There are tons of marketing tools available out there that can help you gather insights, optimize marketing efforts, and boost your business revenue.
But let’s agree that when you are just getting started, rather than spending much on expensive tools, you would like to invest in product and marketing.
And that’s the best way to move forward and grow your business. That’s why you need some powerful free marketing tools that you can use in your day-to-day operations.
In this article, I will show you free Google tools that you can use for your business. The best part of using Google Tools is that you can see how Google sees your website or app and get insights directly from Google where you want to rank and drive traffic from.
So, let’s check them out one by one.
1. Google Analytics – Free Website Analytics Tools for Small Businesses
Nowadays every business has its online presence and it is highly crucial to analyze how your website is performing on the web. You need to analyze the amount of traffic your website receives and how you can optimize it to get more conversions.
This is where you must highly consider using this tool. Google Analytics is a free tool that shows the number of visitors on your site, identifies the most reliable traffic sources, and provides an in-depth analysis of all the activities that occur on your website.
For marketers and business owners Google Analytics is truly a boon as you need not spend money on complex analytic tools to track your website performance. Whether you run your blog, a business website, or an eCommerce store, this tool highly matches all your requirements in gathering data about the website visitors.
The main reasons why marketers love using Google Analytics is that:
- It is completely free and can be integrated with other tools.
- You can design custom reports with important KPIs for your business.
- Segment your target audience using various parameters.
- Instant collection of all data related to your website.
- You can track the performance of important Goals on your site.
In short, this enterprise-based web analytics solution helps you track visitor’s behavior on your site. This tool also helps you in handling your Google Ads campaigns and coming up with informed decisions about your marketing strategy. Google Analytics is absolutely free for users whose websites have less than 5 million page views per month.
2. Google Trends – Find trending terms
If you are looking to rank your content according to the most popular trends related to your industry, then Google Trends is the best handful resource for you.
With the help of this tool, what’s not possible? You can conduct a free keyword search as it shows how a specific keyword performs over time and also recommends you the most related queries depending on your search.
Using this tool, you can analyze keyword performance in your target countries. You just have to enter your target keyword, select your target country and you will see a graph showing you the keyword search interest over time.
You can also compare one keyword with the other to get better insights. So, if you want to conduct extensive market research for your products/services, then Google Trends must be in your arsenal.
3. Google Groups – Create Groups for Your Team
Despite the growing number of different social networking sites, Google groups are still going strong. Google Groups is a simple yet powerful service that helps individuals create a group and join in the conversation.
For your business, you can set up a private group that can be accessed by anyone in your organization, both clients and employees. Here, you can organize your regular meetings and brainstorming sessions on various past and upcoming projects. Google groups are also absolutely free to use.
Here are few ways to use Google Groups:
- Email everyone in a group with a single email address.
- Meet people with similar hobbies, interests, or backgrounds.
- Learn about a topic and join discussions.
- Create a Q&A forum for any topic, such as baking, health, or a task at work.
- Organize meetings, conferences, and events.
- Create a shared inbox and assign topics to members for tracking.
4. Google Alerts – Free Web Alert Notification Tool
Want to get notified about the current trending topics in your industry? Then you should not miss this amazing tool.
Google Alerts sends email notifications for the topics you have subscribed to so that you can stay on track and know what’s happening around you.
For content marketers, I would say that this tool is magic as you can instantly gather all the information with just a few clicks and make informed decisions of how your content performs on the web.
As shown in the image below, this is the process of setting up Google Alerts. I’ve created an alert for the following topics so whenever there is a new update about these topics, I’ll get notified via email or in my RSS feed.
You can also choose at what time the emails should be delivered to your inbox or receive all the alerts in a single email.
5. Google Ads – Best PPC Marketing Platform
Google Ads is the most popular and commonly used PPC marketing platform for businesses of all sizes and scales. It allows you to create different types of ads, including Search Ads, Display Ads, Shopping Ads, and more enabling you to target your audience with different types of marketing campaigns.
Your ads will be displayed on Google and other websites. One of the disadvantages is the bidding price of the best keywords increases over time and may result in a low conversion rate if not analyzed and optimized properly.
The best things about using Google Ads is that it gives you a plethora of data that you can use to optimize your campaigns effectively. So, if your target audience is available on the internet (which is obvious!) and you want to leverage digital advertising for your business, Google Ads is a must-use advertising platform.
Here are few guide on Google Ads to help you run successful campaigns –
6. Google Search Console – Website Tracking and Analysis Tool
Google Search Console is the ultimate giant that optimizes your entire website to rank on search results. You can crawl and index your web pages using this tool, and it helps you track your website’s position, impressions, and click-through rates.
You should have an authorized Gmail account, cookies and Javascript must be strictly enabled, and you must have a recently updated version of chrome, firefox, etc., to access Search Console.
How does Google Search Console benefit you? Here are some of the benefits of using GSC –
- It helps you to troubleshoot and fix your website issues quickly.
- Visualize the traffic data for your website from Google.
- You can receive notifications whenever Google performs any activity on your websites, like indexing or other issues.
- You can also see the internal and external link structure on your site.
Google Search Console is widely used by SEO experts and marketers to analyze their content performance and find new content ideas. Also, site administrators use GSC to resolve server errors, issues in site loading, etc.
7. Google My Business – Free Business Directives
Google My Business is a business listing that a business owner creates on Google. It helps in showing up one’s business on the Google Maps searches and Google’s local 3-pack. It is an easy-to-use free tool.
To rank on the top three listings also known as Google’s local 3-pack, you must leverage incorporating the most relevant and powerful keyword, so that when people search for your brand or services you offer, Google automatically displays your company name with other related information including your website address.
It can not only help your business grow online but helps you drive traffic to your store outlets as well. And with huge updates made to this tool recently, businesses must figure out how to strategically use them to improve ranking and bring more customers.
8. Google Keyword Planner – Free Keyword Research Tools
If you want to leverage Google Ads for marketing and generating traffic to your site, it is very important for you to find relevant keywords to target relevant customers. Google keyword planner helps you in coming up with the perfect set of keywords that you can use for content marketing and PPC campaigns.
Some of the top benefits of using Google Keyword Planner is that you can:
- Find new keywords using words, phrases, websites, and categories.
- Discover search volume trends and historical data of different keywords.
- See performance forecasts for keywords based on your budget and average bid prices.
- See the competition level for each keyword to rank in the paid search result.
However, there are few limitations in the Google Keyword planner for which you need paid tools. For instance, the data is most useful for Google Ads campaign. You cannot prepare your organic content strategy solely based on the insights from this tool.
9. Google Data Studio – Free Data Visualization Tool
With the ever-growing demand for data, the Google Data Studio offers the most unique and useful reporting insights for every piece of information being tracked. It is a free business intelligence tool provided by Google.
It comes with an intuitive interface for exploring and building insights through data. It also acts as an extended version of Google Analytics, where you can view your real-time data presented as charts, geo maps, pivot tables, etc., in the dashboard.
You can easily create and customize your reports and share them with your clients. It offers seamless integration with all Google’s tools, and it is hosted in the cloud so that you need not spend time managing its installation process.
Businesses can use these profound data-driven statistical results to effectively collaborate with their team members and implement calculated decisions to boost their ROI efforts.
10. Google Tag Manager – Free Website Tag Management Tool
Google tag manager allows you to bring in all your tags altogether in a single place. GTM or Google Tag Manager is completely free of cost.
One of the common use of GTM is you can manage Google Analytics events and triggers from one dashboard without using any codes. Not only Google Analytics, you can use GTM to install all sort of tracking codes on your site without affecting your website codes.
Some of the essential tags that you should install on your site using Google Tag Manager are as follows –
- Google Analytics
- Facebook Pixel
- Twitter Website Tag
- LinkedIn Tag
- Google Ads Remarketing
- Leadfeeder (For B2B website)
- HubSpot or any Marketing CRM
11. Google Optimize – Free Website A/B Testing & Optimization Tool
If you are an active marketer interested in experimenting with various versions of your website content, this is the ideal tool. Google Optimize offers you three types of testing: A/B Testing, Multivariate Testing, and Redirect Testing.
You can magnify your website conversion rates using this splendid tool. It uses an editor to create and experiment with different versions of your website pages and a reporting suite that delivers the results of your experiments.
As marketers are highly engaged in improvising their website for effective Google Search, this acts as the ‘must-use’ tool to make the best out of your time in amplifying your return on investments.
Leverage Free Google Tools for your Business
Google offers a lot of free tools for people in every online profession. And Google Marketing Platforms is just a happy place to find tools that provide credible information you can rely upon for strategies and data management.
Now the premium marketing tools like SEMrush, Hotjar, Buzzsumo provides you all the information you need in one dashboard. They do all the backend work of collecting data and presenting you insights that you can use.
In the case of free Google Marketing tools, you will need to collect data from different tools, comprise at one place, and analyze it to derive useful insights. It is a lot of work but kudos to you – these are all FREE tools.