I'm an SEO consultant for startups, and my company, CanIRank, has been featured on Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Search Engine Roundtable, and CNET. My team and I have helped startups go from 141 to over 150,000 monthly organic search visitors in six months and have helped dozens of startups get to page one in Google within months.

As a startup with a limited budget and even less time, it’s essential to research and select the right SEO content software tools. Fortunately for startups, creativity, strategy, and brainpower matter more than a marketing budget (or lack thereof)! There are a number of free/affordable tools out there to optimize your content and rankings.

SEMRush, Moz,and Ahrefs are all great tools, but keep in mind that they require a lot of data mining and analysis. If you’re not a seasoned SEO pro, all of the heavy data work might be overwhelming for SEO newbies and busy startups.

For startup teams that have less SEO experience and are short on time but want to hop on the SEO train, Yoast SEO, CanIRank, BuzzSumo, and WooRank are solid options.

If you use Wordpress, Yoast SEO is a must-have plug-in. Yoast SEO’s most useful features are free and include a built-in content analysis tool, meta and description management, keyword manager, social tools, and a lot more. The content analysis tool analyzes your site in real-time and checks for readability and the presence of your primary keyword.

My company’s tool, CanIRank (https://www.canirank.com/ ), is especially helpful for startups who are hurting for time and resources. CanIRank is a comprehensive SEO intelligence tool that pulls data from well-known SEO services, such as Moz and SEMRush, and then delivers personalized insights, recommendations, and opportunities in a dashboard. Our software does the heavy lifting (collecting and analyzing data) for you, so you’re not spending hours trying to make sense of the numbers.

CanIRank focuses on delivering actionable opportunities over raw data, so you can achieve tangible results sooner than later. Each content optimization opportunity comes with DIY instructions for straightforward execution. And if you’re really short on time, our team of SEO experts are always there to jump in and execute those opportunities for you, freeing you up even more.

BuzzSumo is great for identifying content that’s performing well in a specific niche and generating content ideas for your own site.

WooRank is a helpful SEO audit tool that lets you enter your site url and then generates a personalized report (that you can download as a branded pdf), indicating potential issues and areas of improvement.

Regardless of which software tools are used, it’s essential for startups to not only produce significant value through content but to develop a repeatable content amplification process to get all of that content out there! Strategically researching where to send your content – whether it’s to social media influencers, forums, Q&A sites, aggregator sites in your niche – and then sending it out there has some serious SEO benefits. Here’s a blog post (http://www.canirank.com/blog/define-content-amplification-process/ ) on content amplification that you might find helpful and want to keep in your arsenal.