10 free Google tools for marketers

# Google Search Console

This is an essential tool previously available as Google Webmaster Tools. You could say it is the most important place where we can find information about the health of our website. After connecting Google Search Console with Google Analytics, we have all the information at our fingertips.

Using Google Search Console, we can quickly identify and resolve problems related to indexing or website optimization. We can also find information there about manual penalties, broken links, site indexing, structured data, and the contents of the robots.txt file.

You can also see the phrases that were searched for, their average position in organic results, and the number of clicks. If we see that traffic to our website has dropped significantly, this is definitely the first place we should visit.

It is definitely worth getting familiar with this tool.

# Google Analytics

This tool probably needs no broad introduction. It is one of the most widely used and most advanced analytics tools in the world (currently installed on around 10 million websites.)

You probably want to know how users behave on your website? This is where you will learn where the user came from, how long they stayed, and what interested them. You can see whether you captured their attention with your products / services. Check the bounce rate; if it is high, something is wrong.

Have you defined the goals your website / online store is supposed to achieve? If not, you have an important lesson to learn, and it is best to get started on it as soon as possible.

Thanks to goals, you will be able to answer the question of whether your marketing activities are delivering specific results. Unless the goal is to increase traffic, in which case… you do not even need to know this tool to determine that.

You need to review all data and statistics very carefully and pay attention to what percentage of traffic on our website is spam traffic, because it may turn out that as much as 50% of traffic is generated by bots, while you are pleased that your traffic has increased by 100% year over year.

What else can you learn from Google Analytics? There is quite a lot, but I will tell you what I pay the most attention to:

• demographics
• location
• interests
• engagement
• traffic source
• browser
• devices
• behavior flow
• events that are interesting to me and that I attach to the appropriate elements on the website (JavaScript code is required to place them on the site). There are many tools that can also be used to analyze behavior; one of the latest that I can recommend and that I will write about soon is Smartlook.

# Google Trends

I love this tool; it is one of the first ones I launch at the beginning of the day to see what is buzzing in search, what is trending.
An excellent way to implement Real-Time Marketing. It requires vigilance, quick reflexes, and engagement.

We must remember that search behavior, products, and services evolve. In Google Trends, we can find inspiration that will allow us to create a unique advertising campaign.
We can precisely view and compare phrases, track their popularity over time and across regions of the country, and direct our AdWords campaign right there.

Thanks to this tool, we can also preview a list of related queries, so there is plenty to analyze and draw inspiration from.
The biggest advantage of this tool is that you do not need to know it at all to use it; it is so intuitive that you can get comfortable with it very quickly.

# Google Adwords Keyword Planner

Of course, there are many tools for finding phrases, but the Planner is free and very easy to use. When it comes to phrases that will accurately describe your business, I cannot fail to mention the Keyword Planner, which is based on Google search statistics.

Using Google Trends, we looked for inspiration; now we can verify the search forecast, competition, and advertising bid. We can check prices and popularity in specific regions, cities, or even city districts, on specific desktop/mobile devices.

Here we will also find historical statistics and forecasts for keywords. How should you use it? Experiment, experiment, and experiment—the more time
you spend playing with this tool, the better you will understand the potential it holds. With it, we can identify keywords to use when creating blog content.

# PageSpeed Insights

We know perfectly well that page load speed is one of the factors that affect website rankings in organic results. Google announced this back in 2010.
This tool was created to measure website performance for both mobile devices and desktop computers. The maximum score is 100 points; the better the score, the better.

To use the tool, you do not need to be an expert; simply use PageSpeed Insight by entering the address of the website you want to check. As a result, we will receive suggestions on what must be improved and what is worth improving.

We have a starting point for what to do to make our website load faster. There are also several other tools for checking website speed, such as Pingdom Website Speed Test or WebPageTest. It is worth checking the website using these tools as well.

# Google My Business

A completely free listing and advertisement on Google and Google Maps? If your business operates locally, you cannot afford not to use Google My Business. It is a very important tool when it comes to your company’s visibility in search. If you run a hair salon, beauty salon, are a plumber, or run a car repair shop, you cannot be without this Google listing. Thanks to it, you can acquire new customers.

With Google My Business, you can present your business location, opening hours, phone number, or website in Google Search and Google Maps. Collect reviews from your customers and become a credible business partner.

# Google Alerts

Has anyone heard of Google Alerts? It is a very useful tool for monitoring mentions of a company appearing literally across the entire internet. Whether it is Facebook, Allegro, OLX, online forums, blogs, or the press. If Google indexes something that interests us, we will receive one email per day about it. When I was looking for a car for my wife, I set up an alert for the phrase “Fiat 500 promotion”. If a new promotion for the Fiat 500 appeared on Allegro or on a dealer’s website, I received an alert about that promotion, and that is exactly how I bought the car, saving 20% of its value.

Thanks to Google Alerts, we can also monitor the competition; yes, there are better tools that work in real time, such as Brand24 or Sentione. Either way, it is worth configuring this tool and checking how it performs in your industry.

# Google Sheets

Collaborative work on creating an offer in the cloud? Google Sheets is a great solution for teamwork or working with a client. Continuously updated information allows you to work very effectively thanks to this solution. Because they are in the cloud, we have access to them from anywhere, which is undoubtedly a major advantage of this solution.

What types of sheets are available:

• Google Docs for Word documents
• Google Sheets Excel spreadsheets
• Google Slides the equivalent of PowerPoint
• Google Forms for creating surveys and collecting data from them

You can give users different access rights to sheets, for viewing or editing. Thanks to a Google Chrome extension, you can integrate a spreadsheet with Google Analytics and process the data in a spreadsheet.

# URL Builder

What is this builder? It is an excellent tool for measuring the effectiveness of online activities. With it, we can segment traffic in Google Analytics by tagging the URL with variables for the campaign being run. Thanks to this segmentation, we are able to evaluate the most effective sources of the most valuable traffic.

It is an essential tool that helps us organize data in Google Analytics and makes it easier for us to analyze it.

URLs built this way can be embedded in emails, used on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or attached to a banner on websites where we run promotional activities.

# Google Tag Manager

A great tool created for placing scripts/codes that help track and measure marketing actions related to our website. Its greatest advantage is that adding or modifying a script does not require a developer’s intervention once we have placed the GTM code on our website.

From now on, the person responsible for marketing can independently modify or add scripts on the spot, such as Google Analytics, AdWords, remarketing, or the FB pixel.