6 amazing free SEO tools for small businesses
Adam Steele, senior account executive at Stone Junction, lists 6 SEO tools that every small business should utilise.
Everybody loves free things. Granted, this did change at one stage and everybody loved Raymond for a bit, but now everybody is back to loving free things again. At Stone Junction we believe that the more free advice you can give, the more people you can help and before you know it, customers will be wanting to jump into bed with you left, right and centre. So here are a few of our top free SEO tools:
- SEO Surgeon meta length tool
This one is nice and simple. SEO Surgeon’s meta length tool counts characters so you can plot your title tag and meta description without going over the recommended limits. Simply type into the spaces provided on the page and, once you’re happy, copy and paste the content into your source code.
- Website Grader
Website Grader takes your URL and analyses your site based on four different categories: performance, mobile, SEO and security. It then gives you an overall percentage.
Although this tool is a bit vague, it does point out things you might have missed and makes helpful suggestions as to how to fix issues. This site is useful for tune ups or for the initial audit.
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool
The first and only downloadable on our list. Screaming Frog is a free website crawler designed specifically for SEO. Download the software and type in your domain, within minutes you’ll be endowed with critical data on every URL on your site.
This piece of kit is really useful because it analyses every page on your website and breaks the data down into understandable tabs. We tend to use Screaming Frog for a quick overview of a site and to cross reference SEO issues we’ve come across using our paid SEO software.
The best thing to do with this beast is to download it and then take some time to explore the data. You can find the complete user’s guide here.
- Talkwalker
Talkwalker Alerts are a bit like Google Alerts, but it also provide the nifty feature of giving you information at the touch of a button. Want to find out if you’ve been mentioned in the media to check for backlinks? Bash the name of the company you’re looking for into the search query box and hit preview. Talkwalker will bring up a list of online news, blog and discussion results that include your search term.
- Majestic
Majestic gives you data on the backlinks to your website. It’ll tell you how many external backlinks to your website there are, from how many referring domains and IP addresses. The free version even gives you a 90 day historical graph, so you can assess how certain press releases or media events have affected backlink creation.
- The Moz SEO toolbar
The Moz toolbar is really useful if you want to obtain some basic SEO information about a domain. Maybe you’ve had a link on a website you’ve not come across before and want to know a bit more about the site for instance.
The Moz toolbar gives you information like domain authority and Moz Rank for the site. The higher the two numbers, the more authoritative you should consider the website to be and the more valuable the backlink.
The Moz toolbar will also show you page tags and link metrics, as well as giving the domain a spam score. Needless to say, you don’t really want backlinks from domains with high spam scores.
There are lots of free SEO tools out there; too many to mention in one blog post alone. In the spirit of freedom and sharing, I invite you to go out and have your own little SEO recce. If you do find something you think is worth sharing – drop us a tweet or get in touch here.
If you just want to have a chat about SEO or more information – give us a call at Stone Junction on +44 (0) 1785 225416.
