Featured article by Emma Jones, content writer at TechsCrunch
When you’re running a bootstrapped e-commerce business, you don’t have the luxury of testing every strategy available to see what sticks. You must be lean and efficient in your efforts. If you’re not, you’ll be the one paying for it.
One challenging area of running a bootstrapped e-commerce store is deciding how to invest in one of the bigger potential traffic generators out there: SEO.
To keep your budget friendly and results strong, here are five free SEO tools perfect for any bootstrapped e-commerce business.
After your set-up your site via a free e-commerce store template, one of the next things you should do is add it as a property to Google’s Search Console. You can add various properties depending on how specific you want your data, such as particular product pages or category paths. Google Search Console will shed light on which keywords or phrases are bringing users to your site, notify you of site errors, allow you to exclude sections of your site from being indexed, and more.
Now owned by Neil Patel, UberSuggest is a fantastic free keyword tool that works off Google Suggest and Google Keyword Planner through one friendly interface. As with Keyword Planner, you can filter out negative keywords, and search for specific ones through the suggested phrases. For a free tool, UberSuggest hits a home run by generating keyword phrases in search formats beyond generic web results, such as news, image, shopping and YouTube. Each keyword phrase also lists search volume, cost per click for PPC and the keyword difficulty. You can also export the results to CSV.
E-commerce sites have a lot of pages. When a store is launched without SEO-best practices in mind, things can get out of hand. This is where a technical audit comes into play. However, a tool that analyzes your entire website usually costs money. Screaming Frog highlights all your site errors, such as broken links, missing title or meta descriptions, duplicate content, slow-loading pages and a myriad of other issues. Screaming Frog allows site owners to analyze their technical onsite SEO without turning to costly tools like Moz or SEMRush.
Backlinks have been a key ingredient of solid organic rankings for as long as SEO has been alive. SEO Review Tools has quietly been gaining ground in the organic search space as a great ad-hoc analysis resource for small businesses. You won’t be able to view all your backlinks with this tool (no free tool can offer that), but you can get a solid grasp of where you stand versus your competitors.
Backlink Tool shows you the amount of external backlinks you have, your percentage of followed links as well as the number of referring domains and IP addresses pointing to your site. Bonus: Backlink tool also offers a broken backlink checker so you can contact the site owner to get your links live again.
Fat Joe makes money providing link building services, but their free keyword rank checker web extension is a valuable resource for any bootstrapped business. You won’t want to use it to track large amounts of keywords, but it’s a great tool to quickly check where you rank for any keyword across any country domain.
SEO isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it game; it takes time, care—and usually—a healthy budget. However, when you’re running a lean operation, you need to cut corners and find ways to do things more efficiently. These five free SEO tools are perfect for bootstrapped e-commerce businesses looking to do just that.
