10 Free Online Tools Every Small Business Should Be Using

The cost of expensive software can quickly add up for a small business owner struggling to keep costs down. Luckily, despite the high cost of a lot of big name software solutions, there are many free alternatives out there that small businesses can use to get the job done.

Although Moz’s best SEO features do require a monthly fee to access, its free Open Site Explorer provides basic but important insights on your website’s inbound link profile. This is particularly important if your site has spammy backlinks, which can be disavowed through Google to develop a natural and authoritative linking history.

Additionally, Moz Local allows you to determine any potential problems in your local online strategy.

Researching and learning basic SEO skills for website optimisation can transform a small business’s fortunes. Smart SEO can ensure your website adheres to Google’s quality guidelines and shows up higher in search results.

Keyword research will help you to structure your content around the words most used by your target demographic, and should influence everything from homepage meta tags to blog posts and landing pages.

You can also mix things up with other tools such as Keyword.io , which will suggest keywords. This doesn’t come with any form of key metrics, but you can take these keywords and run them through Google’s software for further analysis.

Small businesses can use Screaming Frog for a full website analysis, including 500 web pages crawled for free. The tool helps to unearth broken links as well as locate landing pages that might be missing important meta tags.

Another good option is Siteliner , which will find any duplicate content across your site and provide detailed analysis along with updates on broken links.

With this customer relationship management (CRM) software solution for Gmail, it’s possible to run your business from your email inbox.  Streak  is made for people who aren’t tech savvy, and you won’t need an engineer to set it up. This cloud-based solution is designed, as the company says, to help you “close more deals, resolve more support tickets, and Get Things Done.”

With effective management of projects, a small business can flourish. The good news is that many normally expensive software solutions offer free versions. Wrike , for instance, offers a free version of its software that is ideal for marketing, creative, project management, and product development teams.

The free version is for no more than five people, and it offers features such as task management, file sharing, a real-time activity stream, a spreadsheet view, and 2GB of storage. The software is also available for smartphones. If you find it useful, Wrike’s professional upgrade is under $10 per month for up to 15 people.

If you regularly send emails to important clients or customers, grammatical errors in your writing can reflect badly on you and your business. Tools such as Grammarly provide prompts when familiar errors occur, such as the misuse of “their,” “there,” and “they’re.” Have an extra set of eyes on your writing, even if it’s in the form of a web-based tool, can help ensure your work always comes across as professional.

Available for both desktop and mobile use, Evernote is an excellent tool for jotting down ideas and collecting notes for projects. It also allows you to share notes with others, screengrab interesting snippets from online articles, and keep all your ideas in one easily accessible place.

One of the downsides of the internet era is the need to manage a small army of varying passwords for seemingly endless services. The solution? Download a password management tool. Tools such as LastPass and Dashlane collect everything into one account and will sign you in automatically to your accounts as soon as you reach the login page. These tools can save you from the endless hassle of requesting password reminders and resetting forgotten login info.

Small businesses developing content strategies will find Answer the Public offers the chance to establish search queries, topics, and questions their target audiences are using. Based on the results you receive, you can develop content (blog posts, landing pages, etc.) around the questions being asked. This allows your business to proactively respond to what an audience wants, whilst providing the chance to rank in Google’s SERPs for popular search terms.

Sourcing images for websites and blog posts remains a challenge for many small businesses. Professional stock image services can be expensive, but using random images pulled off the web can result in copyright infringement and legal issues.

The solution is to look for copyright-free resources. Pixabay can help you make your written content more visually engaging by providing a free resource for photos, illustrations, and even videos. All Pixabay images are released free of copyrights under Creative Commons CC0.

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