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Back in November last year, I wrote a post about some free online tools well worth using. Here are a few more for you, but this time, specifically free Google tools. All you need to do is set up a Google Account to use them if you haven’t got one already.
1. Google Maps
If your business services a specific area and/or has it’s own premises, it’s a good idea to make sure you’re listed on Google Maps. You can register for free and you may well find your business ranking in the Google maps results which often appear at the top of the search results. It’s a great way to get found and can really increase the visibility of your website – to see an example, just type in e.g ‘hotels portsmouth’ into Google and a maps listing will come up above the main search results. To get your site included in Google Maps, click on the above link to the Google Maps website, then click on ‘put your business on Google Maps’ and follow the instructions.
2. Google Products
If you have an e-commerce site that sells products, you can submit your products to Google which will list them in search results in the product search. Again, this is completely free and can give your products additional visibility in Google. To set this up you can either submit items individually or use a feed which you may need your web developer to set up for you: go to the Google products page, click on ‘information for sellers’ at the bottom of the page, then click on ‘submit your products’ on the left and follow the instructions.
3. Google Alerts
Google Alerts are set up to send you an email when an article is posted to the web containing keywords specified by you. The alerts can be used in all sorts of ways, such as to keep track of a particular subject you’re interested in, check out your competitors and also check out what’s being said about your own business, which is really important with all the social channels on the web. Use it to your advantage so that not only can you easily find information across the web on a daily basis, but you can reply back to anything being said about your business.
Others to try:
Google Chrome – the new internet browser, currently only available for Windows users.
Google Checkout – a similar offering to Paypal, I’ve not used it but would find out the pros and cons (and costs involved) of using it over Paypal if you want to give visitors the options of paying for goods or services on your site.
Google Mail – free webmail, very similar to Hotmail. If you’ve not got a webmail account then set one up and use it to subscribe newsletters (particularly if you subscribe to quite a few) and even testing out your own email newsletter!
Google Trends – find out what’s hot in search at the moment!
