Google Tools You Should Be Using
Boosting the amount of traffic going to your website and improving your overall online presence is a lot easier when you take advantage of a few Google tools you should be using. This suite of tools, available directly through Google for anyone with a Google account, gives you data, resources, and inspiration to make your website more visible to people who are searching online.
Boosting Website Visibility—It’s All About SEO
“Hold on,” you might be thinking. “What do you mean by visible?” After all, if you go to your web address, your entire site is right there. No visibility problems as far as you’re concerned.
But typing in your web address and clicking enter isn’t how new customers are going to be finding you. Instead, you’re relying on search engines to show your site to users who have a need for what you have to offer. And because there’s so much competition out there on the internet, the websites that get the best exposure are the websites that have been designed to appeal to these search engines.
Search engine optimization (or SEO, for short) is the practice of making sure your website has everything a search engine needs if it’s going to be listing you in results.
So, is your website properly optimized? That’s what these Google tools will help you determine.
Use Google Analytics + Search Console to Track Success
How is your content doing? Google Analytics is the straightforward way of analyzing all the data related to your website and traffic—how people are finding your website, how long they’re staying on certain pages, and whether they’re hopping around from one internal page to another. Think of this as the testing part of guessing and testing—you’ve created your website with the intention of appealing to potential customers and now Google Analytics can give you concrete numbers to tell you whether you’ve succeeded in that goal or not.
Search Console is a platform that offers similar insight. With Search Console, you can tell exactly what problems exist within your website that might not appeal to Google. For example, if you have broken links within your website or if you have a page that’s loading slowly, Search Console will let you know so you can fix it.
Use Google Ads Keyword Planner to Prompt Viable Content
One crucial step to improving your website’s visibility is to use keywords in blog posts and other content. These keywords are ones that users are searching for on Google. Even though there are plenty of platforms out there that will help you find keywords and numbers indicating how competitive those keywords are, Google’s own Keyword Planner is free and very effective. The Keyword Planner will help you develop long-tail keyword phrases that are more specific to your niche, as well as variations on keywords that are not as competitive. Use these keywords as prompts to generate new content and build a marketing plan around them.
Use Google My Business to List Your Business
Think of Google My Business as the modern phonebook, except it’s online. It has all the information about a business that somebody needs to look up—the business hours, address, reviews, plus lots of images. It will even provide a link back to a business website if the user needs more information. From your perspective as a business owner, Google My Business is a place where you need to set up a listing for your business because it makes it so easy for people to find out about you. You can also use it to respond to reviews, either thanking people for their words of praise or addressing any negative feedback you receive.
Use the Structured Data Testing Tool to See Your Website As Google Sees It
What is structured data? It’s the information that search engines like Google use to understand the pages on your website—information like your business name, your address, what currency you accept, and so forth. In short, it tells a search engine how to interpret a website and to whom it should show the website. But sometimes your structured data just isn’t making sense to the search engine. But because you’re a human and the search engine isn’t, you’re not going to perceive things the same way. Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool lets you see whether everything is as clear to Google as it should be.
Use Google Alerts to Get Industry News
When something big happens in your industry, do you want to be the first to know about it? Google Alerts lets you get notifications straight to your device whenever there is an online buzz about a certain topic. You can even program it to notify you when somebody mentions your business by name, or maybe if somebody mentions one of your competitors. This will let you stay at the forefront of any industry conversations and provide the most up-to-date content you possibly can. You’re even in charge of the frequency, so you can get Google Alerts every day, every week, or just once a month.
Use Google Trends to Track Chatter Over Time
While Google Alerts tells you what’s happening in your industry when the news is breaking, Google Trends lets you track the conversation over time. You can see what’s popular that very minute (yes, literally that very minute) and how interest has grown or waned over the past few weeks, days, or hours. Using Google Trends helps you cultivate content for your website and social networks that is timely, hot, and buzzworthy.