Introduction: Why Black Friday is the Perfect Time to Invest in SEO
Black Friday and Cyber Monday represent the best time of year to invest in SEO tools and services at discounted rates. With many providers like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Surfer SEO offering significant deals for a limited time, startups can grab premium tools that normally carry hefty price tags at a fraction of the cost.
Taking advantage of Black Friday SEO deals now pays dividends in the coming year by providing a strong foundation to boost site traffic, rankings, and conversions when you need it most. SEO is an investment in the future health of your online presence and takes time to reflect in search engine results. Using seasonal sales to make that investment sets startups on the path for sustainable growth in 2023.
For example, investing in a comprehensive SEO audit during the Black Friday sales can uncover critical issues hurting your rankings. Addressing those problems now leads to gradual improvements in organic visibility over the next 6-12 months.
While the initial traffic boost from Black Friday promotions is temporary, the long-term SEO gains are lasting. Investing in the right tools provides startups with the insights, optimization capabilities, and resources to establish best practices that continue elevating their presence. SEO establishes trust and authority with Google to earn high rankings for the long haul.
This guide covers the most impactful types of SEO tools for startups, including auditing tools to reveal optimization opportunities, on-page optimizers to improve existing content, link builders to earn backlinks at scale, technical SEO solutions to improve site speed and performance, and more. Leveraging these solutions now creates a ripple effect that pays dividends for months and years down the road.
SEO Auditing Tools to Identify Problems
Comprehensive SEO audits reveal optimization opportunities and benchmark current performance. Powerful crawlers identify issues that may be penalizing rankings while competitive analysis exposes gaps compared to rivals.
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Ahrefs and SEMrush - The leading SEO suites provide complete audits encompassing on-page factors, technical issues, backlinks, rankings, and more. Their keyword research tools also help uncover untapped terms.
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Screaming Frog - This desktop crawler provides granular technical and on-page audits to fix problems like duplicate content, meta issues, broken links, etc. Its readability checks also analyze content optimization.
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Ubersuggest - Neil Patel's free tool makes keyword research simple. The SEO content analyzer also checks on-page optimization and identifies new opportunities.
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Surfer SEO - This Chrome extension analyzes on-page factors like titles, meta descriptions, headings, and page speed for every site you visit, revealing optimization gaps.
Thorough audits expose the most pressing problems to address first. Detailed competitive analysis also reveals attainable keyword targets to pursue among rivals.
For example, a backlink analysis may show competitors have more links from high authority sites. Outreach to similar domains could help close this gap.
Site Crawlers to Index New Content
Site crawlers ensure search engines properly index and discover new content. Regular crawling provides the best chance for new pages and posts to rank quickly.
Proper indexing enables Google to find and display fresh blog posts and website pages in search results as soon as they are published. This allows you to capitalize on trending topics faster.
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Screaming Frog - This powerful crawler simulates Googlebot to crawl every page and URL on your site, uncovering issues blocking indexing.
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DeepCrawl - A cloud-based solution, DeepCrawl provides in-depth crawling and audits along with actionable optimization recommendations.
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SEO Spider - A cost-effective crawling tool starting under $10/month, SEO Spider helps index new content and identifies issues preventing indexing.
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XML Sitemaps - Sitemaps make crawling more efficient by providing search engines with a list of all pages to index. Useful for improving large sites.
Routine crawling ensures search engines index content quickly after publishing for the best chance to capitalize on trending topics and keywords.
Backlink Checkers for Link-Building Insights
Analyzing the backlink profiles of sites ranking for target keywords reveals link-building opportunities. Tracking new links also helps gauge the impact of outreach campaigns.
Building a diverse backlink profile across different link types, anchor text variations, and referring domains helps sustain long-term rankings.
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Ahrefs and SEMrush - These SEO leaders provide the most exhaustive backlink data, including new, lost, and toxic links. Filter by domain authority, location, anchor text, and more.
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Monitor Backlinks - This real-time backlink tracking tool alerts you to new links from competitors or mentions as they occur to evaluate their impact.
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Majestic - With a vast index of historic backlink data dating back more than 10 years, Majestic identifies influential domains to connect with.
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Google Search Console - Google's free tool shows links to your site and allows you to disavow toxic backlinks harming rankings.
Despite fluctuations in Google's algorithms, backlinks remain a crucial ranking signal. Using deals to develop a robust, diverse backlink profile pays off long after seasonal sales end.
On-Page Optimization Tools for Better Content
Creating optimized content is equally important as technical factors for ranking well. The right tools help streamline content creation and improve existing posts.
For instance, Yoast SEO analyzes content and provides actionable suggestions to optimize it for focus keywords and related terms. This typically improves rankings for those terms over time.
Readability scores help assess whether content is well-organized, conversational, and easy to consume. AI tools provide SEO recommendations to improve pages on the fly while AI writers craft new content optimized for keywords and conversions from the start.
For example:
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Yoast SEO and Frase - These on-page optimizers analyze content and generate actionable suggestions to boost optimization for focus keywords and related terms.
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Jasper and Conversion.ai - These AI writing assistants create new blog posts and landing pages tailored to target keywords and audiences while optimizing readability.
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Surfer SEO - This tool checks on-page factors like meta titles and descriptions and HTML headings, helping optimize existing content.
Creating content optimized for ranking potential and user experience from the start makes hitting SEO goals easier.
Keyword Research Tools for Targeting Topics
Thorough keyword research reveals the topics and search terms driving relevant organic traffic to competitors. This enables startups to expand beyond their core focus keywords and target related low competition long-tail variations.
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Ubersuggest - Neil Patel's free keyword tool makes it simple to generate related keywords and filter suggestions by search volume, CPC data, and more.
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SEMrush - A vast keyword database with precise local monthly search volume data to identify high-potential, low-competition targets.
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Ahrefs - Using its comprehensive backlink data for a seed keyword reveals hundreds of untapped long-tail keyword opportunities.
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Answer the Public - This tool generates keyword suggestions based on actual questions people search to find topics resonating with users.
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Google Trends - Identifying rising trends helps create timely content despite low current volume for those terms. Prioritize growing keywords.
Curating keywords that align with a niche, exhibit solid volume, and have achievable rankings builds organic search visibility over time. This ensures content targets topics people are actively searching for.
Competitive Analysis for Gauging Difficulty
Thorough competitive analysis reveals where competitors are outranking you and the gaps in their strategies to target and outperform.
For example, analyzing a rival's top organic keywords in SEMrush may uncover low competition terms to target. Reviewing their most linked pages in Ahrefs can reveal content ideas.
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SEMrush and Ahrefs - These leading suites compile competitors' top pages, organic keywords, paid ads, backlinks, and more in one dashboard.
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SERPstat - This rank tracker shows competitors' rankings for target terms over time to identify opportunities.
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Followerwonk - Analyze competitors' Twitter bios and users to uncover their social media SEO strategies.
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SimilarWeb - Gain insights into competitors' traffic sources, which reveal their most effective customer acquisition channels.
Gauging the difficulty of ranking for potential targets helps set realistic expectations and shape effective, differentiated strategies leveraging competitors' weaknesses.
Link Building Tools to Earn Backlinks
Earning backlinks remains crucial for sustaining rankings. Outreach tools streamline the process of identifying and connecting with relevant sites.
When doing outreach, focus on building relationships with sites closely aligned to your niche. Avoid spamming low-quality links.
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Pitchbox and GroupHigh - These AI-powered outreach tools provide templates and automation to simplify blogger outreach at scale.
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BuzzStream and NinjaOutreach - Streamline backlink outreach campaigns with email templates, tracking, and automation to save time.
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LinkMiner - Discover new opportunities by analyzing the backlinks of domains relevant to your niche and competitors.
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BuzzSumo and Ahrefs - These tools reveal what content performs best for target keywords to create sharable assets that earn links.
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Google Search Console - Review links pointing to your site and leverage them to identify authoritative domains to connect with.
Building a diverse link profile across domains, keywords, and anchor text is essential for stable rankings resistant to future algorithm shifts.
Site Speed and Technical SEO Tools
Site speed significantly impacts conversions, bounce rates, and organic rankings. Diagnosing and resolving speed issues provides lasting improvements.
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GTmetrix and WebPageTest - These free tools audit page load times from multiple locations and suggest improvements targeting bottlenecks.
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Cloudflare - This CDN and caching solution accelerates site performance and provides free SSL security.
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BunnyCDN - An affordable, high-performance CDN starting at $2/month to cache assets and improve page speed.
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Redirect Path - This tool identifies and fixes broken redirects, prevents 404 errors, and streamlines redirection chains.
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Screaming Frog - This crawler audits technical SEO issues like broken links, duplicate content, metadata, etc. hampering performance.
With page speed becoming a ranking factor, using deals to optimize technical SEO saves money while keeping your site competitive.
For example, Cloudflare's Black Friday sale makes it more affordable for startups to leverage its performance and security benefits.
Conclusion and Summary: Leveraging Deals for Long-Term SEO Success
The limited-time discounts available during Black Friday and Cyber Monday make powerful SEO tools more accessible for startups. Investing in solutions like comprehensive audits, backlink checkers, on-page optimizers, and site speed tools during seasonal sales creates a strong SEO foundation for long-term success.
While the initial traffic and sales boosts from promotional periods are short-lived, their lasting benefits compound over the coming year. SEO is an investment in the future health and growth of an online business. Startups that leverage deals to build sustainable best practices now will reap the rewards with improved organic rankings, traffic, and conversions down the road.
The most critical tools for early-stage growth cover SEO audits, content optimization, backlink building, and technical site improvements. By identifying the solutions that best address their needs, startups can grab premium SEO resources at entry-level prices this Black Friday to support their organic presence in 2023 and beyond.
