Over the past couple of years, the rules of the SEO has changed drastically. This has especially been a revolution when it comes to small businesses. With increased awareness and the relevance of quality content, small businesses have been rapidly investing in content. However, besides the quality, you need to make sure that it is backed by the right set of SEO tools and strategies. The old thumb rule when it came to SEO was quite simple,stuff as many keywords you can to rank on the search engines. But with Google changing the way it ranks websites, there has been a rapid change.
To succeed and remain safe, it is important that you use the right set of tools. There are a number of tools that can be used today. Many of them are free and can help small businesses to manage and navigate their SEO strategies to the optimum levels. Some tips that can help you select from the available tools have been discussed below:
- Evaluate the requirements: The internet has an enormous number of options to choose from. However, not all might be something that would help you with your problems. For someone who is looking to get the basics right, it would not be advised to invest in a heavily loaded and feature rich software. For instance, if you merely need something that is capable of doing a keyword research, a free basic tool can do the job quite easily. However, if the requirement is to go deeper, then a paid option is something you need to go for. This may include the discovery of long tail keywords, link building, guest posting and more.
- The Size of your business or website: For a large business you definitely have a team of people who manage different aspects of SEO. If this is your case, you need a comprehensive SEO tool that performs complex tasks and makes the management a lot easier. Moreover, besides the team size, the other thing to consider would be the scope of the website too. In case you have a website with thousands of pages, then a high-end SEO tool is what you need. On the contrary, if you are a small business and want to make things simpler to rank well for your products and services, simple tools with scalability options is the one to go for.
- Compatibility with other tools: The moment you are about to choose an SEO tool, the most important thing to look for would be its compatibility with the other set of tools you have been using. Besides being simple, the tool needs to have the capability to work well with your website and the other marketing tools that you had been using before. For instance, most of the people who have a website running on WordPress prefer using The plugin is advanced and is well compatible with the platform.
The yesteryear strategies are now getting heavily penalized by all the major search engines. The changes have been for the better and one can expect it to be a lot better in the coming few years. However, if you had been using the recommended tools and white hat SEO techniques over the years, this is not something that you should be worried about. The year 2016 saw a number of small and big changes to Google’s algorithm. Starting from the importance of a mobile-friendly website to the value of the web pages, the changes have definitely turned the tables for small businesses.