Far too many businesses still take SEO for granted. Despite the fact the web is still in its infancy, the SEO side of the game has now become very advanced. If you’re running a small business, relying on nothing but obscure tools to optimize your online presence, it’s time to smarten up and get up to speed.
There are so many quality enterprise level SEO tools out there that can help your business get the edge it needs to gain new customers, maintain relationships, and identify what’s working for you and your competition, and what’s not. Simply coasting when it comes to search engine optimization is nothing but a futile recipe for eventual failure.
Here are 6 enterprise-level SEO tools your small business should already be using.
1. Moz
You’ll rarely find an honest list of recommendations of enterprise SEO tools that doesn’t list Moz (formerly SEOmoz) at the top. There are a lot of free tools available that can be of use to a business of any size, such as a non-native keyword and link explorer, and a MozBar extension that works with several browsers. Most businesses will find these tools helpful, but most will want to upgrade to get access to more features such as unlimited search and comparison ability, and professional insights and other advice from their team of SEO professionals.
Keyword research, link building assistance, local search optimization, site optimization reports, full site audits, and more are all possible on Moz. If there was one enterprise level SEO tool to choose for all your small business’s research and optimization needs, this would be the best bang-for buck. The truth is, Moz’s free solutions are limited, and they do offer a free 30 day trial to try either their subscription-based Moz Pro (monthly) or Moz Local (yearly — which is geared more toward local brick-and-mortar retail).
2. Majestic SEO
Majestic SEO is a set of tools for checking a competitor’s (or your own) backlinks and exploring other on-page metrics. Check out what keywords your competition is using, anchor texts that are being used, citation flow, and backlink history, too. Majestic even allows you to compare several (up to five) different site’s SEO information simultaneously — invaluable for so many business owners when it comes to ranking and bidding on paid search keywords and phrases.
Packages start at the silver level and go up to their platinum level, so companies of all sizes can get unrestricted access to the SEO information they need. All packages give you access to all of Majestic’s tools, with limits being placed on the amount of searches you complete. Best, this enterprise level tool links with your Google Webmaster accounts flawlessly.
3. ALPS
ALPS Enterprise SEO Tool lets you take a close look at your business website’s SEO, and offer insights and recommendations on how you can align your business goals with your search strategy, so that you can make better decisions. This is done by incorporating proprietary data science and machine learning algorithms in the process.
ALPS’ reporting and analytical features allow you to overview your SEO activities, determine the gap in your actions, and forecasting the ROI potential of your targeted keywords, including making suggestions on how to maximize the impact of your SEO strategy.
4. Conductor
Your products are what make your small business money. Some are physical products or services. Products can also be straight up web content such as videos on YouTube, written content on a blog, or engaging pictures and posts on social media platforms like Instagram. Conductor helps streamline the content curation, creation and analysis process, by not only suggesting trending content topics you should focus on for your business, but also by letting you know how your pages are performing. This is just the tip of the iceberg of what the Conductor app is capable of, mind you.
Reports are comprehensive, adjustable to your specific needs and scale. Collaboration tools allow you to share entire or specific content and performance data with team members, regardless of where in the world they’re located. Content can be analyzed to the nth degree, from page visibility online, engagement by product line or category, online personas, and the full path taken by the customer to get to your pages. This tool is invaluable for creating cash and SEO generating content people want to see, and getting that content to them at the optimal part of their journey.
5. Google — Everything!
No SEO enterprise toolkit can ever be complete without those provided by the very people that control the majority of SEO online. Google makes the algorithms and builds tools meant to help you optimize virtually every aspect of your website and online SEO presence.
Google Trends is a great place to start when it comes to see what the online world is most interested in reading, listening to, and watching. Keep up on trending topics as they happen, while avoiding wasting time trying to drive traffic to keywords and topics that nobody’s interested in.
Analytics tells you exactly what keywords and content are drawing people into your website, be that a site to support a local business, or a budding blog, vlog, or social media-driven website. Number of users, bounce rate, referral sources, and demographic data are all essential to optimizing a site’s ranking. Tons of advanced tools allow you to set goals, data filters, and gain insights into how to better optimize your site for performance and rankings.
The Adwords Keyword Planner is another essential enterprise level SEO tool that all small businesses need to use to grow their rankings and business. Simply type in the keyword or niche you’re interested in delving into, and the keyword planner will tell you exactly what competition you’re stacking up against. This tool is essential when you decide to get into the paid search game and need to know how your budget matches up with what the competition is paying currently. Metrics, traffic forecasts, and the ability to create and track/compare multiple keyword campaigns are all available with this tool.
6. Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is yet another essential enterprise SEO tool that all businesses need to use. It crawls your sites and others for broken links. Broken incoming links to your site from others can hurt bounce rate, along with other factors. Broken links on your sites hurt SEO and otherwise hurt user experience. As a business grows, the threat of broken links gets bigger and bigger. Use this tool to identify and rectify broken links and canonical issues.
Bonus: Nightwatch
Nightwatch is an SEO tracker of the next generation, designed for companies and agencies tracking high volumes of keywords and high-traffic websites. It is designed for scaling and offers progressive SEO tracking features such as advanced visualization and segmentation of keywords and backlinks, data aggregation, automatic keyword and competitor discovery, smart notifications, and much more.
Nightwatch is exceptionally good at segmentation and visualization of the data. Like no other tool it enables internet professionals to get a better understanding of how search rankings, site changes and traffic correlate and affect search visibility.
It is ideally suited for website owners, marketing agencies and professionals who are focused on scaling up their internet businesses.
Hopefully, you’ll start using the 6 SEO enterprise tools mentioned right away, to improve your small business’s search engine presence and to grow the online side of your business faster than ever before.