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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 Ads, AdWords and Keyword Planner

Google Ads is another Google tool that is essential for any marketer. It is basically Google's online advertising program and you can use it to create ads and target your focus audience. This helps you increase traffic, sell your product, and create awareness around your website. That is where Google AdWords comes in. As an advertiser, you will choose the list of keywords that are the most relevant to your business and you want to target. Of course, you need to come up with your own list of keywords but how do you know for sure what people are searching for?

Google has that covered as well with the Google Keyword Planner. You can use the "find keywords" option to find new keywords in your niche. As Google says, just “Enter words, phrases, or a URL related to your business.” and they will come up with keyword suggestions for you based on avg. monthly searches, competition and other metrics. This way you have data on the keywords that perform the best for your niche and you are not basing your ads on a pure hunch.

Of course, there are other people out there building ads on the same keywords as you are, that is why this system works like an auction. You have to bid on the keywords that best fit your products, this will be the cost you pay Google every time a user clicks your ad (CPC). The quality score is another important factor that, combined with the amount you bid, influences whether your ad will show up in the SERPs or not. Optimizing your bid amount and quality score is essential for your ads to show up more. There are some factors that you should pay attention to when wanting to improve your quality score. For one, relevance is very important to Google, so building ads that are relevant to the landing page they lead to and to the search query are very important. Google also takes a look at the performance of your account when determining your quality score. Achieving a good performance with ads and AdWords is a matter of trial and error, constant improvement and having a constant overview of your campaigns' data.

Google Ads, AdWords and Keyword Planner

Google Ads is another Google tool that is essential for any marketer. It is basically Google's online advertising program and you can use it to create ads and target your focus audience. This helps you increase traffic, sell your product, and create awareness around your website. That is where Google AdWords comes in. As an advertiser, you will choose the list of keywords that are the most relevant to your business and you want to target. Of course, you need to come up with your own list of keywords but how do you know for sure what people are searching for?

Google has that covered as well with the Google Keyword Planner. You can use the "find keywords" option to find new keywords in your niche. As Google says, just “Enter words, phrases, or a URL related to your business.” and they will come up with keyword suggestions for you based on avg. monthly searches, competition and other metrics. This way you have data on the keywords that perform the best for your niche and you are not basing your ads on a pure hunch.

Of course, there are other people out there building ads on the same keywords as you are, that is why this system works like an auction. You have to bid on the keywords that best fit your products, this will be the cost you pay Google every time a user clicks your ad (CPC). The quality score is another important factor that, combined with the amount you bid, influences whether your ad will show up in the SERPs or not. Optimizing your bid amount and quality score is essential for your ads to show up more. There are some factors that you should pay attention to when wanting to improve your quality score. For one, relevance is very important to Google, so building ads that are relevant to the landing page they lead to and to the search query are very important. Google also takes a look at the performance of your account when determining your quality score. Achieving a good performance with ads and AdWords is a matter of trial and error, constant improvement and having a constant overview of your campaigns' data.

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 Search Console

Google Search Console, is another free tool Google offers, but this one is specially addressed to webmasters. It is the place to go if you want to understand how Google views your site and how to optimize your website's performance in search results. There is a huge amount of data available that you can analyze.

You get a direct access to an overview of your website's performance for the last three months on the status page. Opening the performance report shows you a summary of the key metrics (total clicks, total impressions, average CTR and average position) for the last 7 days, up to 12 months or all the available data. You can also compare two different periods of time in the report to see if your metrics and performance are improving. You can see what pages are getting more traffic, what countries does the traffic come from and on what devices (mobile or desktop). The index coverage shows you the number of pages that have been indexed and what errors occurred. You also get suggestions on what you should improve on your pages in the enhancements section.

These are only a few options of the complex Google Search Console, so we definitely think you should think about using it if you aren't already.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console, is another free tool Google offers, but this one is specially addressed to webmasters. It is the place to go if you want to understand how Google views your site and how to optimize your website's performance in search results. There is a huge amount of data available that you can analyze.

You get a direct access to an overview of your website's performance for the last three months on the status page. Opening the performance report shows you a summary of the key metrics (total clicks, total impressions, average CTR and average position) for the last 7 days, up to 12 months or all the available data. You can also compare two different periods of time in the report to see if your metrics and performance are improving. You can see what pages are getting more traffic, what countries does the traffic come from and on what devices (mobile or desktop). The index coverage shows you the number of pages that have been indexed and what errors occurred. You also get suggestions on what you should improve on your pages in the enhancements section.

These are only a few options of the complex Google Search Console, so we definitely think you should think about using it if you aren't already.

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 Tag Manager and Google Tag Assistant

Going on, we will talk about Google Tag Manager, a very important tool that improves your website speed, it's easy to use, you don't need a developer to use it and allows you to make agile decisions. The Tag Manager basically takes all of the tracking codes on your website and combines them into one JavaScript file. This speeds up your website considerably. For example, there is no use to have your Facebook Pixel or AdWords conversions running on all your pages. You can now set which page you want them to track on. This will improve the website loading time and with it the user experience. The tool also makes installing Google Ads and social media trackers much easier, as most of them are already integrated with Google Tag Manager. There is even a chrome extension that helps you troubleshoot Google Tag Manager.

You can add the Google Tag Assistant extension to make instant changes to your tags and make sure they are all working correctly. One of its most important features is that it lets you record the user flow of your website and analyses your tag set up on the spot. This helps you find errors in your tags, missing events, and other glitches.

Google Tag Manager and Google Tag Assistant

Going on, we will talk about Google Tag Manager, a very important tool that improves your website speed, it's easy to use, you don't need a developer to use it and allows you to make agile decisions. The Tag Manager basically takes all of the tracking codes on your website and combines them into one JavaScript file. This speeds up your website considerably. For example, there is no use to have your Facebook Pixel or AdWords conversions running on all your pages. You can now set which page you want them to track on. This will improve the website loading time and with it the user experience. The tool also makes installing Google Ads and social media trackers much easier, as most of them are already integrated with Google Tag Manager. There is even a chrome extension that helps you troubleshoot Google Tag Manager.

You can add the Google Tag Assistant extension to make instant changes to your tags and make sure they are all working correctly. One of its most important features is that it lets you record the user flow of your website and analyses your tag set up on the spot. This helps you find errors in your tags, missing events, and other glitches.

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.

Google Drive

In this day and age data is essential to any business, so tracking traffic, conversions, speed and optimizing your website should be on your top priorities list. But also organizing this data will help you and your team a lot in the long run. This is where Google's cloud storage service comes in hand.

Google Drive lets you store files, videos, images and transfer them to any computer, tablet or smartphone. You can even backup your entire PC to make sure all your files are safe. The free version comes with 15GB of storage space that you use to store items on Drive, Gmail, and Photos. Of course, they have paid plans for people who need more storage space. There are a number of different file formats you can store on Google Drive, but you can check the full list here. The fact that it is connected with Google office productivity suite makes things even easier for you. So every time you create a Google Doc, Slide or Sheet it is automatically saved in your Drive and available for you to share with anyone. Using Google Drive from your iPhone or Android is extremely easy and you can immediately access all your documents.

Google Drive

In this day and age data is essential to any business, so tracking traffic, conversions, speed and optimizing your website should be on your top priorities list. But also organizing this data will help you and your team a lot in the long run. This is where Google's cloud storage service comes in hand.

Google Drive lets you store files, videos, images and transfer them to any computer, tablet or smartphone. You can even backup your entire PC to make sure all your files are safe. The free version comes with 15GB of storage space that you use to store items on Drive, Gmail, and Photos. Of course, they have paid plans for people who need more storage space. There are a number of different file formats you can store on Google Drive, but you can check the full list here. The fact that it is connected with Google office productivity suite makes things even easier for you. So every time you create a Google Doc, Slide or Sheet it is automatically saved in your Drive and available for you to share with anyone. Using Google Drive from your iPhone or Android is extremely easy and you can immediately access all your documents.

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.

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