Free Cool Google Tools to Raise Your Ranking

By Hector Cisneros

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If you ask about the cost of doing SEO work, most businesses will tell you that outsourcing your SEO work is costly and time-consuming. You don’t normally hear people say, “yeah, it’s easy to do, and I use these free tools.”  Well, what if I told you Google provides a number of software tools to improve visitor experience, make your website convert better and raise your search engine ranking. Would you use them? In this episode of Working the Web to Win we will highlight and explore more than a dozen online software tools. Google provides these tools free for any would-be internet marketers. So, fire up another browser tab and get your mouse ready to click on some cool tools as we explore Google’s free SEO tools and apps to raise your ranking.

Now you may be asking yourself, why I would want to use these tools in the first place? Aren’t my website and blog already set up to provide the best-ranking possible? Wouldn’t my website provider and webmaster have already set this up for me? The answer is, probably not! 98 percent of the prospects we see usually have poorly optimized websites, webpages, and blogs. This is particularly true if they are using a WordPress site and did not pay for additional SEO optimization. To make matters worse, many have paid for SEO optimization and did not get any tangible results. The reason this happens so often is that the average business owner doesn’t know how to verify if the on-page SEO work was completed!

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When we have a client fill out our free web presence analysis questionnaire, the first thing we verify is the on-page SEO factors like META, ALT and other tags on their web property, to make sure they are present and correct. We then analyze the off-page SEO factors like social networking, blogs, podcasts and videos. We also verify any positive press as well. Finally, we verify the website’s conversion factors, user-friendliness and whether the site is mobile-friendly. We use a variety of tools for these evaluations, including; HubSpot, Google and other vendors along with manually verifying the result of these tests. Once the information is verified, we produce a report based on Google’s SEO guidelines and best practices.

Most of our competitors do very little research for their customers. They just put together a proposal based solely on the customer interview (which we also do) and then propose their one-size-fits-all products or services. Our proposals are customized for each client. We calculate what is needed to meet the clients budget and goals. We then make sure that the customer is well educated and that their expectations are clearly defined for the money they intend to spend. If we are providing any guarantees, (yes, we provide real guarantees) we make sure they are clearly defined and are written on the proposal and the invoice.

The rest of this article will delve into the free tools Google provides for achieving internet marketing success.  Most webmasters, internet marketers, and marketing directors use these tools to either improve their website ranking, improve the functionality of their web properties, increase conversion or to verify work performed by others. Now let’s look at Google’s free tools.

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Google’s Webmaster Tools -  The Webmaster tools page provides links to the Search Console, Support, the Learn page and the Connect page.

Search Console – is the place where you track your site's search performance with Google Search Console and browse around for more webmaster resources.

• The Support page is what you use If something's wrong with your site. It's where you get help fast using our top issues list, support documentation, and testing tools.
• The Learn page is where you go to learn how to make sure a site that is great for users also shows up well in search results. It has courses and guides for making high-quality, search-friendly sites. You will want to spend time in the section to learn how to use the tools.
• The Connect page is where you can get updated with Google news, events and Google social media communities.

Web Tools page, which is under the Search Console page includes a variety of tools to optimize your websites. It includes Search Console, a Message Center and Web tools listed below.

Courtesy of Google

Ad Experience Report Tool – is used both for desktop and mobile sites. Google states that “The Ad Experience Report is designed to identify ad experiences that violate the Better Ads Standards, which a set of ad experiences the industry has identified as being highly annoying to users. If your site presents violations, the Ad Experience Report will identify the issues to fix.”

Testing Tools - Next Google offers page and Email structure testing tools.

• Their Structured Data Testing Tool is used to check that Google can correctly parse your structured data markup and display it in search results. 
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• Their Structured Data Markup Helper is used to add markup data to your HTML code in a point and click fashion. 
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• The last testing web tool is the Email Markup Tester. It’s used to validate the structured data contents of an HTML email using the Email Markup Tester.

The Other Resources tool includes the following.

• Google My Business – is used to make sure your business looks great on Google Search,

  

  Courtesy of Google

  Maps and Google+ for free.
• Google Merchant Center – is the place to upload your product data to Google and make it available to Google Product Search and other Google services.
• PageSpeed Insights – is used to find out how to make your web pages faster on all devices.
• Custom Search – is used to harness the power of Google to create a customized search experience for your own website.
• Google Domains – is used to find and purchase a domain name and build a website with Google Domains.
• Webmaster Academy – is a learning tool used to create a great website with valuable content and have it findable in Google Search.

 The rest of the tools listed in this article are separate tools located in Google’s App Center. The link is a small Rubik’s cube looking symbol located next to your profile when you use any Google product (like Gmail, blogger, calendars, etc…). The only exceptions are Blogger, AdSense, Google Play and Google Analytics. These are separate Google tools. Also, there is some overlap between tools listed in the Webmaster Resource section and the Google App Center.

Google Sites – Need to build a website? Google offer Sites as a free website platform. You must have a Gmail or Google account, but other than that it's free. Google offers several templates to choose from and creating a site is a snap. However, editing the banners, content and page information will require some learning and practice on your part.

YouTube – A well optimized YouTube video will not only show up when someone uses YouTube as a search engine, it will also show up in Google Search. Make sure your keywords and description are congruent.

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Google Maps – A large number of people worldwide use Google Maps both on a desktop and with Smartphones to locate businesses and other places. It’s imperative that you make sure your business profile is properly setup in Google Maps. This is accessible through Google My Business or you can either search for your business, claim it (if it's unclaimed) and then update the profile. If your business is not showing up, you can add your business at that time. Maps show up in search a lot, so you want to make sure your profile is indexed and correct.

Google Adwords – Adwords is Google’s pay-per-click advertising platform where you can bid on keywords for ad placement on any search page. This is a great way to generate leads, convert more visitors and increase traffic to your site. More traffic also increases your ranking, so using PPC correctly provides a twofer in business. Adwords also have a lot of build in tools (like a keyword suggester) that can help you maximize your traffic and leads.

Google Photos – Is a great place to create photo albums for your business. We use it as a repository for all the images we post on our blogs as well. You can use Google photos to create shareable photo albums for marketing and as collaboration tools. These photos can be backlinked and embedded or uploaded on your web properties. Just another way to create traffic.

Google Gmail – is primarily a communications tool for sending people emails. But it is integrated into Google’s G-suite office system which makes it a great touch marketing tool. We use it to send an email blast and newsletters driving traffic to our blog and websites. It can also be used to set up a Google hangout sales pitches and small online meeting as well.

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Google Play – If you’re an app creator, you must set up your app profile on Google play. This includes optimizing the app profiles and information for Google Play search. I would also suggest that you create a website or at least a landing page for your app and use the above tools to optimize the web page so that it shows up in Google search.

Google AdSense – is a monetizing tool that allows you to add Google network ads and banners to your blogger blog and websites. You earn money when people click on the ads. You can also use this system to drive traffic to your web pages by using Adwords to advertise in the Google ad networks. When people click on your ad, they are taken to your linked page.

Google Blogger – Blogger, is one of my favorite free Google tools. It is a high-quality blogging/website development platform that is easy to learn and use. It can be used to create its own audience by posting your blogs to the social nets. This audience can be independent of Google Search. Your blog can also act as a website, because you can do pretty much anything on Blogger you can do on a website. It has its own statistical information built-in and is a great backlink to any website. We always put reciprocating backlinks on our blogs/website because a blog always gives people a reason to come back. 

Google Analytics – If you don’t have any analytics set up on your web pages you're just marketing in the dark! Google Analytics is comprehensive and can help any marketer understand what's going on with the traffic on the web properties. You can’t create an effective SEO strategy without good analytics. P.S. Once they are set up, you must review your results on a regular basis. All too often we see clients who have setup analytics but have never used or seen them.

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Truth be told is that all Google Tools can be used in one way or another to create traffic for your web properties. However, driving traffic to a web property that is not designed to convert traffic into customers, is a big waste of time and money. Make sure that all your lead generating web properties are focused, easy to use, provide trust factors like testimonials and include a compelling offer. All the best free or paid internet marketing tools are useless if your web properties are not set up to convert clicks to cash.

If your website or other web property is not performing well in Google Search, it may be because you haven’t taken the time to optimize it properly. It could be because you’re only doing on-page optimization or only off-page optimization with the social nets. If you’re not engaged in either type of optimization your web property will be lost (short of divine intervention) in the vast sea of the World Wide Web. I recommend learning how and using the above-mentioned tools on a regular basis to maximize the value and the return on investment for your web properties. Anything short of actively optimizing your website is just spinning your wheels.

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That’s my opinion; I look forward to reading yours.

In this article, I provided a list of 24 free Google tools that can be used to optimize your web properties search ranking and usability. These 24 Google SEO and website tools can greatly improve your website traffic, ranking, and visitor conversion. This article provides a detailed description and links to all 24 free Google tools.

If you feel your business could use some help with its marketing, give us a call at 904-410-2091. You can also fill out the form in the sidebar of this blog. It will allow us to provide you with a free marketing analysis to help you get better online results. Our claim to fame is that we are one of the few companies who actually provide ironclad written guarantees.

Hector Cisneros is COO and Director of Social Media Marketing at Working the Web to Win, an award-winning Internet marketing company based in Jacksonville, Florida.  He is also co-host of the weekly Internet radio show, "Working the Web to Win" on BlogTalkRadio.com, which airs every Tuesday at 4 p.m. Eastern. Hector is a syndicated writer and published author of “60 Seconds to Success.”