This is a guest post written by InterExcel.
This article describes the available Google solutions and illustrates the features and benefits of each one.
Google My Business
About Google My Business:
Google My Business is a free and easy to use tool for businesses, brands, artists and organisations to manage their online presence across Google, including Search and Maps. By verifying and editing your business information, you can help customers find you as well as tell them the story of your business.
- Manage how your business information appears across Google, including Search and Maps, using Google My Business—for free.
- Interact with customers new and old and tell them the story of your business.
- Get started at google.com/business.
Benefits of using Google My Business:
- It’s easy to start and free to use.
- Manage the information that Google users see when they search for your business or the products and services that you offer.
- Businesses that verify their information with Google My Business are twice as likely to be considered reputable by consumers.
- When people find your business on Google Maps and Google Search, make sure that they have access to information like your hours, website and street address.
- Interact with customers: Read and respond to reviews from your customers and post photos that show off what you do. Businesses that add photos to their listings receive 42% more requests for driving directions on Google Maps and 35% more clicks through to their websites than businesses that don’t.
- Understand and expand your online presence: See insights on how customers searched for your business and where those customers are coming from. You can also see information such as how many people called your business directly from the phone number displayed on local search results in Search and Maps. When you’re ready, seamlessly create and track the performance of AdWords Express campaigns to spread the word about your work.
Google AdWords
Find new customers now, with Google AdWords!
Be seen by customers at the very moment that they’re searching on Google for the things you offer and only pay when they click to visit your website or call.
Why Google AdWords?
- Attract more customers: Whether you’re looking to bring in new website visitors, grow online sales, get the phones ringing or keep customers coming back for more, Google AdWords can help.
- Reach the right people at the right time: Your business gets found by people on Google precisely when they’re searching for the things that you offer.
- Advertise locally or globally: Target your ads to customers in certain countries, regions or cities – or within a set distance from your business or shop.
- Connect with customers across the web: You can reach relevant customers on relevant websites across the web. A range of options let you target by website type, audience type or remarketing, when and where it matters.
- Take the guesswork out of your marketing: It’s measurable, accountable, flexible and Google AdWords shows how many people notice your ads and what percentage click to visit your website, or call you. With the tracking tools, you can even see the actual sales your website is generating as a direct result of your ads.
- Insights around the clock: You can see how your ads are doing at any time by logging in to your Google AdWords account. To save you time, we’ll also send you a monthly summary listing all the key stats and numbers that matter.
- Stop, start, pause, test: You can tweak your ads, try new search terms, pause your campaign and restart whenever you like, for free – and all within Google AdWords.
How it works:
Create your ad – Start by writing an ad that tells people what you offer. Next, choose the search terms that will make your ad show up in the Google results. Finally, set a daily budget. Now your ad is ready to go live.
People see your ad on Google – If the words people type in Google match your keywords, your ad can appear above or next to the search results.
You get more customers – They click your ad and go to your website or call you directly. Best of all, you only pay when they do.
Google Analytics
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a free Web analytics service that provides statistics and basic analytical tools for search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing purposes. The service is available to anyone with a Google account. Google bought Urchin Software Corporation in April 2005 and used that company’s ‘Urchin on Demand’ product as the basis for its current service.
Google Analytics features include:
- Data visualisation tools including a dashboard, scorecards and motion charts which display changes in data over time.
- Segmentation for analysis of subsets, such as conversions.
- Custom reports.
- Email based.
- Sharing and communication.
- Integration with other Google products such as AdWords, Public Data Explorer and Website Optimizer.
Google Analytics is geared toward small and medium sized retail websites. The service has limitations that make it less suited to more complex websites and larger enterprises. For example, the system collects data through a JavaScript page tag inserted in the code of pages the user wants to collect data on. The page tag functions as a Web bug to gather visitor information. However, because it’s reliant on cookies, the system can’t collect data for users who have disabled them. Google also uses sampling in its reports rather than analysing all available data.
Google Apps
Google Apps for Business is an email, messaging and content sharing service provided by Google for small and medium sized businesses as well as enterprises. Similar to Microsoft Exchange, Google Apps offers Web based email and workplace communication, in addition to document sharing. The Google Apps for Business package includes Gmail, Google Calendar and collaboration apps such as Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Video for Business, among other Google services.
Businesses of all sizes and functions use Google Apps for Business to take advantage of Gmail storage, mobile email access and security. Companies can customise Google Apps to fit their business concerns and tailor the interface to their own look and feel. Administrators can connect Google Apps to their existing user directory and authentication system. Plus, if the business wants to continue using its current email service, Google Apps can run alongside it or administrators can route mail from the existing solution to Google Apps for Business.
Security is a major concern when it comes to email services, including Google Apps for small business or large enterprises. Google Apps for Business security is powered by Postini, which includes spam filtering, outbound mail filtering, information sharing rules, password requirements and archiving options.
Customers can run Google Apps for Business on a flexible, per user account basis or on an annual plan. If users want to further customise Google Apps, they can use Google App Engine to build and host Web applications through Google.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor and maintain your site’s presence in Google Search results. You don’t have to sign up for Search Console for your site to be included in Google’s search results, but doing so can help you understand how Google views your site and gives you the chance to optimise its performance in search results.
Why use Search Console?
Monitor your site’s performance in Google Search results:
- Make sure that Google can access your content
- Submit new content for crawling and remove content you don’t want shown in search results
- Create and monitor content that delivers visually engaging search results
- Maintain your site with minimal disruption to search performance
- Monitor and resolve malware or spam issues so your site stays clean
Discover how Google Search – and the world – sees your site:
- Which queries caused your site to appear in search results?
- Did some queries result in more traffic to your site than others?
- Are your product prices, company contact info or events highlighted in rich search results?
- Which sites are linking to your website?
- Is your mobile site performing well for visitors searching on mobile?
Who should use Search Console?
Anyone with a website! From generalist to specialist, from newbie to advanced, Search Console can help you.
- Business owner who delegates: Even if you don’t think you know how to use Search Console, you should be aware of it and become familiar with the basics. You might hire a webmaster or a marketing specialist to help you set up your website with Search Console. In that case, you can work with that person to ensure you have access and the reports for your website. In addition, it’s a good idea to learn all you can about how your site is performing in search results so you can make important business decisions about your site.
- SEO specialist or marketer: As someone focused on online marketing, Search Console will help you monitor your website traffic, optimise your ranking, and make informed decisions about the appearance of your site’s search results. You can use the information in Search Console to influence technical decisions for the website and do sophisticated marketing analysis in conjunction with other Google tools like Analytics, Google Trends and AdWords.
- Site Administrator: As a site admin, you care about the healthy operation of your site. Search Console lets you easily monitor and in some cases resolve server errors, site load issues, and security issues like hacking and malware. You can also use it to ensure any site maintenance or adjustments you make happen smoothly with respect to search performance.
- Web Developer: If you are creating the actual markup and/or code for your site, Search Console helps you monitor and resolve common issues with markup, such as errors in structured data.
- App Developer: If you own an app, you want to see how mobile users find your app using Google Search. Search Console can help you integrate your app seamlessly with the website world.
