Getting your website to rank high on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) is an important part of your digital marketing strategy. But there are lots of ways to get a top ranking, and not all of them will work for you!
Google SEO tools may be the answer you’re looking for. These are tools designed to improve your website’s ranking by optimizing the content that Google’s bot reads when it crawls through your site.
Google SEO tools help you to figure out what keywords or phrases are best for your site, so you can optimize your content for both Google’s bots and the customers who’ll be searching for things related to what you do.
Google Website Seo Tools
Choosing the right SEO tools for your strategy can be overwhelming. With so much variety in features and price ranges, where do you begin? Google’s SEO tools are a great place to start.
Since the search engine currently accounts for 70% of all searches, their SEO tools harness the most accurate and comprehensive source of data.
The best part of using these tools is that they’re absolutely free and generally unlimited. Here are 13 SEO tools built by Google you should consider adding to your wheelhouse.
1. Google Lighthouse
Google Lighthouse is designed to improve your website’s UX and performance. Auditing four different components, Google Lighthouse examines accessibility, Progressive Web Apps, performance, and SEO.
The results of these audits will give you a clear picture of the overall performance of your desktop site, web app, or mobile site.
Site speed is different for every user. Some people might have access to superfast 5g while others might only have unreliable 3g available. Google Lighthouse tells you exactly how each of these users will experience your site.
It will indicate if any of your web pages feel sluggish. As we all know slow or unresponsive web pages result in fewer conversions. This tool is perfect for getting your site up to speed.
Alternatives: Dareboost, WebsiteSpeedchecker.com
2. Google Search Console
With Google Search Console, you can identify broken links, crawling issues, see how many pages are indexed, and find out if your site has been penalised.
This is a great tool for seeing how Google views the technical elements of your site from a ranking perspective. Google Search Console will find all those blockers that are stopping your web properties from ranking well on search engines.
On top of identifying technical issues, you can also use the platform to identify the exact search queries users enter into Google to find your web pages.
Within the ‘Search Queries’ report, explore the analytics for each query, to see which pages need an SEO boost. These pages are generally those with high impressions and low CTR.
Alternatively, the platform can tell you if you might want to reconsider your keyword strategy if your site has lots of pages with low impressions and low position.
3. Google Analytics
Once you’ve got a solid SEO strategy in place, you’ll want to know if it’s helping to bring you more organic traffic. This is where analytical tools come into play.
If you care about making page 1 on Google search results, it’s best to stick to Google Analytics which uses all of its own data.
Other analytical tools usually just piggyback off Google’s data anyway, so you may as well use Google Analytics which is both free and accurate – a win-win situation.
Google Analytics tracks every minute piece of data related to your site’s visitors and traffic. Uncover keyword insights to find which search terms people use to land on your page so you know which elements of your keyword strategy are working.
Carrying out a successful and thorough SEO strategy is challenging if not impossible without performing regular analysis of your site. To stay ahead of the curve and competition, use Google Analytics to help you formulate a successful SEO strategy.
Alternatives: Matomo, FoxMetrics
4. Google Data Studio
Find Google Analytics and its vast data overwhelming? Google Data Studio is a free data visualisation tool which presents the data in visual, easy to read reports, and dashboards to help you interpret all the relevant information correctly.
View graphics like colour-coded maps showing the top countries by sessions or graphs to show you how site sessions are trending.
It integrates with other SEO tools from Google, such as Google Search Console to ensure your reports are as detailed as possible.
5. Google Keyword Planner
When it comes to putting together a strong keyword strategy, you’ll need a clear idea of some essential stats to guide your strategy.
While Google Adwords Keyword Planner was originally designed for PPC, it’s still an excellent Google SEO tool for harnessing keyword data for increasing your organic traffic.
Enter a seed keyword and find out the monthly search volume, competition and up to 300 suggested keywords. Using these metrics, you’ll quickly find out which keywords are better to include and which you can leave out.
It’s also easy to export and save data so you can easily refer back to the keywords when you’re planning your content strategy.
While this Google SEO tool provides plenty of essential keyword metrics, don’t confuse it with being the best or most varied keyword generator. You’ll be better off with more specific keyword research tools.
6. Google My Business
Google My Business is a pretty essential SEO tool if you run a local business with area-specific services or products.
This Google SEO tool allows you to claim your business on Google Maps so potential customers can easily find and locate your business.
Once you’ve claimed your business and it’s appearing on Google Maps, you can add photos and offers to your profile to draw in your target audience.
Google My Business basically gives you control over how you want your business to appear in its listing after appearing in a search.
The set up also allows you to add multiple ways for potential customers to contact you by messaging or calling your business directly.
Relevant statistics give you an accurate indication of how your customers connect with the business. View the total number of searches for your business, the number of calls and how many views your business received.
7. Google Alerts
Want to know any time someone mentions you or your business online? Or do you want to spy on your competitors’ mentions?
Google Alerts is a pretty simple tool to use. Anytime there’s a mention of the exact phrase you want alerts for, Google sends you an alert via email.
While it’s nice to know when you or your business receive a mention, it’s actually essential information when it comes to identifying link building opportunities, or potential brand collaborations. You can use your competitors’ mentions to help guide your strategy.
Alternatives: Mention, Ahrefs Alerts
8. Tag Manager
Waiting around for website updates and long development timelines is undoubtedly frustrating.
Google Tag Manager is a tool that allows you to easily update measurement codes and related code fragments known as tags on your website or app meaning you don’t need to rely on a web developer to do it for you which will ultimately save you time and your marketing budget.
As a more advanced technical Google SEO tool, it can take some time to get your head around some of the concepts. However, once code is installed on your site, you can then edit lots of the common marketing tags without further code updates.
9. Google Mobile-Friendly Test
Having a mobile optimised site is essential for ensuring you reach more customers quickly. A clear, easy to use and mobile-friendly site will ensure your site looks up to date and relevant. If your site is easy to navigate on a smartphone, it will increase customer satisfaction resulting in higher traffic and more conversions.
This tool tests how easily a user can access and navigate your site’s pages from a mobile device. One essential step is to ensure all web pages look good in a vertical format. There should also be larger CTA buttons so that users can take the action they want to without clicking elsewhere by accident.
These aesthetic and navigation issues are all features the platform will analyse to ensure your users are having the best possible mobile experience.
It will also dive deep into technical issues like text that’s too small or plugins that don’t work to ensure your whole site is compatible with a mobile browser.
10. Google Trends
Google Trends is a useful tool for comparing popular search terms over a given time.
View whether a trend is increasing or declining in popularity. This data is especially useful for showing seasonal variations in search popularity.
If you’re in eCommerce or shipping this can be helpful for understanding the seasonal popularity of items. For example, if you sell sunglasses, you’ll be able to see during which months there’s a spike in popularity and when in others there’s a dip.
You can also use this data to inform when you might want to revamp old content that needs a refresh or when you want to increase your output of original content around seasonal trends.
Having access to this data is key for planning when you might want to run PPC, invest more in your SEO strategy or spend time planning your content strategy.
google webmaster tools dashboard
Two of the best tools a webmaster could arm themselves with are the resources from Google Webmaster Tools and the analytics from Google Analytics. Analytics gives you very detailed and robust information about your website’s behavior. Webmaster Tools gives you the tools to communicate with Google to see what they found on your website when their spiders crawled your website’s pages last. The spiders take a look at things like your sitemap, errors on your site, malware detection, site speed statistics, download speeds on pages, search queries and rankings, and so much more that one article will not serve it any justice. So, in this article I am going to focus on the most important aspects of Google Webmaster Tools and how I use it the most in my day to day web management operations.
Dashboard
The Webmaster Tools dashboard is the first place you land when logging into your Google Webmaster Tools account. From this view you can see three basic options in the content area which are: your crawl details, search queries, and sitemap information. This is just a quick look at each of these there areas. Clicking into each will bring up a more in-depth and detailed view allowing you to see more information. On the left hand side is a navigation of the particular areas of services that Google Webmaster Tools provides. The first one I will talk about is the “Search Queries” tab.
Search queries
The “Search Queries” tab can be located under the “Search Traffic” tab. This view allows you to see how many impressions (how many people simply saw your site in a search) and the amount of clicks you got (how many people clicked to go to your site from a search). The blue line is the impressions and the red line is the clicks. A low click rate would suggest your page titles and meta-data is not appealing to the user performing the search. You may need to work on these two items if you see the red line flat line and the blue line dancing around in the numbers. That means people are seeing your site in searches, but they are not clicking to enter in. If you do address page titles and meta-data and find you still have a low click through rate it may be another problem like being too far back in the search results, etc. However, this view allows you to see what your ranked position is with Google under all of the known search terms users have entered and seen your page. This can also help you determine which keywords you want to focus on and which ones you do not.
Crawl errors
The “Crawl Errors” located under the “Crawl” tab is the next down on the list. This tab shows you what types of errors you have such as missing pages (404 errors), access denied (403 errors), if your DNS is working, if robots.txt are reachable, and if you have server connectivity. This may not seem very important but it is. You definitely want to know what pages are broken and not leading to anywhere. This helps to find out if the page was accidentally deleted or moved and gives you the option to correct it how you see fit. Often times you may choose to correct a missing page by redirecting it to another page on your site (known as a 301 redirect).
Fetch as Google
This tool is located under the “Crawl” tab as well. All this tool does is tell Google you have made changes and requests it to crawl that page and to add it to the search index. If you crawl your home page it will give you the option to fetch as Google for the home page alone, or for all of the pages attached to it (essentially your entire site). This is important because when you make changes you want to make Google aware of that to help speed up the process of getting those changes incorporated into the search index faster.
Sitemaps
The next is sitemaps and it is again under the “Crawl” tab. The “Crawl” tab is arguably the most important section in Google Webmaster Tools. On the sitemaps page view you will see if the sitemap has been submitted, if Google recognizes it and accepts it, if there are any errors with the sitemap, if you want test a new sitemap and re-submit it, and what amount of pages Google has indexed of your site from the ones you have submitted. A sitemap is not a necessity for running a website, and not even a necessity to get indexed by Google; but it does make Google’s job much easier and your site will get indexed faster by submitting one.
Security issues
The “Security Issues” tab is the next tab down in the left hand navigation and it only has one view. On that page view you will see any problems that Google has found regarding your page. This is a very important tab to pay attention to and Google will actually send you a message to your email on file to let you know if it picked up any errors. Depending on the severity of the error, Google could stop indexing your site until you fix it, then re-submit the site for approval, and after they approve they will put it back up. Having a corrupt site time and time again and malicious content on it, can also lead to Google blacklisting your domain. If Google blacklists your domain, that is an extremely bad thing and usually means the end of your online presence.
Other resources
Lastly, the “Other Resources” tab, second from the bottom on the left hand navigation is where we will end this article. This tab provides you with various webmaster tools such as:
- Structured Data Tool – This helps you see your site as Google sees it in search results. It does not have the meta-description however. It is a great way to test if your Google Authorship information is hooked up.
- Email Markup Tester – A great starting place to test email markup for email deployments. Emails have a different set of standards than the web and can be tricky to code in order to make look right across all types of devices and web browsers.
- Page Speed Insights – Google Page Speed Insights is a wonderful tool to help determine why a particular page is not loading very fast. It gives you a score and instructions on how to improve your page download speed.
There are other options in there as well and you will have to play around and see which ones you like best. For me, those three are the ones I pay attention to the most.
Conclusion
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