Are you looking to boost your online business with Google for free? Look no further than Google, which generated a whopping $282 billion in revenue in 2022 – with 75% of it coming from advertising through Google AdWords and YouTube. While many businesses spend big bucks on these ads, there are free Google tools that can help you thrive too.
Google’s influence can’t be overstated since its founding in 1998. It has acquired a stunning 250 different companies, including: Motorola Mobile, Android, Waze, YouTube, Picasa, DoubleClick, DeepMind Technologies, FeedBurner, reCAPTCHA, Like.com, Meebo, Nest Labs, Gecko Design, HTC Mobile, Firebase, Fitbit to name a few.!!
As an owner of an e-commerce business, blog, or vlog, Google offers endless possibilities to help grow your business, such as Google Search Engine, which is preferred by 8 out of 10 desktop users and 9 out of 10 mobile users worldwide. Moreover, Google controls over 40% share of the global digital ad market! Impressive numbers, right?
Google Search Engine is preferred by 8 out of 10 internet users globally and controls over 40% share of the global digital ad market!!!
Let’s start with setting up a Google Account for you. The easiest way to do that is by setting up an email account with Gmail. Google email account is one of the most popular and reliable email services. This email account will give you access to the platform from where many awesome features and cloud-based applications can be run using one user name and password. At the end of 2022, Google e-mail service had 1.8 billion active users worldwide. Google has the most impressive servers infrastructure network scatter all over the world. This supports Google Search Engine and email service as the most reliable and accessible globally.
Next in order is Google Tag Manager (GTM) which is a free tag management system (TMS) offered by Google. It provides a simple platform for managing and updating different types of tags on your website. A tag is a tracking code or snippet of Javascript that sends information about your site to a third party, such as Google. To successfully add Google Tag Manager to your website there will be two separate snippets of code generated which needs to be added to your website. Just follow a quick step by step guide or ask your web developer to do that for you. Once that done you can add any needed tag without unnecessary playing with code on your website, GTM injects them automatically for you. You will find here over 80 (!!) different tags to deploy to your website. Most popular tags are: custom HTML tag, Google Analytics tag, Google Ads tag, Google Surveys tag, Facebook tag, LinkedIn tag, Pinterest tag, Hotjar tag, Bing Ads tag, SearchForce tag, Twitter tag, Upsellit tag.
Google Tag Manager helps you also complete the process of verification and registration with Google.
Another very useful tool which Google gives you for free to grow your business is Google Analytics (GA). This is probably the most important tool giving you real insight and data about viewers traffic and their behaviour. GA code comes alive and starts to collect data on how the user engages with your site. GA is used to track your website activity such as session duration, pages per session, the bounce rate of viewers viewing your website. Google Analytics can be used to give you several category reports: (real-time, audience, acquisition, behaviour, conversions). Each category has more subcategories of different reports to show you. To make it even more fun to each report you can add different segments, and each report can be viewed using different metrics. With Google Analytics you can set your goals – configuration setting that allows you to track the valuable actions happening on your site. Goals allow you to measure how well you are fulfilling your business objectives. The abundance of reports and data to look into giving you pointers on how to successfully adjust your business to grow. Google Analytics is must-have for every type of business and website.
Google Analytics is the most important tool giving you real insight and data regards viewers traffic and their behaviour.
Once you logged into the email account allow you to use Google Search Console. I can’t stop emphasise how important this console is with regards to how Google Search Engine sees, recognises and ranks a website. This step is mighty important and often forgotten by less conscious website owners. Some web developers don’t add pages to search console explaining that is not their job hence yours freshly designed website at the start has a massive disadvantage to overcome. With search console, you submit whole sitemaps, pages and posts which you want to appear in Google Search Results. You also can request here indexing of your pages at any time. Google will crawl pages content and will add them to the web search index. By default, every WordPress post and page is indexed. Now your website is listed, can be found and viewed.
After all of that Google helps the business make some real online mark where Google My Business (GMB) comes in. First of all, you have to sign in to Gmail account and claim your business. After filling in your details, you will get a real-life postcard from Google on the address you’ve specified. This card is the only proof you are the owner of the business listed at the address. For some types of business, it’s also possible to get verified via a phone call or an email. If your company/business have set location GMB might help potential customers find your local business easier and get more exposure to them. Each location might be claimed by only one company/business. Google shows your business mark on Google Maps. Properly set GMB account creates a knowledge graph on the right-hand side on the search results. If Google decides to show your business panel here that means you dominate the search results.
Each of knowledge panel consist:- business or brand name,
- logo,
- images – (outside, inside),
- location on the map,
- website,
- directions – how to get to you,
- address,
- opening hours and operating days for your business,
- phone details,
- products – (each with image, name, short description, call to action button),
- products categories,
- reviews and comments,
- short description,
- social media profiles.
Additionally GMB allows you to publish posts, events and news which also get own panels below constructing this massive knowledge graph.
For those businesses not having any website yet or not needing one (I really doubt it) GMB gives an option to set up a basic website. Hosting and domain are all completely free, but the domain name will depend on your business name and domain availability.
Last but not least is an online video-sharing platform YouTube. Nearly 2 billion users log-in each month into YouTube, make it trending place and also giant search engine itself. YouTube is very popular with a young audience but it’s admiration slightly decrease with older population. So if you think about the future, YouTube for sure it is a place to be. Using Google Account you can easily set up a YouTube channel. Here you can customise it by adding a logo, banner, description, about page, website link and social profiles links. Then you ready to add and publish videos. Each video has thumbnail image, title, description and keywords embedded in and all of this together gives enough metadata to create a decent rich snippet for video displaying in the search results.
Each video allows you to set cards – pre-formatted notifications that popup in the top right corner screen over your video. YouTube offers cards to promote other videos, playlists, channels, associated websites, as well as encourages donations and engage viewers in polls. You can set when the cards appear in the timeline below your video and you can click and drag on it to the exact spot you want it to appear.
For each video you can also set end screens appearing at the end of video. End screens can be elements such as a video or playlist, a subscribe button, a link to your website, or promote other channels. Smart use of cards and end screens drive traffic to your associated websites and products. This can be extremely useful if you are trying to pull viewers to your own website, selling a product.
Product videos can increase purchases of the product by 120%. Video content is more powerful than using images.
Google gives you free tools to make your online business visible, rank high in the search results, get better conversion rate and look professionally. Remember your position on Google search results is everything. Over 30% of people click on position one!! If you are not in the top 10 in search results, then you are not going to be seen. Being at the top is everything!!
“If it is not on Google, it doesn’t exist”.
Using these free Google tools can take your online business to the next level and help you achieve great success. By using these tools, you can boost your online business without spending a dime. While each tool has its own learning curve, there are plenty of resources available online to help you get started. With a little time and effort, you can improve your online presence and attract more customers to your business. So what are you waiting for? Get started today!
Just to mention at the end Google did not pay me to write this post. I wanted to share my experience and help you boost online business with Google for free. So enjoy your testing, tweaking, monitoring and watching your business growth 😉
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