Google Analytics
In the digital age, the importance of data for your business / website should never be underestimated. In fact, without properly tracking your site traffic, your business is literally a waste, especially when it comes to optimizing your site and getting the most out of it.
Regardless of whether your website is hosted in the form of a personal blog, news portal, business or corporate website, e-commerce store, Google Analytics is considered an essential tool for any website. The more you use this powerful Google tool, the greater your advantage.
Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. You can create goals and conversion tracking to get the most out of your analytical information and use it to improve your website content, user experience and optimization to increase your online sales.
Out of so many features in Google Analytics, I believe being able to identify the source / medium of your website is one of your website’s best tools. From the data presented, you can find out whether your marketing efforts have been paid for or not. This can provide a solid reference for your next decisions to improve your site’s performance.
Google Data Studio
Trust me, for beginners, you may be overwhelmed by the amount of data displayed in Google Analytics. Honestly, sometimes you just need a simple report with a graph, chart, or circle to summarize your website’s performance.
Here’s a free tool from Google called Google Data Studio that gives you everything you need to use data visualization to turn analytical data into informative, easy-to-understand reports.
Analytics has always been a challenge for digital marketing, but Google Data Studio allows you to create personalized data visualizations and reports. Besides, you can even share with your clients – a huge plus, especially if you work in a large group.
Quick Tip: You can check out the Google Data Studio Gallery to duplicate their samples and modify the way you use your website. Then you will be able to change and edit the metric according to your needs. Pretty amazing, isn’t it?
Google Search console
Formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, this free web service, now renamed Google Search Console, is targeted at webmasters. It allows you to check the indexing status and optimize the visibility of your sites.
This free tool is a MUST for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The ability to track search results on your site is the most valuable data for understanding what your audience is expecting from your site.
Once your site is tracked by Google, you will be able to view your organic search results along with performance statistics for your organic search queries. This information can help you better understand how paid text ads and natural search results work together. If you analyze deep enough, you will find many options, such as identifying relevant search queries that have low organic traffic and targeting those keywords on Google AdWords. This will increase overall traffic, tailored to the purpose of your website.
Google My business
Do you run a brick and mortar business? If so, then free tools from Google are one of the most local SEO strategies to strengthen your website. Google My Business is a powerful tool for businesses and organizations to manage their online presence on Google services such as Google Search and Google Maps.
With Malaysia’s smartphone penetration approaching 100% by 2018, most Malaysians are using smartphones to navigate, search for instant responses, or browse social media platforms. Your company and brand must be found on the Internet with the correct information.
Please ensure that all information listed is correct, up-to-date and reflects your business. Note that this information will show up when people search for your office or brick-and-mortar store through Waze or Google Maps. We often see that some companies have not updated their address, phone number and working hours to the latest. Do you want to get my traffic on your website?
Try the new Google My Business features called “Entries”. The published content will include your image and short description along with a call-to-action link to the intended URL. For example, a blog post “Should I hide or even delete a customer’s query on my Facebook?” will appear at the bottom of our business information.
Google Keyword planner
Building a website without keyword research is exhausting and a waste of time in the long run. To reach the right customers with the right keywords, use Google’s Keyword Planner to find the right keywords. Putting these keywords into your website will ensure that your content stays relevant.
* To access the Keyword Planner, you must log in to your Google AdWords account at http://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner. Creating an account is free and quick.
Yes, it’s completely free, you can find new keyword ideas that are relevant to your product, service, and target customers. The Keyword Planner will show you the number of searches in historical statistics, which is one of the most important key factors for your website.
In addition, data from keyword ideas is a useful tool for positioning your website. Analyze the information and turn it into your next content marketing strategy. Based on your search query data, you should have tons of ideas about what to insert into your text to make it more relevant to your audience.
Google Tag manager
This free tool helps you update tags and code snippets on your website and mobile app quickly and easily. You can insert JavaScript and HTML tags used for website tracking and analysis in Tag Manager without touching the back end of your website.
Many sites do not implement tracking or collect data reliably due to the injection of messy codes. To fix this problem, we strongly recommend that you use Google Tag Manager to consolidate and manage all your tracking codes and scripts.
The best example of using this tool is the use of Facebook Ads. While more and more companies spend on Facebook Ads, most do not install Facebook Pixel on their website for conversion tracking, optimization, and remarketing.
Facebook Ads is already integrated with Google Tag Manager for a smooth and easy installation. All you need to do is click and follow the given instructions without the hassle of complicated coding.
Test my site with Think With Google
To rank well on Google mobile search, your website should have a fast loading speed and a website optimized for mobile devices. Use Think with Google’s Test My Site to check your website’s mobile performance score. After a few minutes, you will get recommendations on how to improve your website’s performance on all devices.
Nobody wants to wait for slow websites or browse unfriendly websites for mobile devices. The suggested time is 3 seconds from Google which means if your site doesn’t fully load in 3 seconds most people will most likely go elsewhere.
Just enter your email address and you will get a detailed analysis of your website. The content of the report is simple, but it provides valuable insight into how Google evaluates the speed of your website.
The report will become a key reference for your webmaster or developer to further optimize your site. If you need an even more detailed report on how Google renders and indexes your site, you should use the PageSpeed Insight tool.
Google PageSpeed Statistics
If you have developers or web designers who really want to understand the factors that increase site speed, try PageSpeed Insights and check your score for site speed and optimization.
The latest version now shows data from your First Contentful Point (FCP), which is a measurement when the user sees a visual response from the page. DOM Content Loaded (DCL), as well as measuring after loading and parsing an HTML document.
PageSpeed Insights comes in handy because it gives you insight into how Google indexes your site differently for the desktop and mobile versions.
Here are some tips for optimizing your website speed from PageSpeed:
- Avoid landing page redirects
- Eliminate blocking JavaScript and CSS rendering in the portion of the page visible on screen
- Enable compression
- Leverage Browser Cache
- Minimize CSS
- Minimize HTML
- Minimize JavaScript
- Optimize your images
- Prioritize visible content
- Reduce the server response time
Google Tendency
Want to see the latest trends and data from Google? You can search for anything using Google Trends and even narrow it down to a specific country or category. This tool is useful for identifying the latest trends or viral news in your location.
Ideally, once you’ve identified a trend, you can create new blog posts, new promotions, or ideas that reflect that trend.
Don’t forget that you can also see traffic of interest in search terms using Google Trends.
This allows you to determine the best time to run a particular campaign. This is useful for seasonal or annual promotional campaigns as you may discover the best time to run ad hoc digital marketing campaigns.
Google Alarm
If you want to stay up to date on a specific topic and all related information that appears in your messages, you can automatically deliver them all with Google Alert and receive notifications every time your keywords or phrases are updated.
Google Alert is good for simple keyword monitoring, and every mention of those keywords is updated to your email inbox to receive near real-time notifications. Of course, you can choose the frequency with which you will receive them – once a day, once a week, and even receive them as they happen.
A handy tip when creating a Google alert is to avoid using general keywords but create alerts that are more unique to your website. The more specific your keywords, the more relevant your alerts will be. For this purpose, you should use search filters where possible, such as languages, regions or sources.
summary
That’s all, above are 10 essential free google tools to improve your website performance. Make full use of all the tools, from analysis, research or monitoring, to achieve the goal of your website.
What are your favorite tools from Google? Do you know any other Google tools that we should take care of? Let us know in the comments below!
