Starting Out In Marketing or SEO? Use These Free Google Tools

Marketing and SEO usually get the thin end of budget allocations and resources.

Thankfully this hurdle doesn’t stop marketers and SEO professionals from being creative and thinking outside the box to get the data and insights they need to excel in their role.

In this blog post, we look at what’s in Google’s tool kit for marketing and SEO, including Google Analytics, Google Console Search, Page Speed Insights and Think With Google.

Google Analytics and Google Seach Console

Customer trends and discoveries assist marketers in making better decisions and increasing conversion rates. Therefore any tool that will deliver trustworthy and accurate data is worth using and more so when it’s free.

Both Google Analytics (GA) and  Google Search Console (GSC) are free.

Are you wondering if you need both GA and GSC? Well, they’re not the same, even though GSC does have some of the same data you’ll find in Google Analytics.

Marketers may prefer Google Analytics for its ease of use in searching user data and for setting up goals for tracking conversions.

For example, using insights on visitor demographics and pages visited is useful for targeted marketing messages, and this data is found in GA.

Similarly, Google Search Console delivers up insights on your website’s performance in search results, and you can track your search engine optimisation, but it’s also got customer or site visitor data that’s easy to read for non-SEO professionals.

For example, you can find out where visitors come from, i.e. their global location and what they used to find you, i.e. their device.

When your focus is local SEO and a specific user demographic, GSC can deliver the information you need to share with marketers for search engine marketing (SEM) and advertising, e.g. PPC and SEO.

User acquisition

In the acquisition section of GSC, you can find out what users did while on your site, including the number of clicks, the click-through rate (CTOR), impressions, queries and the site-wide number of user sessions. Plus, find out the average position of the site in keyword search results.

User Behaviour

What did your users do when they landed on your site? You’ll find out the bounce rate (how long the user stayed on your site before exiting. Plus, which pages they visited.

The behaviour information is important for marketers to work on campaigns to keep users on the site longer and visit the desired pages, e.g. the online shop.

SEO analysts want to improve how the website performs in search results; therefore, knowing its search position is required to gauge if their SEO optimisation improves it.

In Google Analytics, you can get granular detail on visitor conversions, i.e. what they did when they landed on your site, as well as high-level metrics for site-wide conversion.

Conversions

Would you like to track revenue, transactions and rate of conversion? First, you need to set up goals in Google Analytics – see here.

Plus, GA is also useful for salespeople who also need to understand online conversions and where they have played a role in the sales cycle.

With Google, the largest search engine, no website should be with Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

Tip: when you’re starting out in marketing or SEO, get help using these free tools to use more features to learn more about your site and your visitors.

Google Page Speed Insights

We all want super-fast page loading, but it’s challenging, especially when balancing it with user experience initiatives, including videos and images that take time to load. Plus plugins impact page speed as well as the website template and your hosting plan.

Google’s page speed insights let you know what is slowing your site, but it’s not an actual ‘speed test’.

Think With Google

Wow! What a find for marketers! Think with Google (TWG) empowers marketers to make better decisions with their marketing strategies to get higher conversion rates.

Test my site

Within the app, you can test how fast your mobile site loads. Yes, it is mobile-first which is where your focus should be too.

A page that loads in less than 3 seconds is good. Of course, the faster your pages load for the user, the longer they are likely to stay on your site and visit more pages – including your eCommerce store. :).

Marketers have free access to:

Research

Research doesn’t mean you need to spend hours, if not days search and validating data to reveal trends, stories and discoveries. With Think With Google, you have a customer discovery learning and knowledge gathering portal.

Marketing Strategies

This area of TWG will make your head hurt as it’s got so much on offer, and you’ll need to spend a bit of time working out where to start.

Try the data and measurement sub-category – it is a great place to learn how your business resonates with your brand on different platforms. Marketers need to take risks insofar as they are second-guessing what consumers will do next for some campaigns.

Data takes away many risks, and with TWG, marketers will provide more information at their fingertips. When you can click on emerging technology to find out how machine learning, AI, and Augmented Reality (AR) are changing marketing and how we all interact with real-world environments.

Latest – Beta Release of Google Search Console Insights

Did you get an email from Google recently re. their new beta release of Search Console Insights? Wow – it’s impressive and for bloggers and SEO, the feedback on how your content is performing is invaluable. You can find out:

• Performance statistics for your new content
• Which content is doing the best – i.e. gets the most visits and from where
• What are people looking for i.e. what are their keywords in search before they find your content

You’ll need to make sure your Google Analytics is linked to your Google Search Console for Search Console Insights to work. Read more here.

Summary

It’s a fun and exciting time to be a marketer or an SEO expert, even if you’re still struggling to get the budget your role needs.

Reliance on eCommerce sales during COVID has most companies realising marketing and SEO now make the world go around, and they are both integral to growth, so in time, there will be bigger budgets for these areas. Until then, there’s always the free tools and cash-strapped strategies.

Using Google’s tools can make lighter work of your marketing and SEO tasks. There are many more free tools available from other reputable providers, so we will be writing more blog posts on the tools to make your job easier.