If your startup is more than a few weeks old, you’ve probably already been bombarded with email after email touting one tool after another. So how do you know which tools are useful for your small business? Determining what’s useful and what isn’t can help you not waste your very valuable time. Here are 8 SEO Tools every startup should know about and why they are useful. Hopefully, this will help in your decision-making process.

Google Analytics

Google analytics lets you monitor the activities of users visiting your website on every page that you input the pixel code. It’s a great way of monitoring your page and site performance as well as your marketing returns.

You’re able to measure the effectiveness of each campaign, medium and source and compare it to previous time periods as well as to one another. You’re able to add what activities amount to a conversion and therefore measure your conversion rates both sitewide and medium wide.

The key benefit here is the ability to identify your best performing marketing campaigns and mediums in order to double down on them and pull back on the worst performing ones.

Majestic

Majestic is a link intelligence tool for SEO and internet PR and Marketing. You can use this tool to discover the inbound links to any domain, page or specific URL. This could be your own, or others. Majestic shows the value of these links in a reliable way, with the metrics Citation flow (how many sites are linking to that URL or root domain) and Trust flow (the degree of separation from large trusted websites such as the BBC). Majestic also categorises the relevant topics based on the topics of sites linking in (the neighbourhood) and the link text used.

It’s useful to measure your performance and continue to track it over time in order to ensure your business is growing online in the right way. It’s worth mentioning that sites and pages with higher Trust flows and Citation flows with relevant topics will have higher ranks.

The other important use is for competitor analysis. Assessing what links your competitors have that you can emulate, as well as the ones that provide them the most value, which is something you should prioritise.

Keywordtool.io

You’re most likely in the know about keyword research and its importance, not only for SEO but also for advertising and content creation.

Keywordtool.io is a leading keyword research tool and alternative to Google AdWords keyword planner. It generates keywords based on your initial keywords entered and the volume of searches each one gets monthly within the regions you select.

This allows you to discover valuable keywords to target and identify new search terms that could provide you with traffic and sales.

Pingdom, Page speed tool

If you haven’t been told this enough already, Page Speed matters! The amount of time your web pages take to load affects its ranking on search engines. It’s all about user experience, and slow websites deliver a bad experience for the user.

In order to ensure your pages are not taking a long time to load, and if they are, identifying what elements are the cause of the speed issue, you can use Pingdom.

Pingdom allows you to monitor your website’s availability and performance for free and labels clearly which issues are the biggest by marking the severity of the issue.

SEMRush

SEMrush is the swiss army knife of competitive intelligence. It covers SEO, PPC, social media and video advertising research. SEMrush has a database of over 46 million domains and 120 million keywords. Tracking organic keyword positions of domains, ad copy, their positions as well as visual based ads.

SEMrush can give you a quick overview of your (or your competitors) websites performance over time and can help to produce real-time reports.

A good use of the tool is to monitor where your competitors and businesses within your industry are ranking for relevant keywords. SEMrush provides the added benefit of allowing you to view how much traffic comes from each of these positions so you can truly identify the keywords you need to target.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is an SEO spider which crawls websites links, images CSS and other elements of the code that form your website.

It allows you to extract all the key information from your site with one crawl. You can then compile this to make large scale changes to improve your site SEO performance.

Buzzsumo

BuzzSumo is a great tool for SEO content marketing campaigns. It gives you the ability to find influencers on relevant topics, find content ideas from the content that works well and has the most social backing, and identify the sites you should be targeting in order to build a reciprocal content-sharing relationship with.

Keep to highly relevant search terms to keep your results relevant to your business and industry. You can find patterns in the content that is shared and liked the most to see if it’s the subject matter, the content author or the website that is the deciding factor.

Finding influencers to guest post on your site may seem counterintuitive, however, they are likely to share this post, promoting your website. Influencers with large amounts of sharing activity around there content are likely to have good followings.

Hubspot Blog Idea Generator

Content is an integral element to SEO, but it can become difficult to come up with new ideas. Hubspot’s blog ideas generator provides you with ideas based on the keywords that you enter. Although this is targeted at blog posts, it can be used for various types of content.

In content creation, often the title is the hardest thing to think of so this tool makes it easy to produce a larger amount and variety of content relevant to your keywords.

As you go, there will probably be countless tools to help you with your evolving needs. But some tools will remain as staples for startups and big businesses alike. Try out as many as possible to see what works best for you. Remember that it is key to find the tools that solve as many issues your startup faces, as possible.

As always, Happy Small Business Marketing!