of schema markups and sitemaps. Easy schema creation will help you save time on technical optimization and provide search engines with more detailed information about your pages.
Rank Math has a great position tracker that shows you how your pages are ranking for each of the keywords you target. It also has a local SEO tool to help you optimize your Google Business Profile. Rank Math’s plans start at $6.99 per month and increase in price from there, depending on the features you are looking for.
The Content AI tool has over 40 different modes of operation that help you manage the entire content production cycle, from generating blog ideas based on a keyword and creating an outline based on SERP analysis to generating a content draft and editing it.
One of the best features in the Content AI toolset is the ability to generate alt text tags for images with AI. While Rank Math does not provide in-depth SEO software for small businesses, like backlink analysis or keyword research tools, it makes SEO easier for WordPress website owners.
#5 Nightwatch
Nightwatch is a tool that offers a few SEO tools but focuses on one main capability: rank tracking.
Nightwatch can track keyword positions on mobile and desktop platforms across multiple search engines, including YouTube. Nightwatch will track your site’s positions on AI Overviews and is testing LLM tracking to monitor mentions in AI searches.
What makes Nighwatch stand out is its ability to track local search positions. It supports up to 50,000 locations.
Nightwatch’s rank tracker will monitor your site’s average position, search visibility, and click potential. The pricing starts at $32 per month. The more keywords you need to track, the higher the subscription price. You also get access to a site audit tool, an automated reporting tool, and a keyword research tool. While the keyword research tool only includes approximately 20 million keywords, it’s a nice addition to the rank tracker tool.
Overall, Nightwatch can be a great tool if your main goals are rank tracking and reporting, especially if you need to track local keywords.
Summary
Small and medium businesses that want to benefit from increased organic traffic should invest in quality tools for SEO. Using free Google tools like Google Analytics, Search Console, and Keyword Planner is a must, but without specialized tools, it’s almost impossible to create an effective SEO strategy and track your website’s performance.
Choose one of the tools from the list, explore the features it provides, and create more traffic for your website. The best SEO software for your small business depends on your business goals.
