When you’ve attended my workshops or conference presentations, you have heard this message repeatedly:

Make your website work for you, now! Learn how your website needs to change to become your best marketing and “make me money” tool.

Let’s focus on Google tools and your website…and how Google’s free tools can assist you with website optimization for promotion of your business and marketing of your products and services.

Google and Tools to Help Your Website Make Money

Google Analytics

Google Analytics will help you track your website traffic and decide which web pages and ads get the most “Eyeball Time” and where those visitors came from in the first place. Did they click to your website from a Facebook post, an ad you placed, or your Google Places listing? Wouldn’t it be helpful to know if the social media marketing you’re spending time on and the advertising you’re spending money on is effective? Does it get more eyeballs on your business? Or, are you wasting your breath and your cash?

Daryl Lozupone, prinicipal consultant and owner of Renegade Tech Consulting is a web site wizard. In this video, Daryl will show you around Google Analytics, a tool no web site owner should be without if you’re serious about marketing and making your web site work for you.

If you’d like to see another short video from Daryl about why you need Google Analytics, here’s the link to his You Tube video explaining: Google Analytics: Why Do I Need It?

Google Keyword Research Tools

Google’s keyword research tools allow you to use keywords that customers are using when looking for a product. The tool has a number of search options from searching for keyword ideas using a combination of keywords, a web site and categories to comparing statistics for your keywords and filtering results by search volume (global monthly searches etc.) and competition types.

Here’s a screenshot showing the wealth of keyword data for you in Google’s Keyword Tool:

 In the search illustrated in the screenshot I used the phrase “facebook marketing” and got information about competitiveness (Medium), Global Monthly Searches and Local Monthly Searches. I also got a list of related keyword phrases and data. Note: when you have a Gmail account you can sign up for a (free) Adwords account and use the internal keyword tool which returns a larger list of related keywords and more data plus the ability to use advanced tools to narrow your search. I recommend signing up for this tool.

• To link to the external keyword tool, click: Google Adwords External Keyword Tool
• To link to Adwords to sign up for account and access the internal keyword tool, click: Adwords at Google  (Click on the Start Now button. You will use your current Google Gmail account login information once you’ve created your Adwords account.)

Google Optimizer

Google Optimizer, Google’s free web site testing and optimization tool, allows you to increase the value of your existing web sites and traffic.

Here’s how Google describes the difference between Google Analytics and Website Optimizer: 

While Google Analytics tells you what’s happening on your site, Website Optimizer empowers you to change it. You can use Google Analytics to track user behavior on your site, but Website Optimizer will give you the tools you need to improve your site and get users to convert into customers.

At the simplest level, you can use Website Optimizer to do an A/B test (or split test). This allows you to test two different versions of a web page, for instance a sales page, to see which one has higher conversion rate.

NOTE 4/5/2013: Website Optimizer has been integrated with Google Analytics as Content Experiments. To use Content Experiments, sign in to Analytics, open Standard Reporting, and in the Content section, click Experiments. For more information about Content Experiments and how it works, click here.

Other Useful (and Free) Google Tools for Small Business

I use Google to:

1. iGoogle:  Create a desktop dashboard to do a quick tour around my email, social media sites and Google Reader a couple of times a day. I’ve built a dashboard that displays shortcuts as well as social media and social bookmarking streams, gives me quick access to MapQuest and my local National Public Radio site as well as new music from iTunes.

 

2. Google Reader: I keep up-to-date with industry blogs and other blogs in areas of interest to my clients and marketing list. To put something on my morning reading list, I use RSS. So, next time you see a blog you’d like to follow, instead of making a list or sticky note, click on the RSS feed button on the blog and follow on-screen directions to add it to Google Reader.

Here’s a great guide for “newbies” to Google Reader: Newbie’s Guide to Google Reader at CNET.

How Google Tools Will Help Your Website Make Money

Google tools can help you optimize your website so that you get more eyeballs on your business and make your web pages sticky (in other words, people stay longer and have a look around). When you use the right keywords, and measure the effectiveness of your traffic strategies and the conversion (think “sales) on your web pages, you’ll accelerate the number of people who find your business web pages and stick around to learn about your business and products (and buy from your site if you sell from web pages).

My team and I are ready to help you use Google’s tools to grow your business productivity and profitability. Contact us.

To your great Google business success!

 

 

 

Related articles on the web:

• 10 Free SEO Tools (gazalla.wordpress.com)