Small business owners rely on the Internet to bring them traffic and leads. An owner must have an online presence, and paid or organic traffic are the only options. Organic traffic is a long-term approach, but it’s one of the most fruitful options.
Large businesses use both organic and paid options to increase sales. Small business owners with a smaller budget will often choose the organic route to help build their web presence. But when you hire an outside company to do all of your marketing, you also need to have the tools required to monitor and check their work.
You need to know that the marketing is working. These tools help you make sense of your marketing campaign and ensure that your site’s web presence is slowly being built.
IMAGE: PEXELS
1. Google Webmaster Tools
Every list seems to start with Webmaster Tools. Since it’s offered by Google, it makes sense to use tools from the biggest search engine in the world to monitor your SEO. Why would you use this tool?
- It’s free
- PageSpeed insights are offered
- You can fetch your site as Google to find performance errors
- Monitor site issues
- Monitor links
- Monitor crawl errors and security issues
Your SEO company is going to build links to your site, and you want to make sure that you check these links for quality. Correcting errors and ensuring that you’re not receiving spam links is a must for a small business owner.
2. UpCity Report Card
UpCity provides a report card for your website’s SEO. What’s really nice about this free tool is that it allows you to:
- Compare your site to a competitor’s site
- Check your report by keyword
- View link building statistics
- Check on-site analysis
- Monitor trust metrics
- Check website accessibility
- View a numerical report of your site
UpCity makes it easy to view your site’s SEO performance at-a-glance. The performance ensures that your marketing agency is doing their job. You’ll be able to quickly view summaries of how well your site is doing compared to your competitors.
3. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Screaming Frog is a tool that you’ll want to use when having on-page optimization performed. You’ll also use this tool periodically to ensure that your site is always updated. There’s a free and paid version, but most sites will find that the free version is all they need.
This tool can be used for:
- Spotting and identifying site errors
- Locating broken links
- Analyzing redirects
- Page title and meta-analysis
- Meta robot information
- Sitemap generation
- Duplicate content location
Screaming Frog offers a simple, free way to make sure that proper optimization is occurring on-page and off-page. Keep in mind that this is just one of many tools that can be used to monitor your on-site optimization.
A few additional, free tools, that are definitely worth a look and have their place in all SMB owner arsenals include:
Small business owners that take a hands-on approach to the monitoring of their online marketing efforts can hold marketing agencies accountable and ensure their money is being properly spent.
If you are interested in even more app-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels then we have a lot to choose from.
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