5 Free Google Tools That You Should Use to Improve Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Image Credit: Ken Wolter / Shutterstock.com

The advent of free marketing tools has created an equal playing field for small and midsize businesses trying to compete against larger corporations. Google has proven itself as an industry leader in providing free innovative online marketing products. You should check out this Marketwatch article to learn how to invest in times of uncertainty.

Here is a list of the top 5 Free Google Tools That You Should Use to Improve Your Online Marketing Strategy:

1. Google Analytics Experiments:

Google Analytics Experiments (formerly called Optimizer) is a simple, easy-to-use, free tool for A/B testing. To start experiments with Google Analytics you need to have the pages that you want to test created, and access to the backend of your website to insert the experiment tracking code. Visit the post on how to use Google Analytics Experiments for a tutorial on Google Analytics experiments.

2. Google Analytics SEO:

As someone with a background in SEO, the SEO section in Google Analytics is by far, the most interesting and exciting part of Google Analytics. The section offers an in-depth look into how your website is currently found through Google searches.

The goal with looking at your SEO queries in Google Analytics is to find the “hidden keyword(s) gems” that you could be focusing on. The keyword gems are often keywords or keyword phrases that have the following characteristics:

a. Keywords that Receive a lot of impressions but not enough clicks: What this tells you is that although Google sees a match with your users query and your webpage, you maybe competing against others with a better ranking. The goal for optimizing the keyword queries that fall under this group is to try to increase the ranking of the page. For instance, start of with your meta tags and work your way down to actual content of the page(s). You may also have to create page(s) or posts centered on “flower shop Philadelphia”. Online shopping stores, e-stores, internet shops and online shopping malls help people choose products from a wide variety.

Remember: Follow white-hat SEO rules when optimizing your pages. Google is becoming very fluid in how it shows results, so many factors go into the results that people see after entering a search query. And don’t forget to be patient as you work your way towards your SEO goal.

b. Keywords That Receive a Lot of Clicks but Not Enough Impressions: The second characteristic to look out for, when trying to find your keyword gems is to find keyword queries that are receiving a lot of clicks but not enough impressions. There are two main reasons why this might happen.

i. Keywords have a low number of monthly searches: The first reason is that the keyword query generally does not have a lot of people searching for it. To be certain if that is the case, you can use Google keyword planner to find out how many times those keywords are searched for. The next section on Google keyword planner explains this in more detail.

ii. Keywords have low rankings: The second reason for having a lot of clicks but not enough impressions might have to do with your average page ranking. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t always have to rank “numero uno” on a Google search result page to receive a lot of clicks. There are people who visit the second and third pages of Google to look for more results if they cannot find what they are looking for on the first page. The keyword queries that receive lots of clicks put you in a great position because Google could starts to view your pages as relevant. This is especially true if your visitors do not bounce off your keyword query landing pages.

3. Google AdWords Keyword Planner:

The AdWords keyword planner (formerly known as Google keyword tool) is another great tool from Google that can significantly boost your SEO strategy. It’s basically my go to for any keyword research. The keyword planner is easy-to-use, all you need is a few keywords that you are thinking of and Google will do the rest with giving you ideas for more keywords. To improve your online visibility for the keyword gems found in your analytics SEO queries section, you could do a search using the Google keyword planner to aid you with discovering related keywords. If you want to rank for a particular phrase, you always want to find different ways to say that same phrase; Google AdWords keyword planner is a great place to find the related keywords.

4. Google URL Builder:

The Google URL Builder, also sometimes known as Google URL tag is a free URL string builder that allows you to add parameters to your URLs for different campaigns to help you track results in Google Analytics. Tagging your URLs helps you track all your campaign results in Google Analytics.

5. Google Analytics Behavior Flow

Ever wanted to know how your website visitors navigate your site? Then Google analytics behavior flow is definitely the tool for you. The behavior flow in Google Analytics is able to show you a visual path of your website visitors journey from start to exit. This intelligence can help you make important discoveries such as; which webpage visitors tend to exit on (if it’s not a thank you page then, you might want to work on making the page more sticky), pages that need to have inbound links to make the navigation from one page to the other easy for visitors, among others.

As usual, as with any technology product, your results will largely depend on your digital marketing strategy and ability to continuously improve results, so make sure to get help from a digital marketing company!

Note: To keep my Google Analytics data confidential, I have blurred out certain aspects of the screenshots. You will have a different view when you are in Google Analytics.