Google is the king of search engines and there is no doubt that most of the SEO industry revolves around it for marketing and sales. To this end, Google offers a set of tools that help digital marketers analyze their websites, study their performance and improve their visibility in the SERPs. Not surprisingly, Google also performs well in this field. With a variety of dynamic and useful tools, Google helps users do a lot with their websites. And some tools, such as Google Analytics, provide a lot of analytics information for free. So, in this article, we will introduce some of the best SEO tools from Google that can analyze your website in detail and help you in different areas.
Google SEO Tools: Plans and Pricing
Using Google's SEO tools is completely free. All you need is a Google account. However, buying ads through Google Ads costs money. You can spend as much as you want, but on average, you'll pay between $1 and $2 for each click-through from a search engine ad to your website.
Google SEO Tools: Features
Google Analytics 4
Google Analytics is a web analytics service that tracks and reports on website traffic. It's one of the most used analytics services on the web. It provides detailed insights about your website visitors, including how they interact with your site's pages. It tracks everything from page views to bounce rates and conversion paths, giving you clear insights into your site's performance.
Recently, Google announced Google Analytics 4 (GA4), the successor to Universal Analytics (UA). This version has a new way of collecting, processing, and reporting data compared to previous versions. It is very detailed, so you can see not only how many people visited your site, but also how they found it, what pages they were interested in, and how long they spent on your site. This level of detail is essential to optimize your site to better achieve your goals, whether that be more sign-ups, more sales, or any other goal that is important to your business. Although this tool has a lot of details and features, it is very clean and easy to use.
The level of measurement that Google Analytics gives us is incredible. During testing, we were able to see how users were interacting with our site – clicks, downloads, videos watched – without writing a single line of code.
Plus, there's cross-platform tracking, which allows Google Analytics to show you how your audience moves across devices, helping you get the full picture. This is extremely useful when users access your site from different devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and laptops. And for those who love spotting trends and anomalies in their data, the tool provides valuable insights into what's working and what's not, through machine learning.
Plus, Google Analytics integrates seamlessly with Google's advertising platform, which is great for targeting your ads more effectively and getting more value for your money. You can see which ads are driving traffic and conversions so you can focus your efforts and budget on what's really effective. GA4 is also designed with privacy in mind, giving you the insights you need to improve your site while complying with current regulations.
Google PageSpeed ​​Insights
Google PageSpeed ​​Insights primarily helps you evaluate the performance of specific webpages on your website. It is available from a web interface or as part of Chrome DevTools. It measures the speed and usability of your site on both mobile and desktop devices and provides a score between 0 and 100, with a higher score indicating better performance. It is a very useful tool that identifies issues that are slowing down your website and provides a detailed breakdown of various factors such as load time, interactivity, and stability of content on load.
PageSpeed ​​distinguishes between lab data, which provides a snapshot of a controlled environment for debugging, and field data (Real User Monitoring (RUM)), which reflects actual user experience under different conditions and devices, derived from the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX). After performing an analysis, PageSpeed ​​Insights provides a set of recommendations to improve page performance. These recommendations include optimizing images, leveraging browser caching, removing render-blocking JavaScript, and more.
What's more, the tool is incredibly user-friendly: just enter the URL of the page you want to analyze, and within seconds, you'll see a score for both the mobile and desktop versions of your site, along with a list of actionable advice. This ease of use makes it invaluable for web developers and site owners looking to grow their websites organically.
Google Trends
Google Trends allows you to see what people are searching for on Google. You can find out how often certain words or topics are searched for and see how these searches change over time. This gives you an idea of ​​what is popular and what is becoming trending. In fact, you can even look at multiple things at once and compare them. This is great for understanding what people are interested in and seeing if something is becoming more or less popular. You can also see specific regions or specific cities where keywords are most searched for if you want to target a specific area or region on the internet.
It also gives you great insights in real-time, meaning you can see what's trending right now, what people are searching for right now, and it even connects with Google News, so you can see why certain things are trending because of news events.
Google Trends is easy to use. I first used it when I was still a college student and didn't know anything about SEO or trends. Even then, I could have a quick look at the analysis results, and it was free. Even today, you can use it without registering or paying a fee. It's very useful for students, businesses, curious people, and anyone who wants to know what's going on in the world.
And if you're someone who enjoys tinkering with things to make your website more appealing, you can use Google Trends data on your pages to make your site more interesting and authentic. And if you're more tech-savvy, you can use that data even more by connecting to our API, which allows you to automatically generate searched data and use it in a variety of ways.
Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is primarily designed to help advertisers find keywords relevant to their business and see the estimated number of searches they will receive and how much it will cost to target them. It's an essential tool for anyone involved in search engine marketing (SEM) or who wants to optimize their website's search engine optimization (SEO) for specific keywords. Plus, its direct integration with Google Ads provides a streamlined workflow for creating and tailoring ad campaigns based on powerful keyword data.
One of the best features of Google Keyword Planner is that it provides comprehensive data on keyword search volume, competition levels, and cost-per-click (CPC) estimates. This data is invaluable to advertisers and savvy marketers in helping them decide which keywords to target, how to allocate their budget effectively, and what type of content and ads will resonate with their target audience.
Additionally, the tool's keyword suggestions feature is perfect for expanding your keyword list. Enter a seed keyword and Google Keyword Planner will generate a list of related keywords, giving you new ideas you may not have thought of. This will help you expand your SEO and PPC strategy to broaden your reach in attracting traffic and conversions.
Don’t forget, Keyword Planner is extremely useful for analyzing historical search data. It helps you identify and capitalize on seasonal trends and changes in demand, allowing you to adjust your marketing strategy to get the most out of it.
Google My Business
Currently, the majority of businesses who want to establish an online presence are using Google My Business (GMB). Here are the levels and use cases of this dynamic tool from Google. GMB basically helps business owners manage their digital footprint across Google Search and Maps. If you run a business and want to share information such as your location, contact details, opening hours, services, etc., you can do so through your GMB listing. This listing is highly accurate and easily accessible to potential customers. All this becomes very important from a local SEO perspective, as your business will appear in local search results and Google Maps searches, significantly increasing your online visibility.
Another benefit of Google My Business is that it allows you to directly interact with your customers through reviews and the Q&A feature. These interactions not only make your business more trustworthy and credible, but also provide valuable feedback. Additionally, GMB provides insights into how customers find and interact with your listing, such as how many people called your business directly from the phone number listed, and how many people used directions to visit your physical location. This data can be extremely useful for improving your marketing strategy and understanding customer behavior.
GMB also allows businesses to post updates, special offers, events and news directly to their Google listing, helping to keep customers informed and engaged with your business, encouraging them to return and connect.
Google SEO Tools: Interface and Usage
Google is known for its great user experience, and Analytics, Search Console, and Ads are great examples of this. All three SEO tools use an easy to navigate left menu bar with drop-down menus that help you organize your data display. Additionally, within Analytics, you can create custom dashboards and reports to quickly surface the performance information that's most useful to you.
The biggest problem with Google's SEO interface is that Analytics, Search Console, and Ads are three different platforms. While you can link Search Console and Ads, most tasks require you to jump back and forth between the two interfaces.
Separating the three platforms allows for a clear distinction between their respective missions: monitoring performance, optimizing performance, and creating ad campaigns, but combining them into a single user interface creates a more streamlined experience.
Google SEO Tools: Support
Google only provides support for Analytics and Search Console on the web. Both platforms have extensive documentation centers where you can find the appropriate help file by simply describing your problem, but if you get stuck, the only support you can get is to post on the help forums and hope that other users can answer your question.
Support for ads is more specific: there's an online documentation library similar to that of Analytics and Search Console, and support is also available via phone, live chat, and email.
Google SEO Tools: Competitors
Google is one of the few services that offers a ton of data about web traffic and SEO for free, but there are plenty of other SEO software packages that repackage Google Analytics and Search Console to offer more flexible, custom data analysis.
For example, Heap presents Google search data in a way that's more user-friendly for website owners who aren't data scientists, and GoSquared essentially mimics Google Analytics, but with the added benefit of being able to integrate with customer relationship management platforms.
Google SEO Tools: Final Verdict
The combination of Google Analytics, Search Console, and Ads is extremely powerful for website owners. Together, these three tools allow you to not only monitor your website traffic, but also increase it through organic and paid search results. The only major thing missing from Google's SEO tools is information about how well your website ranks in search results for specific keywords. Still, it's hard to complain, considering Google doesn't charge for its SEO suite.