In the ever-evolving world of digital marketing, it can be a challenge to stay on top of the latest tools for things like analytics and keyword research. Amid all the resources available, it can be difficult to know which ones are worth your time and money.
That said, a lot of people are not aware that there are many Google products available to help businesses of all sizes understand their website traffic and make better marketing decisions. Better yet, many of them are free! We’ve selected five of the most useful to give you and your business a leg up.
Google Business Profile
Formerly called Google My Business, this tool allows you to determine how your business will appear in Google and Google Maps search results. You can choose to add photos—including a logo and a cover photo, hours of operation, and any other information that will help showcase your business.
Give an overview of your business, so your potential new customers know what they’re in for. Are you a vegan business? Owned by a minority demographic? Wheelchair accessible? Do you welcome pets? Take extra security or health measures? Let people know! We’ve also covered the many benefits of having a Google Business Profile account for local businesses here.
Google Analytics
Get invaluable insight into how your website is being used. By inserting tracking code into your website, you can see what types of devices people are using to access your website and their geographic location, time of day, duration of their visit, conversions and bounce rate, and much, much more.
See which of your digital marketing campaigns are most effective by tracking how people reached your website: via a link in an email, a Google search, or typing your website’s address directly into the navigation bar.
This tool offers a treasure trove of data that can be quite challenging to sort through at first glance. Luckily, Google also offers free certification courses at the basic and advanced levels to help you get the most out of Google Analytics.
Google Workspace
You are likely already familiar with many of the Google products offered in the Google Workspace suite, but they also offer a package deal on the business versions of these applications, including:
- Gmail
- Calendar
- Sheets
- Meet
- Chat
- Docs
- Slides
Google Workspace is the only entry in this list that is not free. But for what you get, the cost is not high. They offer four different plans to cater to the needs of various types of business users.
Google Trends
A popular tool with digital marketing professionals, SEO analysts, and content writers, Google Trends gives data and visual representations of how frequently specific words or phrases are searched for.
It tells you how many times the word or phrase was searched in any given country or worldwide. You can filter the data to give results for various periods of time such as the past hour, day, week, month, or since 2004.
User-friendly graphs depict how interest in a topic has changed over time. This tool also specifies whether the keyword in question was searched as a general search, image, news, shopping, or YouTube search.
Google Search Console
This is a tool designed for webmasters to better be able to interface with Google and maximize their website’s visibility to the search engine.
This is accomplished by showing how the site is crawled and indexed, which empowers webmasters to discover any errors that might have occurred in the indexing process.
These types of errors can negatively impact a website’s rankings on the Google search results page, making this free tool quite valuable to businesses with an online presence.
While these tools will help your efforts, they won’t cover all aspects of digital marketing needed to fully grow your local business. If you need help coming up with marketing strategies that work, we can help!
Klout 9 is a full-service digital marketing agency dedicated to providing personalized strategies to help achieve your business goals. Unsure where to start? Just give us a call for a free consultation!