Here at Bigwave media, we are always trying to make people more aware of the potential of the digital side of their businesses. A lot of companies have websites and that is as far as they go, but there is a whole other side to the web that can be used for boosting business, sales, and views. This isn’t exclusive to online companies only. Anything from your local garage to the government could be working more efficiently, using web software to help them. Google are a massive advocate for this and have a ton of services to help improve how businesses and charities function online. If you are a registered charity, you get access to many paid for apps for free! Here’s our pick of the best Google tools your business can get its hands on:
1. Google Analytics
So your website is live and on the World Wide Web, but is it doing what you want it to? And is it doing what your customers want it to? Using Google analytics you can see exactly what type of people are arriving at your site, how many there are and what they are looking at. This can help you improve the website experience for these needs. If you have a lot of people reaching your site and not converting to sales, maybe you can make it easier for them to buy. If you have a lot of visitors from a specific geographic location then tailor your content around them.
2. Google AdWords
Google AdWords gives you the opportunity to get more people involved in your site. Through paid advertisement, your website will show up when people Google search relevant keywords that you have assigned to your adverts (you only pay when people click through!). Google AdWords are great because you can give users a clear pathway from search to sale. If you tell people what they are going to get before they click, you get the double whammy of saving your budget for only interested users whilst also benefiting from an increased conversion rate. If your advert says “Buy red shoes here” and a key search you are targeting includes “where can I buy red shoes?” it is pretty safe to assume that everyone clicking through will already want to buy red shoes, you just need to give them that opportunity. Consider using price as a draw and you could be onto a winner.
3. Blogger
Blogger is Google’s blogging service. You can sign up and start writing blogs in minutes using a preassigned professional looking templates. What’s great about this is that each blog post you write adds another page to the internet, which Google will crawl and link back to you. Also, if used properly you can gain a load of free backlinks to your own website and get your blog posts shared on social media. Reading these may be an entrance to your website for someone that would never find it normally. The key to blogs is to use them just to get people through the door. Your website can do the selling afterwards. All these links between the different systems are also important for SEO and clout. The more you are consistently recognised around the internet, the higher Google will place your web pages in search result rankings.
4. Google My Business
Google My Business is the service supplied by Google which puts your business fully into the cloud. It’s all intended to connect you with Google and in turn, connect you with your customers. It does away with any paper or locally saved information and makes your company truly online. Included in this is Google Mail, Google Calendars, Google Cloud Storage, Google+, and more. It is available as a package or as single items, but one thing you can’t do without is Google+. The web giant’s social media platform tends to receive a lot of complaints from people saying it’s not as good as Facebook or Twitter, but what you have to remember is that it is all linked into Google. The location of your shop on Google+ feeds into Google maps; or the opening times of your museum feeds into Google searches; or the phone number of your cat hotel feeds into Google Mail Contacts. (If you have a shop or a museum or a cat hotel, that is. The results are all unique to each business owner!).
Google are trying to get us all connected to improve the experience of online for everyone. Can you remember how you planned your journeys before Google Maps? It may be a bit of a leap and quite daunting moving to a new system and changing how your business works. But don’t worry, Bigwave media offers Google-esque services from Google Analytics training web implementation to AdWords campaign set-up and monitoring to help you fully utilise Google and vastly improve your company’s online web presence.
For an informal chat about how to keep your website up to date and improve your online presence, please get in touch or tweet us @bigwavemedia.