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SEO Tools from Google
Free Tools of the Trade
For most tradespeople, the concept of “free tools” would be unheard of! However, for webmasters and digital marketing professionals this is a fortunate reality.
Who provides these tools?
The good fortune continues, because these tools come straight from the biggest player in the World Wide Web… Google.
Accounting for over 77% of the global search engine market share, Google is undoubtedly the powerhouse of the Internet, and is only growing stronger.
Think about how you engage with the Internet these days… do you click on the URL bar and start typing w-w-w-dot…? No, you ‘Google it’. Often even when you know the website you’re looking for, you ‘Google it’ as the easiest means of access. In fact, ‘Googling it’ has become such common place in our lives, it’s been added to the Oxford English Dictionary.
This highlights a very important fact for website owners: though publishing an attractive well designed website is extremely important… ultimately, it is only the first step in an on-going process; as few people will find your website if it doesn’t rank well on Google!
For this reason, optimizing websites for search engines such as Google - otherwise known as ‘Search Engine Optimization’ or SEO - has become essential practice for a successful online presence.
SEO’s ‘Free Tools’
Although the algorithm used by Google to rank websites for their search results remains a secret, they are kind enough to offer you a number of free tools to help you create the optimal website. Most notably:
Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools): a diagnostic tool which allows you to see exactly how your site interacts with Google, and
Google Analytics: a tracking system that gives you access to various data generated by the people visiting your website.
At first glace these two tools may seem similar, however they are in fact distinctively different, and are designed to be used in conjunction to leverage more traffic to your website. Using only one can leave valuable data unexploited on your quest for optimization.
What’s the Difference between Google Search Console and Google Analytics?
Google Analytics shows how visitors interact with a website. It provides data on page visits, bounce rates, time spent on each page, origin of visitors, return visitors, etc.… allowing you to understand your audience, and make strategic decisions based on these trends.
Google Search Console shows how a website interacts with a search engine. This provides information on pages that search engines cannot crawl, links that are broken, how a website ranks for certain searches, etc.… allowing you to identify and fix technical problems, and build marketing campaigns to support the strengths or vulnerabilities of your website.
Ultimately, these two tools work together to help you create a popular and successful website. Whether you’re website is looking for mass traffic increases to raise brand awareness, or improved conversion rates to boost sales… optimizing your website to suit Google’s best practices gives you the best chance of success.
How Cloud9 can help…
Building a successful website is not a ‘set and forget’ process, and using tools such as these on an ongoing basis is vitally important for online success. At Cloud9, we have grown and evolved with the SEO industry, and spent years understanding and perfecting the use of these tools for business website optimization.
Using these tools and others, we offer continuous expert monitoring and improving of business websites, and the results of our clients who retain us on a monthly basis attest to this.
Contact Cloud9 today for further information.
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