I’m a Boston Newborn Photographer, and last year business was very slow for me. I realized that year over year my website traffic had decreased, along with my inquiries, bookings, and therefore revenue. The truth is, I created a nice website and hoped that my gorgeous images would speak for themselves. I never really gave a thought to the copy I used or simple coding options I had in WordPress. When I finally started to do some research, I was shocked to find that I was ranking in the low 30s for my most important keywords, and my prospective clients just weren’t finding me.

I dedicated my new free time to optimizing my website for SEO, blogging consistently, and monitoring my rankings using free tools. It didn’t happen overnight, but I saw my rankings, impressions and clicks, and traffic climb higher and higher week over week. I’m now ranking in the top 5 for all my main keywords, and my bookings and revenue is higher than it’s ever been. I didn’t spend any money doing it.

If you’re a small business owner, you’ve probably heard the term SEO tossed around, but maybe it feels too confusing (or expensive) to focus on. In today’s world, simply having a beautiful website isn’t enough. If your ideal customers can’t find you online, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is what helps your business show up when people search for services like yours on Google—and for small businesses, that visibility is everything.

Whether you’re a local service provider, an online shop, or a creative entrepreneur, SEO drives organic (free) traffic to your website. It’s one of the most effective, long-term ways to grow your audience and bring in steady business—without relying entirely on ads or social media. The good news is it doesn’t have to cost you anything to get started.

In this post, we’ll explore some free tools you can start using today to improve and monitor your SEO.

Google Search Console

Start here to analyze your website and see how many clicks and impressions your website is getting on Google searches, and for what keywords. You can even drill down into individual pages to see how you’re ranking, and what devices people are using. This is also where you can check your site’s indexing to make sure all of your pages are actually being crawled by Google. Run their Core Web Vitals and PageSpeed Insights tools to find performance issues and issues to address. If you do one thing from this blog post, this is it.

SEO Edge

This is an easy to use app where you can track rankings for specific keywords. You can enter in the keywords you want to track, and see your ranking number, the top 100 listings for that keyword, and the ranking over time. Essentially this app searches each of your keywords on Google and shows you where your website will rank all in one list, so you don’t have to go through and do individual searches. It also saves each search so you can track your ranking over time. The first 5 terms are free, and their subscription for 12 months is $20 for unlimited keywords.

Yoast SEO

Yoast is a free WordPress Plugin that helps you optimize pages and posts for specific keywords. While you are editing a page or post in WordPress, the plugin will analyze the text and give you suggestions for improvement, through both readability and SEO analysis. It will also allow you to add a meta description and see how the search result will show in Google. This serves mostly as a checklist to make sure you are including your keyword properly on the page.

SEM Rush

This is an in-depth SEO and website analysis dashboard. It’s a paid tool that offers some free options that are very helpful. You could spend hours clicking around and digging into the data but I specifically use this for their Site Audit, which will flag SEO specific issues or errors, as well as information on how to fix them. Check your site overall or use the on page SEO checker to see how to optimize specific pages. Their competitive research section also allows you to see what your competitors are ranking for and identify relevant backlink opportunities. I also

Google Business Profile

You’ve probably created a Google Business Profile for your website already, but if you just added your website and phone number, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity for optimization. First, you want to make sure to add an address to show up on Google Maps for searches. This means your business will show up when someone is searching IN Google Maps but ALSO when that little map pops up on the side of a regular Google search. Next, make sure you add detailed and descriptive products and services to your Profile. Google will pull from this when they choose a result to highlight. Be sure to go through all of the Profile fields and be mindful of the keywords you are including. I also like to post “updates” here using my blog posts. I include the title and first paragraph, with a Learn More button linking to my blog post.

Google Reviews

Technically this is part of your Google Business Profile, but it deserves its own shout out. Google reviews not only help build trust with prospective customers, but also help with your site’s ranking. Google pulls search terms and highlights them in their results, so I recommend asking for reviews (with a link directly for them to write them on your Profile) in any way that you can. As a photographer, I send a thank you email after I deliver clients’ final images with a link to review me on Google, explaining how important it is to my business. Click the “Ask for a Review” for the link to send.

This is a contributed blog post by Whitney O’Brien, a newborn, maternity, and family photographer with a studio in Dedham, MA. Before running her photography business full-time, she worked in Marketing for a decade. She’s passionate about creating gorgeous artwork for her clients and operating a successful business that supports her family.

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