If you run a small business, then you already know how important it is to establish a strong brand presence in your community. When customers are looking for services like plumbing, HVAC, electricians, or other home services, they search the internet to find them. Having a website that ranks well on search engines like Google ensures that it’s your services they turn to. But to get your website to show up at the top of search engine results, you will need to develop a strategy that uses appropriate content, backlinks, and more. That’s where do it yourself search engine optimization tools come into play – they can help you find successful keywords and monitor your progress, even if you aren’t an SEO expert.
Like any software or tools, the hard part is finding the right tool for your business needs. That’s why we’ve reviewed some of the top tools out there. Check them out below and see which one makes the most sense for your business.
Finding your website’s performance
The following are some SaaS (software-as-a-service) solutions that small business owners can use to improve the organic search traffic of their websites. Some of these products have free trials or offer limited access for free. Check them out below:
Moz Pro
Moz Pro is a software product that allows you to manage most aspects of your site’s SEO. This tool isn’t too technical and allows small to large businesses to boost their organic website traffic. They have a pretty user friendly interface that’s nice for those new to SEO.
Key features:
- Tracks your ranking efficiently
- Keyword research and analysis
- On-page optimization
- Visualizes your data
- Search engine results page (SERP) analysis
- On-page grader
- Compares links and competitors
Overall this software has features that are user friendly, with easy to read metric charts letting you know how you rank, how your competitors rank, what SEO techniques are working and where you can improve.
Ahrefs
If you’re serious about improving your SEO and out-ranking your competition, Ahrefs might be the tool for you. With a website check for over 100 pre-defined SEO issues, their comprehensive competitive tools, and visual SEO progress reports, you can stop guessing and find out exactly what’s holding your website back from ranking.
Key features:
- Site Explorer
- Gives an in-depth look at the organic search traffic and backlink profile of any website or URL
- See what keywords your competitors are ranking & which pages bring in the most traffic
- See which website are linking to your competitors and gauge the quality of their backlink profile
- Keywords Explorer
- Discover thousands of great keywords to rank for, analyse their ranking difficulty, calculate traffic potential
- Accurate “search volume”
- Keyword difficulty score
- Content Explorer
- Discover the most popular content for any topic (by backlinks, organic traffic and social shares)
- Research top content and discover new content opportunities
- Filter by: Language, social shares, domain rating, backlinks, traffic, word count
- Rank Tracker
- Monitor your rankings over time and chart your performance against your competitors’.
- Site audit to see under the hood of your website’s on-page SEO performance.
- Alerts for new & lost backlinks, web mentions, and new keywords.
Overall, Ahrefs has the tools that will give you an extensive look at your SEO standings and what keywords you can use to improve.
SEMRush
SEMRush is another comprehensive SEO monitoring tool that really stands out for bloggers and businesses. In addition to the expected SEO guidance, this tool also helps you manage your social media, PR, and paid ad strategies with a hub where you can schedule posts, analyze your traffic, and identify the best opportunities to reach your target market.
Key features:
- Site Audit Tool
- Check your site’s SEO health
- Domain vs. Domain comparisons
- Analyze Google ranking factors affecting your website’s performance
- Track SEO optimization progress
- Ensure the security of your website with HTTPS checks
- Keyword research
- Find the right keywords for your SEO campaign
- Find keywords with less competition
- Use keyword grouping to segment your keywords by topic
- Keywords position tracking
- Backlink Audit Tools
- Find all your backlinks using SEMRush’s search console integration
- Check backlinks’ types
- Spot your links’ geolocation
- Organic Traffic Insights
- Unlock the ‘not provided‘ keywords
- Merge analytics and search console data
- Analyze keyword potential
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog developed the SEO Spider Tool, which is one of the most popular SEO tools on the market today. The free version is a great option for technical SEO audits. When you’re ready to dive into your websites’ SEO health you can opt for the paid version that includes features like unlimited crawling, integration with other SEO tools, and much more.
Key features:
- Crawl your full site and lists
- Audit redirects
- Crawl path reports
- Plug into APIs
- Custom extractions and configurations
- Analyze internal linking
- Find orphaned and broken pages
- Identify missing & duplicate titles
- Identify missing & duplicate meta descriptions
- Find images missing alt text
BuzzSumo
If you are looking for a tool that is easy to use and gives you a visual look at your site’s SEO progress, BuzzSumo is a good option. The program gives you intuitive content insights that you can use to determine what content is working and what isn’t by seeing which keywords are showing up in search engines. It also gives you an inside look into the performance of successful influencers and companies in your field.
Key features:
- Discover the most shared content across social networks
- Find influencers for any topic
- Setup keyword mention alerts
- Track your competitor’s content performance
- Get up to 12 months of data
- Discover interesting and trending content
- Export data
Overall, this software has tools that look at influencers and competitors in your industry to find the keywords that are drawing in visitors for them, so you can find new strategies that are going to work for you as well.
Google Analytics
If you are familiar with SEO then you’ve probably heard of Google Analytics. While Google offers an entire suite of SEO tools, Google Analytics is their original one, and it’s one of the most popular because of everything it analyzes.
Key features:
- Measure traffic by device type
- Sitespeed by page
- Setup conversions / goals
- Identify your user’s demographics
- Look at new & returning visitors
- Real-time reporting
- Group traffic by channels
- Campaign tracking
- Add custom alerts
- Add annotations
- Automate reporting
- Build conversion funnels
- Use regular expressions (REGEX)
- Calculated metrics
- Site search
Google Analytics has a lot of tools to help drive your SEO strategy. It can be overwhelming in the beginning so If you’re new to digital marketing you’ll want to start off by prioritizing the key metrics that are important to your business.
Update: For anyone looking to install Google Analytics, consider GA4 which will replace Google Analytics as of July 2023.
This SEO tools list features just a few of the many programs that are available to help you track your site’s visibility online. As a home service professional, you can leverage your website to gain new customers and build brand recognition in your area. With the help of these DIY tools, you can start managing your site’s SEO presence on your own.
