As a small business, you need to apply digital marketing strategies to increase awareness, leads, and conversions. One of the top digital marketing ways to achieve this is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). But, succeeding in SEO is no simple task.
One way to maximize your success with SEO is to use the fundamental SEO tools.
Here is a list of the 10 SEO tools for small businesses you need to maximize your efforts and “simplify” the process.
Essential SEO Tools for Small Business Success in 2025
In 2025, small businesses need strong SEO tools to keep up with the fast-paced digital marketing space and fierce competition. These tools are not just a plus to have but are key for getting more organic traffic, improving brand visibility, and growing steadily.
Having the right SEO tools is, quite frankly, the difference between success and failure as a small business.
1. Google Search Console: Monitor Your Site’s Performance
Google Search Console (GSC) is a non-negotiable. It is your direct connection to Google and your website. It is a free tool that offers important information about how Google sees your website.
With it, you can submit your website pages to Google for indexing, check how your website performs for specific keywords in different countries, and find ways to improve your ranks.
Keeping an eye on your website’s performance using Google Search Console is the key to helping shape your SEO plan.
Submit your website URLs to Google
Especially useful for newborn websites. You can submit your new pages to Google Search Console for manual indexing. This is easy to do.
Simply copy your newly published page URL, paste it into the “URL inspection” bar, and click the “Request Indexing” button.
Pro tip: You can also do this with old pages that have recently been updated with new/fresh content.
Find Low Hanging Fruit Keywords
Once you’ve added sufficient content to your small business website, you will start to receive information in your GSC account. You will have access to performance metrics like “clicks”, “impressions”, “average position”, “queries”, and more.
A great way to find inspiration for new content is to find what is called low-hanging fruit keywords. One way to do this is to look for “queries” or keywords that your small business website is ranking for but you might not have a dedicated page or blog post for this focus keyword yet.
To find these keywords, head to the “Performance” section in GSC. Make sure to filter by the last 12 months, “impressions” and “average position”.
Then scroll down to the “queries” section and sort by “position” highest.
You will have a list of keywords that relate to your current content and that you could potentially use as ideas to create new blog posts, pages, categories, or products.
2. Google Analytics: Your Complete Website’s Data
Understanding your audience is essential for making good SEO decisions. Google Analytics is another essential free tool for this. These metrics include things like user behavior and demographics, giving you a good understanding of how people are engaging with your content.
Google Analytics is more than just a tool for understanding your website traffic. It helps you track specific goals and conversions, like purchases, form submissions, or newsletter sign-ups. By setting up conversion tracking, you can see how well your SEO efforts are working to produce real results.
Don’t just focus on simple things like website traffic. Look deeper into what really matters—conversions. Google Analytics gives you the tools and insights to turn your website into a reliable source that consistently achieves great outcomes.
3. Bing Webmaster Tools: A Free SEO Gem for Small Businesses
Bing Webmaster Tools is an often underappreciated, yet highly useful, free platform that provides SEO insights for small businesses. With features designed to help website owners optimize their online presence, it serves as a cost-effective alternative or complement to Google Search Console.
As of July 2023, online search engine Bing accounted for 10.51 percent of the global desktop search market, while market leader Google had a share of around 81.95 percent. (Statista)
Bing Webmaster Tools can help you identify keywords and backlinks for free.
Spy on Competitors’ Backlinks for Free
Unlike paid tools, Bing lets you analyze competitor backlinks without a subscription.
Go to the “Backlinks” tab of one of your verified domains. Then, in “Backlinks To Any Site” add a site to compare (add your competitor’s URL). You will then have a list of referring domains that you can potentially target for your next link-building campaign.
4. Ahrefs: Competitor Research Tools & SEO Backlink Checker
Knowledge is power, especially in the competitive world of SEO. Ahrefs is one of the best and most advanced SEO tools available. With its advanced web crawling capabilities, it basically provides you with much of the internet’s data in a structured and manageable way. This is one of the reasons why it does not come cheap – starting at $119 per month (it is way worth it).
Fun facts about Ahrefs:
– They process 5 million pages per minute with their web crawler, AhrefsBot, which is the 2nd most active crawler worldwide.
– The keyword index includes 110 billion keywords, with 28.7 billion filtered keywords for detailed insights.
– Ahrefs’ content index covers 16.3 billion pages, discovering 10 million new pages daily and updating metrics for 300 million pages every 24 hours.
– Their backlink index holds 35 trillion external backlink records and 413.8 billion pages.
Find Easy to Rank for Keywords
Ahrefs is a great keyword tool. With the “Keyword Explorer,” you can spot high-volume and low-competition keywords that your competitors might not pay attention to giving you a fighting chance to rank your small business to the top ranks of Google.
Start in the “Keyword Explorer” and enter a general keyword related to your niche like “SEO”. Then, click on “Matching terms”.
Using Ahrefs filter parameters, filter out any keywords with a difficulty higher than 9 and a DR (domain rating) of higher than 49 in the top 5 results. This will provide you with a large list of potentially easy-to-rank keywords for your niche.
You can take this a step further by filtering by term. Select one of the terms on the left-hand side to get even more specific.
Pro tip: Create pages for each of these key terms in order to grow your topical authority.
Steal Your Competitor’s Backlinks
Backlinks are probably the most important aspect of a good SEO strategy. Basically, if you want your small business website to rank for “money” keywords (the keywords that bring the most money-making traffic), you need to have good quality backlinks. Here is how you can steal them from your competitors using Ahrefs.
First, identify your competition. Who is your closest number one competitor? I am not talking about Nike or Addidas, but rather the big local chain in your area or your specific niche.
Add their website URL to the “Site Explorer” in Ahrefs.
Then, head over to the “Backlinks” tab. Use Ahref’s parameters to filter by “Do Follow”, maximum DR to 89, and filter by “Anchor text” – this is where you add your specific service or product. Lastly, make sure to filter by “One link per domain”.
Filtering by “Anchor text” ensures that the backlink is actually related to your service or product.
You now have a list of referring pages or websites that you can contact to request a backlink to your website.
Get the blueprint to getting quality backlinks in bulk ⇒
5. Hunter: Email Finder and Outreach Platform for SEO and Prospecting
Connecting with the right people can make all the difference, and Hunter is your go-to solution for finding and verifying professional email addresses. Trusted by most professional SEO experts and link builders, it leverages proprietary technology and AI to help you identify relevant leads and enrich contact details – great for backlink outreach.
Hunter’s pricing starts at $49 per month. Try it free ⇒
Find Emails for Backlink Outreach with Hunter
Backlinks are one of the most important things for any website to rank. Backlinks (links from other websites to yours) are like trust signals to search engines. The more good quality backlinks you have pointing to your website, the more “trustworthy” it seems to Google. And, in return, Google will reward your small business website with higher rankings.
But how do you get them? Well, one of the best ways to get backlinks is to simply contact the website owner you want a backlink from and ask them for one.
Hunter makes this super easy. First, start in the “Discover” tab. This is where you will find relevant businesses to contact. Enter your small business industry, add a business size (start small 1-10), and enter a keyword that you specialize in.
Here’s a list of businesses you could contact for a guest post or link insertion (over 1,600 of them). Click the “Find email addresses” to get the emails of the website owners and admins.
Now, you have a list of emails you can contact. Or, you can use Hunter’s Campaigns module, allowing you to compose, personalize, and schedule emails at scale using these emails.
Get the backlink outreach blueprint ⇒
6. Answerthepublic: SEO & Keyword Tool
Content ideas can be hard to find, but Answerthepublic makes it easy. This smart SEO keyword research tool provides you with questions your target audience is asking online. It is a great way to find ideas for all types of content ideas.
Think about creating content that answers the questions of your target audience. Answerthepublic helps you achieve this and provides you with data from Google, Bing, YouTube, TikTok, and more.
Answer Your Target Audience’s Questions
Answerthepublic helps you connect with your target audience by providing you with a collection of questions for any topic. This will help you create content that addresses their problems, challenges, and goals turning you into the go-to expert in your field.
You get 3 free daily searches on the free plan.
7. Screaming Frog: SEO Spider Tool & Crawler Software
Screaming Frog Spider is an essential tool for all your technical SEO needs. This SEO tool explores your site in almost every detail. It looks at each page for technical issues, broken links, and other things that might hurt your SEO performance.
Technical SEO is important but can often be ignored. It is the base of any strong SEO strategy and should be the first thing you check before doing any type of SEO.
Fix Technical SEO Issues with Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is free for up to 500 URL crawls.
From broken links to slow loading speeds, Screaming Frog finds technical SEO problems that could hurt your website’s ranking potential. To fix these issues quickly, begin by adding your website URL.
As you can see in the image above, Screaming Frog will crawl all your website URLs (including images, files, and everything else). But where you need to focus your attention is the ‘Issues’ tab. Here you’ll be presented with various technical issues that need to be addressed.
In the ‘Issues’ tab, you can select the specific issue and the left-hand side will provide you with the URLs related to that issue.
Unlock the benefits of a well-optimized website and watch your organic traffic grow. Screaming Frog offers tools to check and fix technical SEO issues. This way, your website runs smoothly and gets great results.
8. ChatGPT: Your All-in-one SEO Assistant
The growth of AI has changed content optimization forever. ChatGPT has been a leader in this exciting area. This AI language model (if used wisely) can work as a helpful and intelligent SEO assistant. Chat GPT can help with tasks like keyword research, content creation, and competitor analysis.
Find Low-Competition Keywords with Chat GPT
A great way to use Chat GPT for SEO is to task it with finding unique keywords for a specific niche. This is especially useful if you are a small business just starting out and don’t have the budget to spend hundreds of dollars on SEO tools like Ahrefs and Semrush.
To have Chat GPT find low-competition keywords for you, use a query similar to the one below:
“You are a helpful and intelligent SEO assistant. I am looking for a list of unique keywords for the niche {your niche}. Your task is to provide me with a list of easy to rank, low completion keywords based on the following criteria: 1) The keywords should each be unique but related to {your niche}, 2) The list of keywords should be long tail keywords and a minimum of 3 words, 3) The list of keywords should be categorised by their specific search intent (informational, navigational, transcational and commercial). Please provide me with a keyword list. Provide me with a minimum of 10 keywords for each search intent.”
Scrape URLs With WebPilot
WebPilot is a custom GPT that allows you to scrape URLs and extract useful information from competitor pages. This comes in handy for SEO when you use it to provide an SEO plan to help outrank the top results for a specific keyword.
For example, let’s say you are trying to rank for the keyword “most expensive cities in Europe”. Do a simple Google search and copy the top three URL results (organic not ads). Now, in WebPilot, provide a prompt like:
“Striclty using these URLs: {Top result URL #1}, {Top result URL #2}, {Top URL result #3}.
These three URLs are the top 3 Google results for the keyword {your keyword}. Your task is to identify any gaps or benefits that I can capitalise on for my own blog targeting the same keyword. Please identify any potential topics that are missing from these URLs that you feel could add value to the topic. Provide me with your response with topic ideas, including their headlines and a brief outline of what I should include.”
9. Exploding Topics: Identify Trending Topics
In a competitive market, staying ahead of the curve can mean the difference between gaining thousands of clicks or just a few hundred. Exploding Topics empowers small businesses to seize that advantage by identifying emerging trends before they become mainstream.
By leveraging cutting-edge technology, including advanced algorithms and human expertise, Exploding Topics monitors millions of data points from sources like social media, search engines, and e-commerce platforms. This proactive approach helps you pinpoint new opportunities in your field.
Find Trends Before They Go Mainstream
Exploding Topics looks at millions of data points from social media, search engines, and online forums. To find trending topics, filter by the last 2 years, add your category (industry), and find a list of trending topics, products, and terms.
You can also find more information regarding a specific topic by clicking on it. In addition, you will be provided with a list of related topics you can potentially cover as well.
Be the first to cover these topics to grab all the attention.
10. Scalenut: AI-powered SEO Content Writing
If you’re serious about getting organic traffic from Google and other search engines, you need a blog section. Writing high-quality content is king when it comes to ranking your website and topical authority.
Scalenut gets you more than half of the way there by providing you with an already SEO-optimized blog post based on the top Google search results.
This AI-driven writing tool helps you identify the right keywords to rank for with its own “Keyword Planner”, which helps you auto-optimize blog posts with its auto-optimize feature, and create brand new SEO-optimized content with their “Article Writer”.
Scalenut is your go-to SEO content writing tool for small businesses.
Write an SEO-optimized article in a few Clicks
With their user-friendly UI, Scalenut makes it easy to create articles that are already SEO optimized.
Start in their “Keyword Planner” and provide the topic you want to rank for. Select the country you want to target and hit “Plan”.
When finished, “Open Report”. You will be presented with a list of keywords ideas with “Search Volume” and “Keywords Difficulty”. Select one with a good search to KD ratio, and select “Create Article”
Scalenut will take a few minutes to write the full article as it is pulling the information based on the top-performing articles on Google of your chosen keyword and compiling it into a value-packed blog post. When done, you will be able to click on “Open Article”.
Remeber! While Scalenut does a great job of providing you with a well-structured, well-optimized blog post, you can’t let the AI do all the work. So your job is to go through all the sections of this blog post and humanize it, add your experience and expertise, and your unique insights.
At the same time, pay attention to the “Optimize” tab on the right.
Make sure to increase your SEO score by following the guidelines in the “Section Score”.
If you do AI-based content optimization right, you can quickly increase your website’s organic traffic. Scalenut helps you with keyword research and content creation. Your job is to make sure you provide unique insights and your own expertise on the topic.
Scalenut is great for writing SEO-optimized content in English. But, if you’re looking to write in multiple languages, look at Surferseo.
11. Rank Math for WordPress
Rank Math is a free WordPress plugin. It is a must-have SEO plugin packed with cool features for small businesses like keyword monitoring, advanced schema generation, easy built-in integrations with Google, 404 monitoring, redirects, and more mostly for free.
Enhance SEO Efforts With Ranks Math
Rank Math provides an easy way to make small SEO optimizations and configure your meta stage titles and descriptions. Meta information is the information provided to the user on search results. They are important for making a good first impression. These short summaries help attract visitors and can increase your click-through rate (CTR).
Conclusion
In conclusion, the right SEO tools can really help small businesses improve their online presence and draw in more visitors. Using tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, and ChatGPT makes your SEO work easier and can improve your website’s performance. It is important to know how these tools work and to use them in your digital marketing plan. This will help you stay ahead in the changing online world. Whether you are just starting or want to make your current SEO work better, choosing the right tools can greatly increase your organic traffic and help your business grow online.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which SEO tool is best for small businesses just starting out?
For beginners, Google Search Console is a great place to start. It offers essential information about how your website performs and the rankings of your keywords. When you use it with Google Analytics to analyze user experience, you will build a strong base for SEO.
How can SEO tools improve website traffic for a small business?
SEO tools help improve search results. They do this by finding the right keywords and making content better. This attracts more organic traffic. These tools also look at how users behave on a website. With this information, it’s easier to create a user-friendly site that can rank higher.
Are there any free SEO tools that are effective for small businesses?
Yes, Google Search Console and Google Analytics provide a lot of data at no cost. Also, using the keyword planner in Google Ads can help a lot. Plus, Google My Business is great for local SEO. This can really help small businesses succeed.
How often should SEO tools be used for analysis and updates?
Regular checks, either every week or month, using SEO tools is a good idea to track progress. You should make updates, like technical SEO fixes, all the time. This should be based on what the data tells you and any changes in search engine rules.
