Getting SEO right is the first step to a successful digital strategy for any organization. If correctly implemented, it will lead to higher page rankings on search engines, better site visibility, increased organic traffic, as well as improved advertising efficiency. These, in turn, translate to increased revenue and business growth. However, despite SEO being useful, many small businesses do not enjoy these obvious benefits for a couple of reasons.

Some are not conversant with the strategies, while others mistakenly presume setting a Search Engine Optimization campaign is a one-time set-and-forget thing. A successful SEO campaign involves continuous careful planning and implementation. Fortunately, there are many helpful digital tools business owners can use to understand and improve their online marketing efforts. Some of these tools include;

· Google Analytics

· Semrush

· Ahref

· Open site explorer

1. Google Analytics

It is one of the most powerful digital marketing tools. This Google tool gives business owners the means of assessing the performance of their digital marketing campaigns. It offers valuable information like where the site visitors come from, how they ended up on the site, what attracted the visitors to the site, the keywords that they used, the content they loved, as well as the marketing tactics that resulted in the most leads and conversions. Furthermore, the tools support the multiple viewing of Google Analytics, exportation of reports to different formats like PDF, CSV, TSV, XML and much more.

Armed with such statistics, it becomes easy for small business owners to determine whether or not the website meets the desired objective. To get this free useful tool, a business owner simply needs to set up a Google account and install the Analytics tracking code to his or her website or blog.

Small business owners should log in daily in their google analytics account and keep an eye on the performance of their keywords this helps the entrepreneurs to create a successful ongoing content strategy for the site through constant brainstorming.

2. SEMrush

Even though SEMrush’s designers had SEO professional in mind when creating this useful SEO tool, small business webmasters can also benefit significantly from it. The way it works is that one inputs on the semrush.com platform, the URL of the website under consideration. The platform will then generate a list of keywords for which the site in question already ranks on search engines and an estimate of the number of times people searched those particular keywords in a given month. Subsequently, a business owner can decide whether or not a particular keyword is worth optimizing. So weekly check your keyword position and that of your competitor.

SEMrush users concur that it is one of the leading competitive research tools in the digital world. It is a superb way of monitoring and researching the competitor’s ads in that when combined with the competitor’s website data it is easy to study, understand and defeat the competition. The tool comes in two versions of free and premium. The paid version naturally contains more superior features including the ability to perform more searches daily.

3. Ahrefs

Any seasoned webmaster would attest to the importance of backlinks in as far as web traffic generation and web page ranking goes. The higher the number of links directing to your website, the higher the chances of traffic. The links, however, must be natural to ensure they are not flagged by Google algorithms such as Penguin, subsequently affecting the page rankings. Thanks to the Ahrefs tool, a small business owner has access to a full backlink tools suite. It contains useful features like the Site Explorer, Position Explorer, Content Explorer, Position Tracker, Crawl Report and Ahrefs Alerts. Aherf back link index is far superior and updated very frequently. So check if you are getting backlinks.

These tools make it possible to assess if the website links come from legitimate sites, and remove those that come from illegitimate or spammy platforms. Furthermore, through Ahrefs, a person can conduct a competitor analysis to identify the source of the competitor’s backlinks and adopt the strategies that would lead to success.

4. Moz Open Site Explorer

Moz is another backlink tool, but it does other things as well. For instance, it offers small business webmasters several tracking tools for understanding better the website’s search engine landscape and determine the importance of a site. It does so by revealing the top ranking keywords on the site, the high authority pages, the number of backlinks, lists of URLs that direct to your site as well as the most recent links to your site or blog. Such information is vital for increasing the amount of outbound links that lead to the site. The tool has a user-friendly and easy to use interface. Just go to the moz.com website, input your URL and conduct a search.

But the most useful function of the open site explorer is the measurement of Domain Authority that since the demise of google Page Rank is rapidly becoming the standard. Domain Authority or often abbreviated DA is a measure of the domain strength. From 0 to 100 it tells how powerful and authoritative is your site. You can use for free and if you register you can get more searches for no money. Check it here.

Domain Authority tells how powerful is your domain.

Conclusion

The above tools are relatively straightforward to use and include free versions. They are ideal for any small business owner who wishes to revamp his or her SEO campaigns and help the company achieve its profitability and growth objectives.