What are people searching for on Google?

A lot of small businesses can not afford to pay thousands of dollars on paying data companies to identify the keywords that their potential clients/customers are searching. So for all the small businesses out there, here are my top 7 free online tools to help you increase traffic to your website.

Remember that most of these free tools come with restrictions, so I suggest using a mix of all of them, understand the data and then make the required changes to increase quality traffic to your website.

1. Neil Patel - UberSuggests

This is my favorite free tool out there!

Sign in and provide your website domain name and watch the free magic happen. This program analyses your top ranking keywords that you can use to create a blog, improve SEO ranking and build a more seamless experience for your online customers. Using this website for our client K.M. Cash Remodeling in Virginia Beach identified the top remodeling keywords this month - 'Kitchen Remodel Virginia Beach.'

With this information Royals Advertising will work on ensuring that we optimize this top searched keyword phrase and write a blog that provides us with the ability to implement these keywords and generate some of this traffic to K.M. Cash Remodeling.

The system also crawls your site and completes a site audit, this information provides quick easy solutions as well as complicated fixes that will improve your website ranking. These changes can be as simple as adding H1 tags to your website or shortening your title tags. It can also include more difficult tasks that may require a coder to complete (if this is the case, I recommend going on UpWork to find someone who can fix the problem at a reasonable rate).

One final benefit is that you can see how your competitors are doing. Make sure to search their URL and see how you can compare.

One downside I have noticed is that the backlinks are not pulling the correct data. So be careful when assessing this section. Backlinks are so important, so let's find a tool that also provides you with this information.

2. Ahrefs

After testing this tool with a number of our Hampton Roads small business clients this tool provides you with your list of backlinks. Again you can even put your competitor's url in and see how you compare. Everything else on this site is subscription only, but do take advantage of the backlink audit tool! It's great!

3. Buzzsumo

It is free for 7 days! Take a tour and get all the information you can. This tool is great for finding online influencers and identifying the top performing articles and blogs across the web. Why do you need this information? This information is helpful in understanding what your clients are reading about and what their interests are. Finding the popular content from specific keywords will assist you in growing your reach. For example searching 'swim school for kids' and then targeting the content to 'Virginia, USA' we pulled the below results. If any of these blogs/articles has the ability to comment - go for it! Just remember to add your url to the end of your comment.

Additionally, you can set up keyword alerts with mentions of your brand and media, your competitors and specific keywords that you want to focus on. It provides you with blog articles that mention these keywords, the popularity and traffic of that keyword and more!

4. Answer the Public

This is a free tool that helps you see what questions people will most likely search in the future. This is great for blogging and webpage content to make sure you are answering the questions that most people are asking.

To use our remodeling company as an example, we put in the search tab 'remodeling' and 141 questions appeared for this search result. One that stood out to me was 'is remodeling worth it?' and 'are remodeling expenses tax deductible?' Now we have two quick blogs we can write or add these question to an FAQ webpage. This will improve the quality of traffic to our client's site as well as build a website that assists these popular queries, thus becoming an information leader in the remodeling industry.

5. Google Ads Keyword Tool

In Google Ads you can click on 'keyword ideas', search a keyword and it will provide you with the popularity and the number of monthly searches for that keyword. If you are not going to pay for Google Ads, I still recommend using this tool. Add the popular local keywords into your blogs and compete by improving your organic search result ranking.

6. Google Search Console

Connecting your domain to Google Search Console will provide you with great insights into how your business is performing on Google. Google gives you for free the:

• top performing queries and webpages

• total clicks, impressions, CTR and average position on Google

• results of your rich data (if you have added structured data to your website)

• search engine traffic from mobile and desktop

• You can also submit your sitemap to Google here, this will also improve your SEO.

• backlinks report

• broken links on your website.

7. Simply Google Search

This is a manual process but it will provide you with the most popular search terms. If you begin to write in the Google search tab - 'swim school' the following populates. For our client's swim school in Norfolk, VA we would make sure that these keywords are in her website title, description, H1 tag and scattered throughout her website and blogs.

These 7 free tools working hand in hand will help your small business in Hampton Roads improve website traffic and ranking on search engines. Make sure to really analyze the data and work on a monthly plan to improve your targeted keywords.

Good luck!