Google Tools for Small Business Owners

SEO

Oct 19

This blog is for creative business owners who want to grow their businesses online. I’ll be sharing blog posts that cover an aspect of digital marketing for creatives, whether you sell products or services. It’s a marketing pep talk if you will.

I’ll be talking about all things SEO, marketing funnels, advertising, email marketing, or mindset around marketing. Each post will encourage and inspire you with actionable tips: sans marketing jargon.

If you’ve read the words “Google Tools” and broken out in a cold sweat, don’t panic! While Google Tools can feel overwhelming, it’s not as scary as it sounds. In this post, I will break down two specific tools and why you absolutely need them for your business.

We’ll be covering…

Google Analytics
Google Search Console
Why Google Tools are necessary for your small business

Google Tools & Why You Need Them

Have you got Google Analytics installed for your website?

If so, when was the last time you logged in?

What about Google Search Console?

You’re probably thinking - Google WHAT?

Most business owners I work with have installed (or at least heard of!) Google Analytics - but feeling confident with finding your way around it and knowing how to interpret the data is another kettle of fish.

But not very many people have heard of or installed Google Search Console!

There are other tools in Google’s suite, but these are the basic ones you need for your online business.

Google Analytics is a giant data table gathering information about your website and its visitors and presenting it in a series of reports.

It tells us who our visitors are demographically, how our content is performing, and how people are interacting with our websites: which pages are performing well and keeping people engaged, and which pages are making people decide that our website isn’t for them.

Google Search Console is more about our domain than our website - how does it appear in search engines, are there any errors, and is it secure?

It’s a tool used by SEOs across the land that flags any errors or concerns and tells you how your domain performs in search results - including the organic keywords you’re getting impressions from.

Both tools are fundamentally important for running an online business in any country where Google is the primary search engine. If you’ve a larger market presence in places like Russia, China, or South Korea, you will need to use different tools for those countries.

These tools can feel overwhelmingly technical, but they are incredibly insightful and useful for growing your business online.

Google Analytics Isn't Scary, and Here's Why

One of the sessions I teach for UAL (University of the Arts London) is an Introduction to Google Analytics. Sounds riveting, no?

Most people who run businesses online have “Set up Google Analytics” on their to-do lists. The jury’s out on whether it will get completed, but even if it does as soon as you log in, it can feel slightly bewildering, and before you know it, it’s been over a year since you last logged in.

But Google Analytics is a treasure trove of information about your website.

Marketing is maths, not magic.

So if your business is growing? It’s because your audience is growing and engaging with your brand.

Google Analytics helps us drill down into what’s working and what’s not, so we can make a concrete plan of action for improving and growing our website’s performance online.

We don’t need to rely on our emotions to make business decisions - we can use data!

Here are some examples of what you can find in Google Analytics and how it can help you make decisions in your marketing:

How many people came to your site, and who are they?
How many unique visitors came to your site, and where are they based?
What language are they browsing in?
What devices are they using? (e.g. mobile/desktop - is relevant for optimising your site and interesting for building out other audiences and targeting other platforms).
How did they find your website? Where did they come from?
Which pages did they land on when they came to your site? Which pages did they visit?
How long did they stay?
What did they do when they were on your site? Did they convert?

It’s helpful to review your traffic by source, as it helps you understand the performance of your current marketing and the potential growth opportunities.

For eCommerce, you can often see conversion rate by source - in my own business, we have a great conversion rate from organic traffic but a lower conversion rate from Pinterest, for instance (because we get a lot of US visitors who are put off when they see GBP on the website). We wouldn’t know that without Google Analytics!

Understanding how engaged people are with your site helps make improvements and decisions about new content and website optimisations.

If you have an enhanced eCommerce set-up (straightforward for Shopify, slightly more involved for other platforms!) or more advanced tagging and tracking if you’re a service provider, you can measure conversion goals in Google Analytics too.

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What the Heck is Google Search Console?

Have you heard of Google Search Console before?

It’s one of the most amazing tools and is beloved by SEOs everywhere, but most business owners don’t even know it exists.

Google Analytics is about your website & content. Google Search Console is about your domain & page performance.

They are both needed for you to optimise your website.

Google Search Console gives you access to a host of fascinating information, including…

Your domain’s performance in search results

How many impressions are you getting? Which countries are you getting impressions from? How many people are clicking on your results when they see them? What’s your average ranking for the organic keywords you’re getting impressions from?

Which organic keywords you’re appearing for

Google Analytics will always give you a (none provided) result for any organic search UNLESS you’ve connected your Google Search Console account to your Google Analytics Account. Because of privacy laws, Google Analytics can’t tell you how people got to your site (their behaviour before they clicked on your link). Still, Google Search Console can tell you which keywords your site appears for - and often, this is a fascinating source of inspiration for the content and on page optimisation!

Whether there are any issues with missing pages on your website

Google Search Console gives you a summary of any errors or issues with your website, so you can fix them and ensure that your website visitors & search engine bots alike can easily access all your website’s pages.

Whether there are any security issues or Google penalties against your site

There are some additional handy reports where Google will flag any issues to you so you can understand if there’s a dip in your traffic. It’s important to keep an eye on these at least once a month.

You can also upload your sitemap to Google Search Console, an outline of your website’s pages that Google can use to ensure all your website pages are in its index.

Take Action

That might feel like a lot of information in one go, but luckily there’s only one thing I want you to do today.

Go and install those Google Tools.

Google Tools will only track data from the installed point, so don’t wait around! The sooner you install it, the better.
Any questions? Leave me a comment or send me a message on Instagram!