20 Free But Overlooked Google Tools Every SEO Professional Should Know

Sarah Clark | February 14, 2017 | SEO | No Comments

Google has always something new in its stock to make our marketing strategy better and stronger. But are we well aware of all the free tools that Google has brought to help our SEO professionals? No one can deny that without a strong web marketing, no business can exist in this digital age. And SEO is an integral part of web marketing. There are many experienced SEO professionals who also overlook the new and updated Google tools that could have helped them greatly to add more feathers of success to their crowns.

If you are a professional SEO, you should not sit back and wait for your competitors to beat you and win the game; rather you should implement the best tools and track your progress regularly. At the same time, it is equally important to be well-aware of the current search engine Google updates. Now, let’s check out the ignored Google tools that have abilities to improve the web presence of a business or website.

1. Google Mobile-Friendly Test

Is there any need to discuss the importance of a mobile-friendly website in this digital era? Google’s mobile-friendly update has directly supported the vitality of a website to be mobile-friendly. Hence, Google has brought a tool to help the SEO professionals. You can determine whether your website is mobile-friendly or not in a couple of seconds with the help of Google Mobile-Friendly Test. If you find your website failing this test, you should fix the issues as soon as possible. The mobile-friendly version of the website can improve the search ranking of that website and influence the traffic as well.

2. Google Plus

This is really a great tool that can serve as a mini blog post. You need to give a headline to each post. Google plus incorporates the headline into the title tag of your post. And it will be shown on the Google search result. A right kind of headline can make your post stand out in the search results. G+ formatting allows you to break down your long blogs making your post simple and easy to read. You can add images to your post to make it more attractive. Finally, you need to share it with your circles or selected individuals.

3. Google My Business

Local SEO matters a lot. If you want to drive your local business online, you must implement an effective strategy based on search engine optimization. For this, you can start with Google My Business. A business listing will help your prospective customers get a lot of information about your company such as the open hours, location, and contact details. As per the statistics, local searches can lead 50 percent of the mobile visitors to check out the store within one day. Though Google My Business listings cannot assure online traffic, it can guide you to the right direction.

4. Google Social Search

Google Social Search may seem to be irrelevant to SEO, but it is not. You are allowed to learn a lot from Google Social Search. Let’s discuss how you can use it for search engine optimization. If you are connected to a person or company with a common name on a social networking site and fail to find that person or company on other sites, Google social circle will help you. Each person or company is grouped with certain links that have been decided to be public on the Google profile by the users. You can easily find them with the help of Google Profile Directory. You can find trends of other sites and businesses of your interest to take ideas in order to improve your own work.

5. Google PageSpeed Insights

You can’t deny how important website speed is for search engine optimization. If you want to see your website at the top rank of the search engine rankings, you must take the speed of the website very seriously and therefore it need website page speed optimization. If your website is slow, your visitors will be irritated and will take no time to switch to your competitors. How quickly the content loads on your website will influence the ranking of your website directly. Hence, you need to make it sure that your website always moves faster. You can check the speed of your website on Google PageSpeed Insights Tool. You can check the website speed both for desktop and mobile tab versions. Additionally, it will offer you suggestions to fix the things you need to improve in order to get your page speed better. In this way, you can make your website search engine-friendly.

6. Google Drive

If you are not using Google Drive yet, you are not running with the present. Search engine optimization always deals with lots of documents. Once you have written and posted a content, that does not mean that it has no vitality for the future. In future, you can get ideas from the old posts when you are writing on the most advanced versions of that topic. You may need the posted contents to make your SEO reports as well. Google Drive has made it easier to keep your documents organized. You can make folders in the name of each project and store the contents written for that project in that particular folder. Another amazing thing is, you can directly share your documents without emailing them. Once the folder is created, you can share that with anyone you want.

7. Google Trends

Google Trends is one of the most useful tools that is often neglected by SEO professionals. It can help you to find out the popular topics right now. You can explore “featured insight”; you can search any topic or keyword that is coming to your mind. If you want to write blogs on social media, for instance, you can get here the latest and popular happenings about social media platforms. A wide list of topics relevant to your search will come up and you can choose the most suitable one for your blog post.

8. Google Correlate

Google Correlate finds out the patterns of the search that go well with the trends that are viral in the current market. Many people do not want to give it much importance, but it can greatly help the local businesses with the regional chains to determine what local search project should be emphasized. Even you can find the best keyword ideas here. For this, you just need to type specific phrases to find out what other phrases are appearing. In this way, you can find out the most searched keywords. Ok, don’t believe my words, do it once and I am sure you will fall in love with it!

9. Google Follow Finder

This is another amazing Google tool that most of the SEO professionals often overlook. You just need to plug in your name and Google Follow Finder will suggest you some names whom you can follow. Google makes this suggestion only after analyzing your social graph. Even you can use it to search more people who are like your Twitter friends. It can help the SEO professionals to build a powerful network that is really important for online marketing to be updated about what the other businesses are doing.

10. Google Chrome

Google Chrome has a number of search engine optimization extensions that can help you take wise decisions about your web marketing strategy. SEO and Website Analysis extension is one of these helpful extensions that helps you to pull SEO report for any site. Google Chrome also helps to track the impact of the SEO strategy of your competitors. In this way, you can gain a clear vision of what you require to do next to rank your keywords on the top of the search engine rankings.

11. Google News

Whenever you want to investigate the growth of a story or track mentions of the company you are promoting in the press over the time, you can do it using Google News . Even you can see what’s hot in various types of publications. From here, you can get a link that you can refer back to later. In this way, you will be able to follow the progress regularly.

12. Google Alerts

If you want to gather essential knowledge about the topic you have chosen to prepare your contents on, you can use Google Alerts to keep yourself updated about that particular topic. Google will provide the latest index updates on regular basis. This tool also includes a search of non-linking references to your brand or lets you find a latest topic or company of your interest. Here you are allowed to set up an alert for your top competitors. It implies that you will receive a notice whenever your competitors will be mentioned by any online outlet.

13. Google Voice

Apparently, SEO is meant for driving as much valuable traffic as it can be possible. But SEO is for something more than gathering website traffic. You need to do something to convert the viewers into your customers. Your strategy obviously will depend on the nature of your particular business. There are some businesses for which you may need access to a single number for all of the phones you have. For, instance, when you have many business lines, you can take the help of Google Voice in order to bring all of the lines together. It provides free long distance voicemail system and competitive rates for all the international calls. It also includes other exciting features such as sending text messages directly from your computer, sending personalized greetings, sharing voicemails and reading the transcription, and receiving calls from any phone.

14. Google Sheets

I am sure many of my readers working as SEO professionals have never considered Google Sheets as one of the best SEO tools. Google Sheets are very useful especially for the beginners as they need to watch on everything they are doing. Even an experienced person should also utilize this tool that can help him/her to:

Create a content calendar or plan for the blogs and guest posts

Track those keywords that have been used previously and can be used again in the future

Track the numbers and the sources of the links to their sites

Apart from these, Google Sheets can help you to share the responsibilities with your colleagues or partners. For instance, when you want to work on long tail keyword selection along with your team, instead of sending a number of emails, again and again, you can share the information with your team via Google Sheets.

15. YouTube

When a discussion regarding Google tools is going on, it is impossible to ignore YouTube so far as SEO is concerned. When you are eyeing on an effective online marketing and SEO strategy, you include some relevant and engaging visual elements like videos in it. Is there any platform better than YouTube for sharing your videos? Not at all. If you have not used this platform yet, you should browse the most popular channels regarding your business to get a number of ideas about which tricks have worked for the similar businesses. In this way, you can make the most effective strategy.

16. Google Adwords Keyword Planner

This tool is comparatively more popular than the rest listed here. Still, it should be discussed here because of its importance. We all know that choosing a set of right keywords can take a website to the top rank. You can get a wide range of suggested keywords from Adwords Keyword Planner. Recently, it has been made much PPC oriented than the keyword tool. Still, the keyword planner is equally important for the SEO professionals.

17. Google Consumer Surveys

You know very well how important it is to understand your audience in order to make a website efficient to serve them (the audience). If you go for a survey, it can cost a huge amount of money. Therefore, Google Consumer Surveys can be a good option for measuring the reactions of the users. It is true that you cannot get all the facilities without paying, but you can get valuable data about how your users are perceiving your site and what are their experiences. It will be really helpful when you need to test a new site design or the category of the content.

18. Content Experiments

Google Analytics Content Experiments, previously known as Google’s Website Optimizer, helps the SEO professionals to test, measure and optimize a site. It lets you show a number of different variations of a page to its users. It implies that you can examine the layouts, headings, contents, and colors in order to find out the optimum layout. When someone is assigned to optimize a business, this tool can help him/her dip his/her toes to determine the strategy.

19. Tag Manager

Being a marketer, you definitely want a tag management tool that is easy and simple to handle. Google Tag Manager assures flexibility, portability and easy implementation of a data layer. It is known to all that data layer includes all the required information that you may need to pass to this tag manager. You can pass events and variables with the help of the data layer; you can set trigger in this Google tool. It can help you to refer to the information that you have put in the data layer easily.

20. Google Blog

Last but not the least, Google blog needs to be mentioned here. Though this is not a tool like the ones that have been discussed above, its importance is immense. You might have gone through a number of blogs and articles to gather knowledge about what is going on in the web world. But have you ever considered Google Blog? This is perhaps the best place for gathering knowledge of the recent developments and happenings. Therefore, you should check out Google blog regularly to rich your knowledge of the present market and search engine optimization trends.

Final Thought

If you are still ignoring these Google tools, don’t wait a single minute, just grab the tools and see the difference within a few days. I am sure you are going to appreciate Google after reaping the benefits of these tools by Google.

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Sarah Clark

Sarah Clark, working in B3NET Inc. & Mobixed as Content Developer. B3NET is leading web design & web development company from Orange County, California, Search Optimal is the Internet Marketing division of it. Sarah is working in web, mobile & Internet marketing domain with her 8 years of experience.

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