:: Jessica Davis, Godot Media ::
For most individuals, Google is the most trustworthy search engine out there and most of us turn to Google for any requirement that we may have online. However, most people forget that the largest search engine provider is also a great believer in small businesses.
Google wants to be able to help small businesses as much as possible and the company has launched a lot of products and tools to help any kind of business get off the ground and thrive. Google is much more than just a search engine and if you look hard enough, you will find a treasure chest of tools to help your small business grow. Here are six of the best tools that Google offers small businesses.
For any business to survive and thrive, it needs to be able to change with the times. In fact, as a small business owner, you need to understand current and upcoming trends to ensure that you are ahead of your competitors. Google Trends is just the tool for you to understand trending search terms. Most small businesses rely heavily on online marketing to attract new customers.
Google Trends will help you find the right keywords and trending search terms that you must include in your online marketing copies to reach out to a wide audience and to ensure that your copy has the maximum impact. Google Trends even provides additional details on trending search terms for accurate analysis.
Google Analytics is probably the most important for any business that has an online presence. This statistics tool will help you understand how well your website is doing. With Google Analytics, you can understand how many people are visiting your website, where most of the traffic is coming from, the demographics of the audience that your website is attracting and even the times at which your website is getting most of its traffic. This tool gives an in depth information about your Web traffic, which is essential for you, to understand your customer base and to figure out how to improve your website and online marketing methods.
Google Drive is Google's answer to Dropbox and in some cases it is even better than the latter. The tool is a cloud storage system that allows you to store up to 10GB of data. Small businesses don't have the luxury to have servers and databases to store business data and Google Drive is very easy to use. Any small business owner can easily learn how to use this tool to store, organize and retrieve presentation, spreadsheets, documents, videos and images. The best part of the tool is that it integrates very well with third-party tools so you can customize your Google Drive to make it more efficient for your business.
Imagine the kind of success you would get and the amount of goods you would be able to sell if you could have product ads for relevant searches conducted on Google. Now you can do that with Google Merchant Center. This tool lets you manage your online inventory of products so that your products can show up with Google properties. When you link your Google Merchants with your Google AdWords accounts you will see your products appearing as product ads on Google Shopping and Google search results pages. These ads will even feature information about the products such as prices, a small description and images.
Google+ may not yet be a serious competitor to other social media websites like Facebook but Google+ is the preferred site for those looking to network. Most importantly, as a Google product, you can bet that it integrates well with all other Google products. To reach out to more customers, to improve search engine rankings and to build a network for your business, you need to make sure that your business has a page or account with Google+. Google Search takes Google+ into account and ensures that Google+ results show up prominently for the right searches.
This is the preferred email client provider for most people in the world. But it is also an excellent tool for businesses. Small businesses may often not have registered domain names and dedicated email providers. Gmail is an excellent alternative allowing you to provide your employees with email accounts that they can use very easily.
Jessica Davis is a Content Strategist at Godot Media, a leading content services company. She has extensive experience in creating engaging content for businesses and individuals. Other fields of interest are social media, technology and fashion.