Free invaluable Google marketing tools for small businesses

Written by Lilly Steel, Managing Director

Tools are the bread and butter of us digital marketers. With CRMs, analytics platforms and split testing you can gather invaluable data about customer behaviour and marketing performance. Marketers will often pay top dollar for tools that give them the accurate information they need to improve campaigns. Unfortunately, not all businesses have money just laying around to spend on marketing tools.

Luckily for us, there are plenty of incredible free tools that can help SMEs improve conversions, increase sales and maximise their marketing spend. Today we’d like to showcase a few Google marketing tools that we love – and that just happen to be free.

Google Analytics

Anyone with a Google account and a website can take advantage of this brilliant tool. Google Analytics is a platform for measuring SEO and site performance. When visitors land on your site, you can analyse which pages they visit, where they click, how long they hang around, and from which links they arrive. With this knowledge in hand, you can dig deep into what you can do to improve your SEO strategy and bring in more web traffic, as well as increase page conversions.

Now that Google has rolled out their Google Analytics 4 platform, you can get deep insights into the lifecycle of a lead/customer on your website. With event-based metrics you can see how someone moves through your sales funnel and optimise your site to increase sales/conversions. But, there’s more to come on this later.

Google My Business

There was once a time when Google My Business was only used by physical retail stores, but it is now increasingly being adopted by companies of all kinds. Google My Business is a free online business directive that allows you to rank as a certified result in searches – and display relevant info to attract new leads. Think yellow pages but for the 21st century.

Once you’ve registered an account, you can include info about your services, operating times, contact info, web links and more. Having a Google My Business page means you’ll rank higher on the Search Engine Results Page and potential leads will be more likely to trust your enterprise and get in touch. Not having a page could put you farther down in the search results, make you seem less trustworthy and reduce the number of leads you attract each month!

Google Console

It’s easy to get confused between Google Analytics and Google Console, as they both deal with website performance and traffic. What sets Google Console apart though is that it specifically measures site performance in terms of structure, SEO and linking. The data you can glean from Console is far more technical and can help fix glaring problems with your small business marketing.

Google Search Console registers individual clicks and user actions on all pages without you needing to install a tracking code. By tracking organic and direct traffic, and analysing the optimisation of your site, Console can provide you practical, technical tips for improving usability and SEO ranking of your pages. This can help increase your position on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) and boost the quality of traffic to your crucial pages.

Google Trends

If you’re trying to understand your audience and their habits, Google Trends is an amazing tool. It allows you to find out the popularity of certain search terms by country/location and time. With this info you can discover what your target audience is interested in at any given time and predict what they’ll be interested in in the future. This allows you to better target your content to improve SEO as well as page conversions. Best part is that you don’t even need to sign in to use Google Trends. You can go straight to the website, enter a search term and collect a bunch of outstanding data.

If you’re launching your small business online, or run a business and you’re new to marketing, these free Google tools can seriously streamline your process. By taking action on the data provided, you can improve site performance and conversion rates – and ultimately close more sales. Of course there are a plethora of tools that are more well-versed than these platforms, but if you’re just starting out or haven’t implemented anything yet, we really recommend Google’s software.

Implementing tools and software, both free and paid, is crucial for marketing in the digital world. If you’re looking to catapult your business online – and drive more organic traffic, conversions and sales – our team of consultants can build a marketing strategy specialty for you. Get in touch today to get things started.