4 Important SEO Tools for Businesses

In an increasingly competitive online world, every business owner should know how to manage their online presence to their best benefit. Many small and large businesses miss out on online sales opportunities because they do not pay enough attention to search engine optimization (SEO) on their pages, website content, or social media sites.

Free Tools for your SEO needs

Hiring a professional SEO agency is something to consider when you want to better your online marketing, but in the meant time using SEO tools can make the job of internet marketing much easier and more intuitive. Here are the 4 free tools that are very effective for covering all the important areas of SEO:

1. Google AdWords Keyword Tool

Link: https://adwords.google.ca/KeywordPlanner
This program helps you to find keywords that are most popular for your industry. You can find out what keywords get the highest amount of traffic and use those to help you make your website and your business easier to find on various search engines. It’s very simple as you only have to type in different words and searches to find the amount of traffic for keywords. If you are new to Keyword Planner, read this article to find out how to best use the tool.

2. Google Analytic & Google Webmaster

Google Analytics is one of the best services on the web for keeping track of how traffic is coming to your site. This tool automatically lets you know if any keywords you’re using are attracting people or not. If you want to know how people are finding your site, this is the tool you need since you only have to activate it and check up on the reports occasionally. Here is a helpful read about how to get started with Analytic tool.

Google Webmaster takes tracking to the next step. You’ll have access to a lot of important SEO information with this tool, such as who is linking to your site, what your strongest keywords are, what has been indexed on your website, etc. Essentially, this tool shows you what Google sees when you site comes up. That’s the kind of information you need when you want to engage in SEO activities. Learn how to get the best out of Google Webmaster here.

3. WordPress

Download the latest current version: https://wordpress.org/download/
Many sites today are powered by WordPress, especially blogs and smaller company websites. WordPress is one of the largest content management systems on the web right now. Its user friendly controls, useful and available customer support, intuitive layouts, customization, plug-ins, and more draw a lot of people to use this as a platform for their website content. If you can’t figure out how to do something you want to do, there are thousands of tutorials out there for you to learn from. Make sure you read through this guide first before installing WordPress.

For those who preferred a visual step by step video, here is just the video to guide you through WordPress instalation:

4. HootSuite

Sign up for the Free version: https://hootsuite.com/plans/free
Social media is a big part of internet marketing and SEO activities for any business. It can be difficult to run all of your social media accounts without a way to consolidate them all into one console. This is exactly what HootSuite does for you. You can check messages, post content, respond to anything, view postings, and everything else you’d normally do on any social media account through their dashboard. That means you don’t have to log into a bunch of different websites and check out what’s been happening, you can simply sign on to your Hootsuite account and manage all your accounts at the same time. Here is the official start guide of HootSuit.

Summary
Running a business is not easy, but if you’re not using the right tools for your online marketing and SEO efforts you could be making it even harder than it should be. These 4 tools will set you in the right direction for optimizing your website and your business in search engine results pages. The result of this is more traffic that you can then convert into sales.