Main Google tools (1)

When we talk about Google, it seems everyone thinks it’s only a search engine.  Obviously, the search engine is what Google represents for companies and users, it’s Google’s star product. But besides it, Google offers a number of tools, many of them are free and a great help to any online entrepreneur. 

With Google tools, you can optimize your eCommerce for its search engine, and that in turn means indirectly optimizing for SEO too.  So, today we’ll begin a new series to review and get to know Google’s main tools.  You may already know some of them, but believe us: you should know ALL of them.

As mentioned before, the big G’s ecosystem is much larger than we usually imagine. In today’s post, we will focus on 3 of the most important Google tools.

You may know it by its previous name, Google Webmaster Tools. Although the old name sounds a bit outdated (especially for “webmaster”), it certainly defined better what it is.

Google Search Console is a handful of useful resources for those who manage a website. Its main features are:

• Appearance in the search engine

In this section, we will know how Google presents our website visually with its results.

It’s the place where we can check which structured data is used, the fonts used the specific pages with elements of this kind and, if applicable, which one of them contain errors.

Here, it’s also possible to use the data markup helper. Another feature worth mentioning it’s the HTML improvements, that inform us about incidents in metadata or not indexable content (such as certain formats of images or video).

• Search Traffic

 Really useful for SEO.  Although not as complete than other external tools, the information comes directly from Google. 

 With this feature, you can know the clicks, impressions, CTR, and positions you’ve taken in the searches.  You can also apply different filters to search queries containing specific keywords, that have been made from specific countries or filter by the device used to do the search. 

You can also access certain SEO off page information, like internal and external links, and even manual actions notifications (penalties). 

• Google Index

Here you can know how many pages of your website are in Google’s database and, therefore, are likely to be displayed. It also allows you to delete certain pages from the index.

• Tracking

Know Google tracking statistics and the pages it couldn’t access or find (the infamous 404 error). 

Here you can also test your robots.txt to make sure you’re not blocking anything critical and upload a sitemap to interpret it (also knowing what it has indexed).

It’s the most widespread web analytics tool.  Thanks to Analytics we can know a large number of data related to the traffic of our website and set KPIs to help us monitor the growth of a website or web application. 

Some of the most relevant data about our audience are: 

• Number of sessions: Set of interactions with a website that occur in a given time period.

• Users: Those who have initiated at least one session in a given period of time.

• Number of visits: It’s the total, regardless of if the same user made several visits during one or more sessions.

• Pages per session: How many pages have seen on average each user. 

And we could go on and on because Google Analytics has an enormous capacity to generate data (and in real time to that!).  From every Google tool, Analytics is undoubtedly the most complex one.  It divides the information in:

• Audience: Everything mention above, plus geo-demographic data, devices used, and the behavior of new and returning visitors...

• Acquisition: The channel your traffic comes from, its sources, data associated with campaigns...

• Behavior: Which pages have been seen, how many pages and for how long have been seen, the first and last page the user visited... 

In Analytics, we can also set goals and even create multichannel funnels.  But this is for advanced analysts.

That said, if you’re not an expert, you can find Insights and other highly relevant information for your future strategy.  Analytics is also free, although there’s a Premium paid version well above the $100K, which it’s appropriate for large corporations.

This contrasts with what we have seen so far because it’s very simple to use and doesn’t have many options.  This doesn’t mean it’s not important, more so in a scenario where Google wants everything to be mobile-friendly  (its priority, well above the Desktop versions). 

You only have to access this URL and enter your domain in the search box. In just a few seconds, it will load a representation of your mobile page and will tell you if your page is mobile-friendly and what you should improve. 

If you have a page linked to Google Search Console, you can also access a Mobile Usability Report available there.

Images | Google, Unsplash.