For startups with a limited marketing budget, being found through search engines is one of the most cost effective ways to generate leads. If you are producing helpful content such as blog posts or guides to help potential customers, you of course want prospects to start finding these materials through social media, your company newsletter and of course, through Google search.
In a previous blog post, we listed 4 free, basic SEO tools that every WordPress website should have. In this blog post, we list 5 more free tools that help with SEO for startups.
1. Quick Sprout Website Analyzer
Need a general idea of how your website’s SEO is doing? Quick Sprout’s free website analyzer gives you grades on various factors including SEO, page speed and warnings. It also provides general SEO recommendations, as well as specific diagnostics on keywords for your website.
If you’re new to SEO, this is a great tool to start with. Quick Sprout also has a great collection of practical SEO, sales and marketing blog posts.
2. Google My Business
Google My Business shows your company on a map next to the organic search results when people search for your business name. Showing potential customers that you have a physical office adds credibility to your name, especially if you’re a new company. In addition, business listings are verified by Google with a physical postcard with a code, which adds credibility to your business. Your Google My Business profile also links back to your company’s website which helps customers find your website.
3. Broken Link Checker
Broken links are links that point to pages that don’t exist. This may be caused by a typo by who ever created the link, or the page being linked to has been removed. It’s important to fix broken links to ensure a good user experience, and also because having a lot of broken links can affect your search rankings.
The Broken Link Checker is a free online tool that identifies all the broken links on your website, the page it’s found on in your website, and where the broken URL is pointing to.
4. SEO PowerSuite
The quality and the quantity of links to your website is a key factor in your website search rankings. However, it can be challenging to get links when you’re a new company because not many people may know about you or your products/services.
One way to find potential people to link to you is by checking who links to your competitors using a free tool called SEO PowerSuite. Once you enter a URL, the tool finds all the pages that link to the site, as well as details associated with each linking page such as the total number of links on that page. For example, if you’re a mobile developer of health apps, you may find a page from a technology blog that has compiled a list of health app developers and you can then email them to ask if they’d list you as well.
5. Pingdom Website Speed Test
Page speed is known to affect Google search rankings, so a tool like Pingdom that helps debug your page’s load speed is certainly useful.
After entering the webpage you want to analyze, such as your company’s homepage, Pingdom gives you a complete list of
every file that had to be loaded in order to render that page, as well as the size and how long it each individual component took to load.
This list lets you identify the files which the largest in size or slowest to load, so you that you can make changes as necessary. For example, there may be an image that’s 2,000 pixels wide that can be resized to 500 pixels; once you replace this image with a small version, you should see the load time drop slightly.
What other SEO tools would you recommend for startups or companies who are new to SEO, or have new websites? Follow us on Twitter at @vapartners for daily tips on sales, marketing and social media.
