SMB SEO

Technical SEO, audits and speed for small businesses

Crawlers, site audits, speed tools, redirects and international SEO. We list 42, and 29 have a free plan.

Order: tools we’ve tested come first, by score, then the rest alphabetically. Payment never changes the order.

Prices checked between Oct 6, 2026 and Oct 13, 2026. How prices compare across categories

How to choose a technical SEO tool

Updated Oct 9, 2026.

Start with Search Console

Google Search Console is “a free service offered by Google” (Google Search Console Help), and several of its reports check things a site audit tool also looks at: the Index coverage report lists the pages Google indexed or tried to index, the Core Web Vitals report shows how pages perform “based on real world usage data”, and the rich result reports show the structured data Google could or couldn’t read (Google Search Central). There’s no need to sign in every day, since Search Console emails you when Google finds new issues (Google Search Central). A crawler or audit tool earns its price when you need to check pages Google hasn’t reported on, or run checks Search Console doesn’t, across your whole site whenever you choose.

Know what your platform already handles

Shopify says every store handles canonical tags, a sitemap and a robots.txt file on its own (Shopify Help Center). For sitemaps, Google says that on a platform such as WordPress, Wix or Blogger, “it’s likely that your CMS has already made a sitemap available to search engines and you don’t have to do anything”, and that a small site, “about 500 pages or fewer”, may not need one if every important page can be reached through its menu or links and it doesn’t have many videos, images or news pages to show in search (Google Search Central). Before you pay a tool to add any of these, check what your platform already does.

Read duplicate content warnings calmly

If an audit lists duplicate pages, remember that Google says “Some duplicate content on a site is normal and it’s not a violation of Google’s spam policies”, and that a canonical tag is “a hint, not a rule”: Google picks one page from a set of duplicates and usually shows that one (Google Search Central). Google notes that duplicates can be a bad experience for visitors and can make it harder to track how your content performs, so tidy them up, but an ordinary duplicate isn’t a spam policy violation.

Measure speed the way Google does

Core Web Vitals “measure real-world user experience”, and Google’s targets are a Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, an Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds and a Cumulative Layout Shift score under 0.1 (Google Search Central). Check whether a speed tool reports these from real visitors’ data or from a single test run of its own, and compare it with Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report.

Sources for this guide

Words to know