Why Google?

You might be wondering why we worry about Google. As much as I hate that Google is slowly but surely taking over the world, let’s face it. They know what they are doing! Their tools, both free and paid, are fully integrated, which means they work together in a beautiful harmony to serve YOU! As a consumer, they bring the most relevant, up-to-date, and trusted search results. Google is the top search engine out of five, consistently pulling in over 65% of all U.S. searches!

The economy is sluggish now, but is slowly pulling ahead. Building a solid online presence and aggressive marketing plan, and being visible and prepared to serve customers when they are ready to spend will be vital to your survival. Taking advantage of the free Google applications for your marketing and communication needs are a great place to start. It will take some time to get it all in place, just like the rest of your marketing campaign, but that really is a testament to just how comprehensive these free services are. Sink or swim, baby. I choose swim.

It all starts with a Google account, which has a variety of products to suit just about any communication, scheduling, and content management need you might have. What I outline below is a fraction of what they offer, and although these are not necessarily vital applications for marketing, remember that Google can see you. Using their tools in general may not help your ranking, but linking to your website effectively will help your ranking. You do this by adding signatures, providing profile information, etc. to these tools, and leading viewers to your site.

Free Google products – the short list

Gmail is email! Users can sign up for unlimited accounts and take advantage of an amazing amount of storage and archiving capabilities. I have hundreds of communications saved and I am using 2% of my storage limit. Gmailers can also chat with other Gmailers and send links, files and videos through chat. Contacts are easily imported, managed, and grouped. You can even create your own task list, and cross it out when you have completed it!

Google Calendar is great because it can be used publicly, privately, or both! Create master calendars, individual calendars, import friends’ calendars, share calendars, add calendar collaborators, add RSS feeds and more. You get the drift. There is a lot you can do with calendars.

Google Docs is the ultimate in free content organization and collaboration tools. So many of us collaborate with individuals or businesses nationally and even globally, and Google docs allows us to better manage projects by sharing documents and making and tracking changes all in one place. Even if you are a single user, Google docs is a great free alternative to expensive office programs. It doesn’t have quite the capability of these products, but it is a great start for new businesses on a budget.

You can up the ante with Google Sites, and collaborate publicly or privately on entire projects. Users can customize templates to coordinate to their own website and branding look, and set user and viewer permissions.

Free marketing tools

Google also offers a variety of free marketing tools to help you build a marketing plan, reach customers, and track success. What you choose to utilize is up to you, your business, and your goals.

Every web marketing plan should start with the consideration of search engine optimization. Luckily, Google provides three free tools to get started – Insights for Search, Searched-based Keyword Tool, and AdPlanner. Insights for Search allows you to search for search trends and patterns. You can narrow your search by category, seasonality, geographic distribution, and other properties. The Search-based Keyword Tool is the heart of where search engine optimization should start – Google will actually guide you toward what keywords people are searching for in your particular industry. AdPlanner offers a variety of tools to help you identify which websites are the best websites for you to advertise your business, and build a campaign around.

Google Webmaster Tools is true one stop shopping for the business concerned with search engine optimization, website indexing, and monitoring traffic to and from your website. This is a place where website owners can submit their sitemap, see how Google indexes their site, and see who links to their site. Google will also send you an alert if there are any errors or malware problems with your site!

Business to consumer site owners can benefit greatly from the Google Product Search, which allows you to post photos and descriptions of your product to appear on the Google product search page. Although exposure will depend on solid keywords and knowing exactly what the customer wants and is searching for, it doesn’t get much better than this for free. Although products from this search are only sometimes featured on the main google.com page, Google and many other corporate and small businesses claim that this tool increases traffic to your website tremendously.

Although Webmaster tools includes a way to track site visitation, no Google marketing plan would be complete without the use of Google Analytics. Analytics offers a dizzying amount of analysis that is too complex to go into deeply here. What is important to know is Analytics offers a customizable, in-depth tracking of website usage. Google Analytics analyzes marketing success, and can communicate this information through email reports across your organization.

Rounding out the free Google suite of marketing tools is Google Places. Google Places puts your business on Google maps and provides a place for you to provide complete business profile information and advertise events and specials. You can also track hits to your website from Google Places and more.

Google offers a huge amount of free tools to communicate and manage content, and get started marketing, analyzing and hopefully selling. Although I think there comes a time in every business launch that you will have to pony up for advertising, you can take your business pretty far with free tools. Pair these free tools with a solid social media campaign and you are well on your way to success. More on that in the coming weeks!