Google Analytics

In this digital age, the importance of data for a business/website should never be underestimated. In fact, without proper website traffic tracking, a business is literally at a loss, especially when it comes to optimizing the website and getting the most out of it.

Whether your website runs in the form of a personal blog, news portal, business or corporate page, e-commerce store, Google Analytics is considered an essential tool for every website. The more you use this powerful Google tool, the greater your advantage will be.

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 analytics information and use it to improve your website content, user experience, and optimization to improve online sales.

Out of so many features in Google Analytics, I think the ability to identify the Source/Medium of your website is one of the best tools for websites. Based on the data displayed, you can find out whether or not your marketing efforts have paid off. This can provide a solid reference for your next decision to improve the performance of your website.

Google data study

Trust me, for beginners, you might find yourself overwhelmed by all the amount of data displayed in Google Analytics. To be honest, sometimes you just need a simple report with a chart, graph or pie to summarize your website’s performance.

Here’s a free tool from Google called Google Data Studio, which gives you everything you need to turn your analytical data into informative and easy-to-understand reports through data visualization.

Analytics has always been a challenge for digital marketing, however, Google Data Studio allows you to create customizable reports and data visualizations. Plus, you can even share with your clients, a huge plus, especially if you’re working in a large group.

Quick Tip: You can check out the Google Data Studio Gallery to duplicate your samples and modify your website usage. After that, you will be able to change and edit the metric according to your needs. Pretty amazing, right?

Google search console

Formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, now rebranded as Google Search Console, this free web service is designed for webmasters. It allows you to check the indexing status and optimize the visibility of your websites.

This free tool is a MUST for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The power to track your site’s search performance is the most precious piece of data in understanding what the public wants from your site.

Once Google crawls the website, you will be able to see the organic search results along with performance statistics for organic search queries. This information helps you better understand how paid text ads and organic search results work together. If you dig deep enough, you’ll find many opportunities, such as identifying relevant search queries that have low organic traffic volume and targeting these keywords in Google AdWords. This will increase your overall traffic, tailored to the goal of your website.

Google My business

Are you operating a brick and mortar business? If so, this free tool from Google is 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, like Google Search and Google Maps.

As smartphone penetration in Malaysia approaches 100% by 2018, majority of Malaysians are using smartphones for browsing, searching for instant answers or browsing social media platforms. Your business and brand must be found online with the right information.

Please make sure all information listed is correct, up-to-date, and reflects your business. Remember, this information will appear when people search for your office or physical store through Waze or Google Map. We often see that some of the companies have not updated their address, phone number and business hours to the latest. Do you want to earn my traffic to your website?

You should try the new Google My Business features called “Posts”. The published content will display your image and a short description with a call to action link to your desired URL. For example, the blog post “Should I hide or even delete the customer inquiry on my Facebook?” It will appear at the bottom of our commercial 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, you need to use Google Keyword Planner to discover relevant keywords. Inserting those keywords into your website will ensure that your content remains relevant.

*To access Keyword Planner, you must be signed in to your Google AdWords account at http://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner. Creating the account is free and fast.

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 search volume data in historical statistics, which is one of the most important key factors for your website.

Also, keyword idea data is a useful tool for your website SEO. Analyze the information and turn it into your next content marketing strategy. Based on the search term data, you should have lots 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 tracking and analytics on websites in Tag Manager without touching the back of the website.

Many websites do not implement tracking functionality or have unreliable data collection due to messy code injection. To resolve this, we highly recommend using Google Tag Manager to consolidate and manage all your tracking codes or scripts.

The best example of the use of this tool is the use of Facebook ads. While more and more businesses are spending on Facebook ads, most don’t install the Facebook Pixel on their website for conversion tracking, optimization, and remarketing purposes.

Facebook Ads is already integrated with Google Tag Manager for an easy and seamless installation. All you need to do is just click and follow the given instructions without any complicated coding required.

Test my Think With Google site

To rank well on Google Mobile Search, your website must have a fast loading speed and a mobile-optimized website. Use Think with Google’s Test My Site tool to check your website’s mobile performance score. After a few minutes, you’ll receive recommendations to improve website performance on all devices.

No one wants to wait for slow websites or browse websites that are not mobile friendly. The suggested time is 3 seconds from Google, which means that if your site doesn’t fully load in 3 seconds, most people will probably go elsewhere.

Just insert your email address and you will get the detailed analysis of your website. The content of the report is simple, but it provides valuable insight into how Google ranks your website speed.

The report will become a crucial reference for your webmaster or web developer to further optimize the website. If you need an even more detailed report on how Google renders and indexes your website, you should use the PageSpeed ​​​​Insight tool.

Google Page Speed ​​Perspective

If you have web developers or web designers who really want to understand the factors to increase your website speed, try PageSpeed ​​​​​​Insights Tool and check your website speed and optimization score.

The latest version now shows data for your first content point (FCP), the measurement when a user views a visual response from the page. DOM Content Loaded (DCL), as well as the measurement when the HTML document has been loaded and parsed.

PageSpeed ​​​​​​Insights is useful for providing insights into how Google indexes your website differently for desktop and mobile versions.

Here are some website speed optimization tips from PageSpeed:

  • Avoid landing page redirects

  • Remove rendering-blocking JavaScript and CSS in top-of-the-page content

  • enable compression

  • Take advantage of browser caching

  • Minimize CSS

  • Minimize HTML

  • Minimize JavaScript

  • Optimize Images

  • Prioritize visible content

  • Reduce server response time

Google trend

Do you want to see the latest trends and data from Google? You can search for anything through Google Trends and even limit yourself 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 the traffic of interest for your search terms using Google Trends.

With this, you can detect the best time to launch a specific campaign. This is useful for seasonal campaigns or yearly promotions because you can find out the best time for your ad hoc digital marketing campaigns.

Google Alert

If you want to stay on top of a particular topic and all the related information that appears in the news, you can receive them automatically with Google Alert and receive notifications whenever your keywords or phrases have new updates.

Google Alert is good for simple keyword monitoring, with updates on every mention of those keywords being sent to your email inbox for near real-time notification. Of course, you can choose how often you’ll receive them: once a day, once a week, or even receive them as they happen.

A helpful tip when creating Google Alert is to avoid using generic keywords and create alerts that are more unique to your website. The more precise the keywords are, the more relevant your alerts will be. For that, you should use the search filters whenever possible, such as languages, region, or fonts.

Summary

So, that’s it, above are the 10 must-have free Google tools to improve your website performance. Make the most of any analytics, research, or tracking tools to achieve your site’s goal.

What are your favorite Google tools? Do you know of any other Google tools we should cover? Let us know in the comments below!