20 Google Tools for Small Businesses – Part 2

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In this article we look at the best Google resources for your small business. Many of the tools listed are free or low cost and contain invaluable information to help grow your business.

1. Google Keyword Planner (Free for Google Adword account holders) – Is a tool to search for keyword and ad group ideas, and see how keywords might perform in search and advertising. Keyword Planner is a free AdWord tool that can also help you choose competitive bids and budgets to use with your Adword campaigns.
2. Google My Business (Free) – Formerly called Google Places – Get your business on Google for free. “Google My Business” offers businesses a free business listing in Google’s business directory. Google My Business connects you directly with customers, whether they’re looking for you on Search, Maps or Google+.
3. Google Trends (Free) – A popular tool for showing how often a search is being done for a particle word or phrase. Based on Google Search, it shows how often a particular search term is entered relative to the total search volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages. Google Trends also allows the user to compare the volume of searches between two or more terms. This is a great tool for figuring out when people are looking for your product or service.
4. Google Global Market Finder (Free) – With Google Global Market Finder, you can find audiences around the world who are likely to be interested in your products, services, or business.

Simply enter keywords that describe your product or service and then select a region. You can choose specific markets or the entire world. Global Market Finder uses data from Internet searches around the world to show the number of times people search for your keywords in up to 56 languages.

5. Think Insights (Free) – Think Insights is your online destination for marketing insights, industry research and consumer trends. It includes studies and research from different countries across the globe categorized under marketing objective and platform. It includes tools like Brand Impressions, YouTube Dashboard, Data Board for Research Insights, Mobile Calculator, Consumer Barometer and More.
6. Google Public Data Explorer (Free) – Analyze hundreds of data points across dozens of countries and over several years. The data points range widely from GDP to passenger cars, cost of business start-up procedures or even the proportion of seats held by women in national parliaments.
7. Google Consumer Surveys (Free) – Google Consumer Surveys is a fast, affordable, and accurate market research tool that helps you make informed business decisions by asking Internet users survey questions. Users complete survey questions in order to access high-quality content around the Web, and content publishers get paid as their users answer. Google automatically aggregates and analyzes responses through a simple online interface.
8. The Customer Journey to Online Purchase (Free) – These days, the customer journey has grown more complex. Before making an online purchase decision, a customer may engage with your brand through many different media channels over several days. This tool, based on Q4 2012 data from Google Analytics, helps you explore and understand the customer journey to improve your marketing programs.
9. Google Adwords (Paid) – Google AdWords is an online advertising service that places advertising copy at the top, bottom, or beside, the list of search results Google displays for a particular search query. The choice and placement of the ads is based in part on a proprietary determination of the relevance of the search query to the advertising copy. AdWords offers pay-per-click (PPC), that is, cost-per-click (CPC) advertising, cost-per-thousand-impressions or cost per mille (CPM) advertising, site-targeted advertising for text, banner, and rich-media ads, and remarketing. The AdWords program includes local, national, and international distribution. Google’s text advertisements are short, consisting of one headline of 25 characters, two additional text lines of 35 characters each, and a display URL of 35 characters.
10. YouTube (Free) – The site allows users to upload, view, and share videos. Available content includes video clips, TV clips, music videos, and other content such as video blogging, short original videos, and educational videos. Having a YouTube account for your business is a great way to show the best features of your product or service on an easily recognizable medium.