Google Resources
Must use tools to get the best out of SEO
SEO Tips & Tricks: The free Google tools you need to use in 2019
Whether you work in marketing, SEO, or you are just starting out in any of these areas you've definitely used at least one of Google's free tools on a daily basis. But are you enjoying the full potential of the free tools Google is offering? Probably not. Instead of sticking to the things you know, let's branch out a little and explore some new tools, newly added features, and additional uses for the Google tools you might already be working with.
Diving into this, it feels like there is no better place to start than Google Analytics. If you own a website and you are not using Analytics already, what are you doing then?
Google Analytics
Google Analytics, is the tool that gives you insights into your website traffic, you can find out who, when, and where are the people that visit your website. You can find out how much time people spend on your website and what page do they spend the most time on. Then you can go on to draw conclusions on why they leave early and what you can do better to improve your user experience. Because a good user experience means more sales. All you have to do in order to get started is to set up your Google Analytics account through the Google account you already have (or a new one) and install a tracking code on each page of your website. Google Analytics is the voice of reason, it helps you make informed decisions based on real data. So next time you set up a new advertising campaign or decide to write new content pieces you know what already performed for your website and what didn't. Having an informed direction is so much productive than working based on mere hunches.
At first glance of your Analytics account, taking a look under acquisition, the overview tab gives you insights into the user behavior, and conversion data for your top traffic sources by channel (referral, direct, organic search, and social). You can see how many sessions you acquired, the bounce rate for the sessions and the number of conversions for the channels that performed best for you. This is already a valuable insight into your website's performance. You can also find out if your marketing efforts have been worth it or not and adjust your marketing budget accordingly.
Google Trends
While Google Keyword Planner gives you the search volume data for a certain term, Google Trends is a tool that will show you the relative popularity of a term. It eliminates the repeated searches from the same person in order to give you an accurate result on how popular your term is. This tool is great for identifying seasonal trends and making the most out of them. You can see what period of the year people search for your product the most and create content that you release at the exact peak. It also saves you the time you would spend writing content on a term that has good search volumes in Google Keyword Planner but is actually not receiving much interest anymore. You would much rather invest your time in writing content for a query that shows signs of steady or increased popularity.
You can also use Google Trends to plan in advance your content calendar for the year. If you know your products trend in certain months (maybe on certain holidays) they will most certainly trend again next year, so why not be prepared? Using Google Trends together with Google Keyword Planner will help you get an accurate idea of what keywords work for you and when you should use them.
Google Optimize
Google also thought of a tool to help optimize and improve your website's UX. Google Optimize allows you to run tests on your website (A/B testing, redirect tests or multivariate testing) in order to discover the best way to deliver your content. It also connects to your Google Analytics account to pull data and give you a full view of how your tests are working. You can use Google Optimize to adapt your content to different types of customers and therefore achieve a higher conversion rate.
Google PageSeed Insights
Google PageSpeed Insights does what it states, it gives you insights into the loading speed users experience on your page and how you can improve it. But don't be fooled, this is not a page speed test tool like Google Test My Site. The new update for this tool gives you data from the Google Chrome user experience report. This means you get information from the actual experience users have when loading your page. If your page is not having much traffic you might get an "unavailable" message from this tool. The Google PageSpeed Insights provides your website with a speed score, an optimization score, a page load distribution section, a page stats section and optimization suggestions that you should apply to improve your website. Another important thing is that you can get insights on how Google is indexing your website differently for desktop and mobile versions.
What is Google planning for the future?
Google is always finding new ways to improve and refine it's tools so we will continue to improve and add to our list. We hope this was a useful intro to Google Tools for you and do check back soon as we will be adding new tools to the list.
Latest Resources
Want to learn more? We've handpicked the latest news, articles, tools and courses for you.