Free — $0, forever
Free forever. One website, enough to see your own numbers.
- 25 tracked keywords
- 100 audit pages a month
- 10 keyword lookups a month
The problem
SEO for small business starts with data you already own.
Most SEO tools for small business are sold on a feature list. A small business site usually has one of two problems. Either nobody can find it, or it gets found for the wrong things by the wrong people. Neither problem is solved by a bigger dashboard. Both are solved by looking at what Google already knows about you and acting on it.
That data exists and it is free: Google Search Console records every query your site has been shown for, how many people clicked, and roughly where you ranked. Bing Webmaster Tools does the same for Bing, which on a lot of local sites is a bigger share of traffic than people expect. The catch is that Search Console throws its history away after roughly 16 months and its interface is built for looking, not for working.
So the honest shopping list for a small business is short: keep your own copy of that data, turn it into a list of jobs, and check the site for technical faults often enough that a broken template does not sit there for six months. That is the whole thing. Everything else on a big suite's feature list is real work for somebody, but it is probably not work for you.
The short list
Three tools, and you already own one.
Set these up once and the monthly routine takes about twenty minutes.
Your own search data, kept
Connect Google Search Console — read-only — and MrKeyword stores a daily copy from that moment on. Your history keeps growing past Google's window, so next year you can still answer “were we better in March?”. Add Bing Webmaster Tools if you have it; it costs nothing and it often explains traffic Google cannot.
A short tracked-keyword list
Track the terms you would actually like to be called about: your services, your town, the two or three things people ask for by name. 25 of them on Free is enough for most local businesses. MrKeyword lists the queries you already appear for, so you can pick real ones instead of guessing.
A monthly crawl
60 technical checks across 100 pages a month, which is a complete audit of most small business sites. Each issue comes with what it is, how many pages it affects and what to do about it — sorted so the widest problem is at the top.
All three are on the Free plan: $0, no credit card, and it does not expire. Compare the plans when you outgrow it.
Month one
Start from what you already rank for.
The fastest wins on a small site are almost never new pages. They are queries where you already appear on the second page — Google has decided you are relevant, it just has not decided you are the best answer. MrKeyword collects those into an “almost there” list: positions 11 to 20, sorted by how many impressions they get. Improving one of those pages is a morning's work with a measurable result.
- Every query your site appears for, from your own Search Console
- Filters for page one, almost there, and seen but not clicked
- Add any of them to tracking in one click
- A wrong-page warning when Google ranks a different URL than you meant
Month two
Fix the faults that affect the most pages.
A small site rarely has one catastrophic problem. It has a template fault repeated across forty pages — a missing meta description, a title that is identical on every service page, images with no alt text, a page nobody links to. The audit groups findings by how widespread they are, so you fix one template instead of forty pages.
- 60 checks in three severities, each with the fix written out
- Issues grouped by category and by new, persisting or fixed
- Core Web Vitals from Google, with the source named
- A crawl-over-crawl diff so you can prove the fix landed
Skip these
What a small business does not need to pay for.
A backlink index. The big suites charge for a crawl of the whole web so you can look at anybody's links. It is genuinely expensive to build and genuinely useful to agencies doing outreach at scale. For a plumber in Leeds it is a number to look at once a quarter. MrKeyword does not sell you one — it has no third-party backlink index and says so.
Competitor traffic estimates. Nobody outside a company knows its traffic. Every “competitor traffic” figure in every tool is a model, and the error bars are wide. Making decisions about your own site from a guess about somebody else's is a bad trade.
Daily SERP scraping. Checking a live search result every day for a hundred keywords is what makes rank trackers expensive. The average position your own Search Console reports is a measurement of what real people actually saw, for free, and it is the right number for trend work and client reporting. It is not the same as refreshing a search page yourself, and MrKeyword says so on every screen.
Seats and permissions you do not have people for. If it is you and maybe a designer, a plan sold on twenty seats is not a bargain.
The cost
What this actually costs.
Cheap SEO tools usually mean a crippled free tier designed to annoy you into upgrading. Here is the whole ladder, and the honest reason to move up it.
Basic — $1 a month
One website with real allowances and the weekly email digest.
- 250 tracked keywords
- 1,000 audit pages a month
- 100 keyword lookups a month
Pro AI — $5 a month per website
$5 for the first website, $5 per extra website. AI audits and briefs included.
- 1,000 tracked keywords
- 5,000 audit pages a month
- 500 keyword lookups a month
- 50 AI page audits a month
Move up when the allowance runs out, not because a banner asked you to. If you need more of one thing once, a $5 credit pack works on any plan including Free. Every limit, side by side.
Scope
What this does not do
A small business should know what a tool cannot do before it depends on it.
- It needs Google Search Console. Rank tracking and reports read your verified property. Without one there is nothing to read, and no tool can invent it honestly.
- It is not a website builder or a content writer. MrKeyword tells you what to fix and drafts the title, meta and structured data. You still publish it.
- There is no local-pack or Google Business Profile tracking. If your priority is the map pack, this is not the tool for that part of the job.
- Positions are period averages from Google and Bing, not a live look at page one.
Questions from small business owners
What SEO tools does a small business actually need?
Three things, and you already own the first one. Google Search Console tells you what you are already being found for — it is free and it is the only source that knows your real numbers. Then something to keep a history of it, because Search Console throws data away after about 16 months. Then a crawler, run monthly, to catch the technical faults that quietly cost you pages. MrKeyword's Free plan is all three for $0.
Do I need to pay $100 a month for an SEO suite?
Not to do the work described on this page. The big suites are priced for teams that need a backlink index, competitor traffic estimates and PPC research. If you have one website and want to know what you rank for, what to write next and what is broken, that is Free, or $1 a month for ten times the allowances.
How many keywords should a small business track?
Fewer than you think. 25 is enough to cover the services you sell and the towns you sell them in, which is what Free includes. Tracking 500 keywords you have no page for produces a longer report, not more customers. Basic raises it to 250 when you have earned the need.
How often should I run a site audit?
Monthly is enough for a site that changes slowly, and after any redesign or migration — that is when the expensive faults appear. Free covers 100 pages a month, which audits most small business sites completely. MrKeyword can re-crawl on a schedule so you are told rather than having to remember.
Can I do this without hiring an SEO?
For a small site, largely yes. Every issue the crawler finds is written out in plain English with the fix, and the single-page audit hands you a prompt you can paste into a developer's AI coding assistant. What a good consultant adds is judgement about what is worth doing — not access to secret data.
Is my Google data safe?
The Search Console connection uses Google's read-only scope: MrKeyword can read your performance data and cannot change a property, submit a sitemap or touch your site. Connection tokens are encrypted at rest. The security page lists every scope and control.
Read next
If you run your own site, these help next.
Free SEO tools
The four tools you can use right now on a free account, with no credit card.
Read moreSite audit
What the 60 technical checks look for, and how the health score is calculated.
Read moreKeyword research
Where the search volumes come from, and why some keywords say “Not available”.
Read morePricing
Free, $1 and $5 per website, with every limit listed.
Read moreStart with the free plan.
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