3 Completely Free Google Tools For Powerful Business Growth

Free Google Tools For Business Growth

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TLWR: Take advantage of these three very accessible and free Google platforms to grow your business - Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Trends.

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​     When it comes to business growth strategies for small businesses, there is nothing quite as awesome as free tools… as long as they’re reliable. But how can you know if a company offering you free information online is reliable? Don’t worry… I’ve got you covered. If anyone online has proven their reliability, it’s the people over at Google – so in today’s blog we’re going to present you with three completely free online tools from Google that will help you with your business growth plan!

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Google Analytics

     Google Analytics (GA) is a fundamental data tracking tool when it comes to growing your business online. If you are not sure whether you already have an account, I’d suggest asking others on your team (or whoever does your marketing) before you get all gung-ho, find a tutorial, and create a new one. I’d give you kudos for your ambition, but I often see businesses that have unintentionally created multiple GA accounts, and it can make things more complicated than necessary.

​     One issue with creating new accounts is that you won’t have all of the previous data from past years in there… so why start from scratch when you might already have data in another GA account? If someone else has already created an account, you can simply ask them for access and you’re good to go. Having multiple GA accounts can get troublesome when you unintentionally start incorporating multiple tracking codes from all sorts of different places on your website… in this business, let’s always aim to be as streamlined as possible because small errors today can become a large headache for your digital marketing and business success down the line.
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What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is simply the best way to view high-quality data and detailed information about your website(s). Many other data tools you will find actually just get their data from GA, and simply don’t mention it. If you market your business with a website by Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, or other similar builders, they have areas within their backend that show you website analytics and while you might be assuming they are gathering that data themselves… in actuality, they are pulling it from GA and repackaging the look and contents to what they feel is important.
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What practical applications does Google Analytics have?

With Google Analytics, you can see your performance over many years, which can help you make better business decisions. If you notice that you are getting most of your traffic from people on desktop computers, then that could affect the way in which you design your website to optimize for their desktop viewing experience. If you notice your old blog posts are only getting 10 views a month while other newer ones get 1000 views in the same time frame, you can choose whether or not it is time to delete the old post, update it, or incorporate its content into a newer, better-performing blog that it would fit easily within (which would boost the performance of the better blog).

​Are you running a business that can sell products/services around the globe? Then wouldn’t it be nice to know the cities from which you receive the most traffic, so you can create future marketing or ad campaigns that target those areas? The situations where GA can help could go on for nearly forever… but you get the point. This is a free Google tool that you must get today, so you can begin collecting data that allows you to make informed decisions in the months and years ahead.
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Google Search Console

     ​Formerly known as Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console is definitely the second in command when it comes to free data tools offered by Google. After you have created or received access to your GA, this is the next area you should focus on securing.
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What is Google Search Console?

​This online tool’s strength is in search, optimization, and identifying errors. Google Search Console has some overlap of information you can get in GA but it is presented in a simpler fashion… and because of that, there are less options for customization of reporting but you can get in and out much more quickly with the data you were looking for. With GSC, you are able to see simple graphing of the performance of your website. Two of the most regularly graphed data sets I use are the impressions and clicks your website is receiving. You can use this information to adjust the content of your website to create a better user experience.
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What are some example uses of Google Search Console?

Let’s say you populate your graphs, and you see that you are getting 1000 impressions on Google per day for a certain search term, but 0 clicks. You can now ask yourself why that is, and make an adjustment plan to entice more searchers to click your result. What do you think the user’s search intent was? Could the problem be that your title tag is poorly written? These are things you need to be on top of to optimize your online marketing and potential website traffic.

​Another useful tool within GSC is the information they give you on links. You can see all of the websites that link over to yours, which is great for things like tracking backlink growth, or checking whether you have spammy backlinks in order to disavow them and prevent them from negatively affecting Google’s perception of your site (and your ranking).  There are so many great things you are able to do once you have this tool in your arsenal. Get it today and take a look around at all of the information available, so you can decide what’s relevant for your own business goals.
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Google Trends

     Tired of hearing me tell you to go put in work to secure your GA and GSC accounts? Well, you’re in luck! This is a Google tool that you don’t need to sign up for or paste code onto your website to be able to use. This is as simple as it gets… just go visit the site!
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What is Google Trends?

This is a tool I can see you using multiple times a week just because it’s so fun! This tool shows you what is hot right now. It can also tell you if an industry is growing or shrinking in search volume throughout time. You are able to filter by country, state, province, city, time frames, and much more. I’m sure I don’t have to explain much about the practical applications of this to you since it is so straightforward… but here are some uses anyway...
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Using Google Trends to Help Your Business

To take advantage of this tool, simply type in your industry (or relevant industry keywords) and see the spikes in searches/traffic it gets each year during a certain season or month… or week… or day… and then figure out how to capitalize on the seasonality of that.

This tool is also amazing at comparing multiple terms on the same graph. If, for example, you wanted to know if more people in your city were searching for “underarm waxing” or “armpit waxing”, you could compare them in Google Trends (assuming they have enough search traffic in your city).

Example of Google Trends comparison.

Another use for Google Trends is assistance with when to write content. If, for example, you use some tools online to check the search volume for a phrase, and see it received 1,000,000 searches in the current year… you might assume it’s a good topic to create content around. But what if that was just a trendy topic during January of that year because of a celebrity mention, and the remaining 11 months (and presumably for the future as well) it received no searches? This is something you can see in Google Trends, because you can see a giant spike in January and then a trickle of searches for the rest of the year. You would be better off choosing an option that had only 100,000 searches in the entire year but had a more reliable and ongoing search volume so people will actually see your content.

​As with any tool, I could go on forever with ways they can benefit you and your business, but I’d suggest just going over to Google Trends and playing around with it.

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​     There are so many places to go online to find data that it can get very confusing. Don’t overwhelm yourself. Don’t spend money on things you don’t have to. Start by taking full advantage of these three free Google tools over the next month and really get to know them. Once you’ve built an understanding of how they work, and begin to make plans to improve your business thanks to their data… then consider expanding to other platforms or even investing in some of the ones that cost money. For now… get out there and have fun with these!

If you would like to have a professional marketing team handle everything for you then I'd suggest taking a look at our services and reaching out today.

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Author

Julian Lloyd - An entrepreneur, fitness addict, and marketing specialist with over a decade of experience in sales and marketing.