Back to all articlesGoogle is so much more than a search engine – even though it is known for its popular search engine getting 3.5 billion searches per day, Google also has numerous business tools that can be immensely valuable for your marketing team and your business.
We rounded up a list of crucial Google business tools so you can ensure that your business is taking full advantage of what Google has to offer.
1. Google My Business
Want to get some free advertising on Google? Google My Business[insert link] does just that for you! By claiming your Google My Business listing, your business can get featured in the Google Rankings results, as well as Google Maps for local searches! Contrary to Google Adwords, you do not have to pay for your position to get onto the Google Ranking when listing yourself on Google My Business.
When you set up your listing, you’ll automatically create a Google+ Page for your business as well, which leads us to our second Google marketing tool.
2. Google+
As a business, setting up and maintaining a Google+ Page works alongside your Google My Business listing – making Google+ even more important for you and your business! It is important to maintain a page as a link to the page is given automatically when creating a Google My Business listing as potential consumers will be redirected to that page when seeing your listing on the Google rankings.
Using Google+ as a marketing tool allows you to branch out to your demographic, similarly to any other social media platform. Some features include:
- Real-Time Stream: In Google+, the stream flows as new updates are posted. New updates automatically show up at the top of your stream after you log in, and new comments appear automatically as people comment on the posts.
- Circles: You use Circles to organise the people you follow on Google+ and you can use Circles to organize your stream.
- Tagging: Just type + or @, followed by the person’s name to tag them. The person will be notified that you tagged them and linked to your post.
Google+ is a feature-rich social networking experience. From instant, real-time updates to sharing a post from almost any Google application, the features in the on the network makes the Google+ experience all the more special!
3. Google Suite
Want to collaborate with your colleagues on a project? Google suite is a swarm of efficient collaboration tools you can use in your workplace to replace typical software on your desktop:
- Google Docs
- Google Sheets
- Google Slides
- Google Forms
These Real-time collaboration tools can be used for a numerous amount of tasks, you can collaborate on marketing data analysis, market research, blog drafts. presentations and surveys/polls! All of the software saves automatically so there is no need to worry about losing your work and all your documents can be accessed across all your devices by downloading the app.
4. Google Webmaster
Want a better insight into how well you site performs in the eyes of Google? By setting up a Google Webmaster Tools account, it will alert you about any red flags that could stop you from ranking higher in Google search.It also helps you analyse your existing search traffic so you can understand how your visitors are finding you.
Here is an overview on how to efficiently optimise your site for Google Rankings by using Webmaster Tools:
5. Google Calendar
Being organised is a key to being a efficient marketer – by using Google Calendar, you give yourself an easy way to organise your day, keep track of meetings and share your calendar with your colleagues. You can also use Google Apps for Work so your colleagues can automatically use Google Calendar to book meeting rooms and check co-workers meeting availability.
Google Calendar can also be a good way to set up an editable calendar to organise blog and other marketing content and share it with co-workers!
6. Google Adwords
You can give your organic efforts of optimisation a jumpstart by using Google Adwords – it allows you use Google’s Pay-Per-Click (PPC) product to run campaigns to reach your suited demographic.
You create ads that target specific keywords related to your business and your ads appear above or to the right of organic search results on Google when people search for these keywords. The cost of the ad will depend on how competitive the keyword is that you have targeted, and you only pay if the visitors actually click on your ad!
However, you need to keep in mind that AdWords can quickly become an expensive tool to use, and, unlike organic search, PPC offers a quick way to reach your audience, whereas organic search provides longer-term and free results. If used correctly, PPC can help you plan your SEO optimisation for your organic search strategy.
By testing different keywords in PPC, you can quickly figure out what keywords will send you traffic from your targeted demographic.
7. Google Adwords Keyword Planner
Keyword research helps you helps you identify keywords to target when creating blogs, website content, SEO and content creation efforts so you can be found by your preferred target audience.
The Google Adwords Keyword Planner, can help you search for significant keywords to your business that your audience will search for. Even though it is used to plan Adword campaigns, it can be helpful for your organic keyword research as well as the keyword planner gives you suggestions and ideas to help find the perfect keywords to be found on Google Rankings!
Bare in mind that you will have to create an Adwords account to use Google Keyword Planner, but that does mean you have create an Ad.
8. Google Analytics
How many of your visitors are brand new vs returning? What is your best performing webpage or piece of content? Does your site have a high bounce rate?
All of these analytical questions can be answered in Google Analytics! This is Google’s free website analytics product. It is used to give your a smarter and accurate insight into your website traffic, how well your content is performing and understand how people are finding your site in the first place and how they navigate round it!
It has so many features to help you judge where to market your content and how to reach your preferred audience by having features such as:
- Advertising and campaign performance features
- Audience behaviour
- Sales and conversions
- Site and App performance
- Analyse and testing
Google has so many more additional features to help improve your business!
Google has a numerous amount of tools to help enhance the performance of your business. Not everyone will want or need to implement all these tools into their day-to-day work, but even using the basic tools – when used correctly – can make your business more efficient, smarter and intellectually developed when communicating to your customers!