Most of you are aware of Google being the most popular and powerful search engine, but do you know that Google has also created a bunch of marketing tools that are very useful for marketing managers and business owners alike?
Whether you are looking to boost your website’s SEO rankings, increase conversion rates, fine-tune the user experience, manage and track the reputation of your brand, plan and execute your content calendar, or get a handle on your content production process, Google has your back.
In this article, we are going to run you through some of our favorite Google Marketing Tools that you should consider using to level up your game.
- Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one of the most effective and powerful tools to monitor the traffic on your website. You can keep an eye on things such as your most popular blog posts, your regularly returning visitors, the amount of time your visitors are spending on your website, what pages they are spending the most time on, and other interesting interaction patterns.
- Google AdWords Keyword Planner
Google AdWords Keyword planner has been a key part of the AdWords cosmos for a long time, and tons of people in the SEO and PPC industry have been using it as their go-to tool for keyword planning.
The Google AdWords Keyword Planner tool helps you in uncovering new keywords that you can bid on or use for your SEO research. You can get insights into average cost per click, traffic potential, competitiveness, and a lot more that is specific to the geographic location corresponding to the service or product that you are looking to promote.
This tool helps you in prioritizing the keywords that you wish to bid on and find if there is room to bid on other relevant keywords.
- Google Trends
Google Trends is a trend searching feature that can be used to see how frequently the search term is used inside the Google search engine compared to the total search volume of the website over a specific time period. Google Trends is useful in relative keyword research and in discovering spikes in these volume of keyword searches caused by certain events.
You can navigate Google Trends from the top down by observing what searches are presently trending; you can then navigate deeper into the topic to seek more information. You may even enter a term in the search box to see the variations of this term in search volume in different locations and over time.
This data can be very valuable for marketers. For instance, if you are running a seasonal business, you would like to ramp up your marketing activities when you find relevant search terms trending.
- Google Webmaster tools
Google Webmaster tools is an awesome program that helps you streamline your online marketing activities and makes sure that google search engine can find your website easily based on the most relevant, popular search terms. Webmaster tools will inform you of the problem areas if your website is set up in a manner that makes it hard for the search engine to discover so that you can make the necessary changes and improve your SEO rankings.
It is also important to note that Google has been continuously refining its ranking factors and now increasingly takes website health into account to determine a site’s search ranking. Google gives higher rank to websites that make use of an SSL certificate to protect their visitors. Google notices the SSL certificate just as your customers do and loves sites that make use of SSL certificates to combat cyber intruders.
- Google Content Experiments
Google Content Experiments help you with split testing of your software. Most likely, the primary goal of your website is to convert casual visitors into customers or members. Considering that you may have already set up a sales funnel, what you now want to figure out is why the conversion rates are not where you expect them to be. Experimenting with split testing on graphics and content copy can help you get some insights.
What are the visitors responding well to? What is turning them away? With the help of Google Content Experiments, you can run the original landing pages and their variations side by side and track the statistics to see if playing with images, headlines, copy, buttons, or the layout increases your conversion rates.
- Google Alerts
Google Alerts is an awesome tool that helps you keep a close eye on the features of your media, the online reputation of your business, and tracking the moves of your competitors. You just need to set up some relevant Google Alerts corresponding to the name of your business and related keywords; the system will send you alerts whenever it finds those terms being mentioned on the internet.
If you have just launched a new product or service and have sent out many press releases for the same, set up a Google Alert for the name of the service or product, Google Alerts will send you notifications every time a feature piece or article about your launched product or service is published. This is a great way to keep an eye on online activity related to the product or service and respond to any negative narrative that may be taking place on the internet.
So, here you have it – some of our beloved and super handy marketing tools from Google that you should be using. Of course, this is not the complete universe of services (some paid and some free) that Google offers to help you with your marketing efforts; these are just some of our all-time favorites. So, go ahead and use them to take your marketing game to the next level!
