12 FREE Google tools to help you in your business!

Did you know that besides the more commonly known Google Workspace, Google Drive, Google Maps and Google ads tools that you may be using that there are even more FREE tools by Google to help you with your marketing insights? So many of these are little known gems to help small business owners make more informed decisions and unlock valuable insights to help them grow. I’ve started toying around with a couple of the lesser known ones recently and it’s revealed a couple of areas of focus for me to look into around my website optimisation.

With the end of the year fast approaching I highly recommend exploring some of these to aid with your 2022 plans!

So here’s a list for you (in no particular order)

Google Analytics https://analytics.google.com/

Google Analytics is an absolute MUST to be using for information about where your traffic is coming from and how your visitors are behaving on your site. It is one of the first things I check out when I start working with a new client.

Google Surveys (Forms) https://surveys.google.com/

Google Surveys helps you to create surveys cost effectively to gain valuable insights amongst your audience and customers!

Google Trends https://trends.google.com/trends/?geo=NZ

A great search tool for trending topics right now that you can use for content planning for your biz.

Google Keyword Planner https://ads.google.com/keyword_planner

This is a great free tool to gain ideas for keyword targeting options, you can run your website and your competitor websites through it for recommendations for targeting for your business and content ideas! You could also run relevant product or services terms for ideas too.

Google Looker Studio https://lookerstudio.google.com/
This is a fantastic dashboard set up for customised reports (that make sense for YOUR business goals and objectives) to help you make better, more data informed decisions. It obviously integrates with Google tools but you can also use other plugin software (which does cost but is a worthwile investment to consider for the time it will save) to also bring in data from your social and e-commerce platforms. Im currently upskilling myself on Data Studio and building out some custom reports for some of my clients and loving it so far.

Google Page Speed insights https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

The page load speed of your site is quite a big deal for your SEO, anything that takes longer than 3seconds to load is going to cost you visitors and therefore business. This is especially important if most of your web traffic is coming from mobile devices (you can check out whether thats the case using Google Analytics)

Google Search Console https://search.google.com/search-console/

Another great tool to help you get better SEO, the search console helps you measure your site’s Search traffic and performance, fix any issues (like broken links!) and make your site shine in Google’s Search results.

Google Business Profile https://business.google.com/

This is awesome for helping to promote and showcase local businesses in particular. Note there is a bit of a rigmarole around having to get a postcard sent with a verification code to your physical address that may take up to two weeks, but overall it’s worth it as it’s great for helping with your SEO ranking too!

Google Optimize https://optimize.google.com/optimize/home/

This is a free website optimization tool that helps you with understanding how you can increase visitor conversion rates and overall visitor satisfaction by testing different combinations of website content such as different landing pages, it integrates really well into Google Analytics to help you understand how to further improve your website.

Google Adsense https://www.google.com/adsense/

Got a reasonable amount of traffic coming into your website or blog? Ever wondered how Google sources all those websites for running ads on their Google Display networks? Well this is how that happens. All you have to do is add a piece of code to your site and voila! you could be earning some $!

Think With Google https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-aunz/

This is a really handy library of articles and resources to help you with marketing your business. Its well worth checking in on every so often (and yes theres an option to localise to the asia-pacific region too!)

Google Alerts https://www.google.co.nz/alerts

This is a super useful tool and really simple to set up to help you keep an eye on the topics, search terms and queries most important to you and your business. Delivered to your inbox so you can stay on top of real-time mentions, media coverage, new content, and more, all without having to invest in an expensive monitoring service

So that’s quite the list of FREE tools to help you with gaining more valuable insights about your business BUT before you go off into bright shiny object syndrome and/or overwhelm. Just pick one or two of these to explore over the next month.

From my perspective the absolute MUST that you should be using of these is Google Analytics followed by establishing your Google My Business Profile.

If content is something you struggle with a bit then Google Alerts/Keyword Planner and Trends would be where I’d go next.

If it’s website improvements that you think would be of most value then Search Console, Optimise and Page speed insights would be the tools for you.

We help get your business ‘found’ on Google with our Digital Platforms audit. If you are interested in learning more about this – book a call in with us to chat!