Nine Useful SEO Tools for Your Small Business Website

Understanding how your website’s SEO and ranking works is not always an exact science, as it involves a number of complex factors – including the quality and number of backlinks, the strategic use of keywords, and the quality, authority and originality of your site’s content.

That being said, there are many useful SEO tools around for analysing your site’s pages and providing feedback, so that you can decide how to better optimise your website and improve your chances of obtaining higher rankings. Read on for a brief look at some of these keyword, content and technical tools.

Ahrefs tool

As you are no doubt aware, the quality and number of backlinks to a site can have a substantial influence on ranking. The Ahrefs backlink tool is designed for tracking links by providing you with a report of backlinks to your site. The number of backlinks provided per request depends on your plan level. You can also use Ahrefs for keyword competition analysis.

Schema Creator

As search engines become more smart and sophisticated, it means that while keywords are still important, it’s largely the quality and context of your content that matters. Schema is designed to define context by providing tools that enable you to interpret the meaning and intent behind your written content – in turn optimising it better for web crawlers.

Raven tools

Raven’s website analytics tool provides you with automated link monitoring, reports for keyword rankings for Google and Bing, traffic tracking for different campaigns, and evaluations for your website for an array of criteria.

Title and Description Optimiser

This free optimiser tool is designed to assist you in optimising web page meta and title tags. It also provides suggestions for keywords to use in these tags according to geographical location.

Google Snippet Preview

The snippet preview tool enables you to analyse the snippets (usually from meta tags) that appear in Google SERPs, so that you can optimise them as required. Having concise, information-rich and optimised snippets may result in higher click rates.

SEOMoz

The SEOMoz toolbar for Chrome allows you to analyse domain and page authority for each search result, conduct link analysis, do keyword research, define rankings for keywords, measure page load speed, and analyse pages in a variety of other ways.

CopyScape

CopyScape is a tool for checking for plagiarism for specific text. With the importance placed on producing original content on websites, this is useful for checking the originality and uniqueness of content posted on a site. Links to duplicate content are provided, and it also reports on the percentage of similarity to other content.

Word2CleanHTML

This free web tool lets you convert text written in Word or other similar programs to HTML. The term ‘clean HTML’ may refer to the way in which it removes fonts, colours and other effects so that the text is stripped back. This then enables you to add your own formatting that is suitable for use on the web.

Google Experiment

This is a free Google tool you can use to test up to five versions of a web page on a selected audience, and track its success according to pre-determined goals. It can be used to test a variety of elements including calls-to-action, page layouts, images, headlines, and text.

The above is just a sample of the many SEO tools available to assist you in optimising your site. More examples can be found in this article at Search Engine Watch.

As we mentioned at the start, SEO is complex. It is also dynamic and involves having some understanding of how people behave and what they want when doing internet searches – and in that sense is more than a simplistic mathematical exercise. While in-depth analysis requires more than just using analytical tools by themselves, you may find one or more of the above SEO tools useful for saving yourself some time and effort in determining which elements of your site might be in need of some changes and improvements.