Google offers 7 essential free Google services for small business owners and digital marketers to get the most out of their digital marketing activities
When it comes to search, there is no doubt that Google is the 800-pound Gorilla, at least for the time being. The same applies to local search. To help make the most of the Internet, Google offers 7 essential free Google services for small business owners, web masters and digital marketers.
For most small businesses, local search is what is going to be of most importance. Local SEO is a highly effective form of local online marketing. It allows local businesses to promote their services to local services at exactly the time they are looking for that type of business.
Local SEO is very important for the following reasons:
- 18% of local mobile searches lead to a sale within a day.
- 60% of American adults use smartphones and tablets to search for local product and service information.
- 50% of local-mobile searchers are looking for business information like a local address.
- 78% of local-mobile searches result in offline purchases.
- 46% of all searches on Google are local
- 76% of local searches result in a phone call
To help digital marketers and small business owners succeed online, Google has 7 great tools that are available for free. Not only are these tools free, they are some of the best tools available at any price.
Here is the list of 7 great tools from Google for digital marketers and small businesses:
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a analytics service that provides statistics and basic analytic tools for search engine optimization and marketing purposes. The service is available to anyone with a Google account. Google Analytics is targeted at small to medium sized websites. Larger, more complex websites have data needs that are better met using paid analytics solutions. However, for the small business owner, Google Analytics is the best.
Google Analytics may take some time getting used to but it is manageable. There are over 100 different reports that are available to users in Google Analytics. As a result, you are able to find at least a few reports that are key performance indicators of your site goals and digital marketing activities.
Google Analytics features include:
- Data visualization tools including a dashboard, motion charts and score cars that map data changes over time.
- Segmentation for analysis of subsets, such as conversions.
- Custom reports
- Email-based sharing and communication.
- Integration with Google products, such as AdWords and Website Optimizer.
Google Analytics is a great way to answer such questions as where is your traffic coming from? What pages are people looking at? What are people doing once they are on your site? Such information can be used to determine digital marketing and content marketing strategy
Google AdWords
Google AdWords is an advertising service for businesses wanting to display ads on Google and its advertising network. The AdWords program enables businesses to set a budget for advertising and pay only when people click the ads. While there are display, video, and remarketing ads, the service is largely focused on keywords.
For all that it is, Adwords is very simple and effective. In simple terms, a digital marketer or small business owner picks relevant keywords, which will trigger ads when searched within Google.
To optimize Google AdWords, there is the matter of synchronizing your keyword, ad, landing page and call-to-action across Google and your website. To run a campaign, digital marketers and small business owners set a budget, a length of time, basic parameters such as location and time of day that the ad should run, and let it run.
To get the most out of Google AdWords, it is important to understand how to set up campaigns as well as how the auctions work. Otherwise, you could end up wasting time and money.
Google Optimize
Google Optimize is integrated within the Google Analytics suite of tools. Optimize is a tool for digital marketers and small business owners who want to do simple A/B testing.
A/B testing is a when several versions of a specific page are shown to user to identify the best version that is going to bring about the most conversions. A/B testing can be very exact with marketers testing details that range from more obvious features such as a title to colors and images.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a process for increasing the percentage of visitors to a website that convert into customers, or more generally, take any desired action on a webpage. A/B testing is one of the simplest ways to go about doing conversion rate optimization on your website.
The foundation of CRO is continuous testing to find the combination of factors that bring about the best results, whether it be sales, leads, or newsletter subscriptions. It can be a very effective digital marketing strategy if you are dealing with a product or service that costs a lot of money or requires a large amount of traffic.
Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is a part of the Google AdWords suite of online tools that enables digital marketers and small business owners to research keywords for paid advertising campaigns. While Keyword Planner is primarily intended to estimate traffic and other data for paid search campaigns, it can be applied to research for organic search campaigns as well.
Keyword Planner also helps digital marketers and small business owners develop new, relevant search terms and keywords for their existing products, business and customers. Often thought of as a thesaurus for Google AdWords, the more relevant, exact keywords you have, the greater the likelihood for a larger return on investment.
By researching keywords ahead of time, you can target certain search keywords, users, and audiences with a high degree of accuracy.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free service directed at digital marketers, business owners and web masters. It enables you to monitor and maintain your site’s presence in Google Search results. You don’t have to sign up for the service to be included in Google’s search results, but doing so will help you understand how Google views your site. It is the only way that web site owners can interact with the team at Google that runs organic search.
While the ins and outs of Google Search Console may be more than what a business owner would want to take on, they should have an understanding of what it does. This way, they be able to better oversee the person who they delegate oversight of Search Console to.
Some of the things that you can do in Google Search Console is to:
- Ensure that Google can access your content
- Submit sitemaps
- Monitor spam and malware issues
- See which keywords people entered to see what caused your site to show up in search results
- What sites are linking to yours
- Mobile performance
- And more.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a change detection and notification service that sends emails when it finds new results, such as web pages, newspaper articles, blogs, and scientific research that matches the user’s search terms. It is used by politicians, PR specialists and corporations and is a great resource for small business owners as well.
To illustrate how it works, a small business owner can create an alert for their competitor or their product line. Google Alerts will automatically send the business owner an email informing them that there is some news that they are tracking. It enables users to stay one step ahead of the competition and the news cycle.
Google Trends
Google Trends is a tool that shows how often a particular search term is entered relative to the total search volume across various regions around the world and in various languages. For digital marketers and small business owners, it is a great way to gather valuable intelligence on a wide range of subjects. For example, Google Trends can be used to track popularity of a product or target market over time.
In Closing
Google is the 800-pound Gorilla in the world of search and SEO. Fortunately, success with Google and digital marketing does not have to be a mystery. Google makes a number of helpful tools to help small business owners fully leverage Google and the Internet to their benefit.
Hopefully, this article has given readers a basic overview of the tools that Google makes available to website owners.
I welcome any questions, comments, or feedback that you might have. I also have extensive experience with Google Analytics and AdWords. Please feel free to contact me with questions. We can also help with:
Content Marketing for Local Business
Digital Marketing for Local Business
Sales Funnels for Local Business