Free Google tools for your small business
As a small business, you should take advantage of anything that can help make you more visible online. Thankfully, Google offers a number of free tools that businesses can use to track your website traffic, improve your site’s local search engine optimisation (SEO), and did I mention it’s free?
Google Analytics
Google Analytics gives you the free tools that you need to analyse data for your business in one place. You can learn more about your customers, understand how people come to your site, and how they interact with it but I’ve seen many sites that don’t have the tracking set up or are just ignoring it.
The information you can glean from Google Analytics is vital in helping you make decisions about how to market your business more effectively. If you see that most of your conversions come from your Facebook page, you’ll know that choosing to focus your efforts on social media will have a higher probability of success and will be more likely to pay off.
And looking at stats around page views and time on page can help you determine which pages or areas of your site needs to be improved. This will ultimately help you deliver a great user experience to your customers.
Google My Business
Google My Business is another free tool that I don’t see many people making the most of, or even using at all. It helps to give you more control over your online presence and appearance in Google search results and Google Maps. It’s particularly important for businesses who want to show up in local searches.
If you’ve ever searched for a business’ name, you’ll often see their GMB ‘knowledge panel’ pop up. This is a card containing important information customers want to know about a business and it takes up a prominent position on all devices.
At a glance, potential customers can learn a lot about your business and even make a decision about whether or not they want to visit your business or your website. Your listing can include information such as:
- Business name
- Business type
- Address
- Opening hours
- Phone number
- Link to website
- Images
- Customer reviews
- Overall star rating
Google Search Console
Search Console is (another) free service from Google that helps you monitor, maintain and troubleshoot your site’s presence in search results. It helps you understand and improve how Google sees your site and gives you a lot of information about your site and the people who visit it.
There is some crossover with Analytics (mentioned above) in terms of getting data on people who visit your site, how they’re finding it, and whether people are visiting your site on a mobile, tablet or desktop. Although, I mainly use Search Console to find and fix website errors, submit a sitemap, and create and check a robots.txt file.
Useful Links
If you’re looking for a more complete list of SEO resources, take a look at this post.
If you need help setting up any of the above, or making sense of the data, get in touch with me. I’d be happy to help.