The Google ecosystem is just massive! It can be really confusing for business owners to know which tools to use, where to get the best performance of your site within search. But also some operational productivity tools that you can use within Google to help you along the way. So today I just thought I’d look at the four of those must-haves you should be absolutely having in your business to ensure that performance.
So let’s have a look the first first one, is Google My Business, it’s the front end of your site within Google. It’s the stamp of Google to say ‘yes’ this ‘is’ this business. So it’s the first thing that appears if someone searches your business name… your Google My Business profile will appear first it’s the stamp on the map, it’s your Google reviews, all of that the front end that’s critical to setup first.
Now I would actually set these up under one login account so set up in your business name @ gmail.com or if you’re using the G-Suite for email then you would have a dedicated… Google @ mybusiness com.au as your core account. Set up each of these different tools, and activate them under the one account therefore you have a much better way to track them in the future, combine the data etc.
So what’s next? Google Tag Manager sits at the back end of your site, it’s a little bit of code that’s it in your site great for serving all the different tracking tools and performance analytics tools that you need to plug in. Google Analytics is one but you can also plug in the Facebook pixel into that same account and your Google Ads tracking, all plugs into this one bit of code. Very powerful it is the most efficient way to serve your tracking codes now rather than adding all these different blocks of code in the bottom of your site which is going to slow it down. Tag Manager is the solution for that.
The next is Google cloud again some of you may know about Google cloud and may use it without even realizing it if you’re serving a location map with embedded in your website then you absolutely need a billing account in Google cloud to activate sure that map is working. Sometimes you go to sites now that just show “ah this map isn’t working properly please contact the web guy” that’s because the billing account isn’t activated. So Google cloud looks after all that API stuff as well as a lot massive services around cloud hosting storage etc.
The next one is Google search console it is the hidden gem of the web knowledge around how your site is performing within Google organic search. It extends analytics beyond what you really need lots of data but at its core is you can understand the clicks, impressions ,click throughs and average positions for each search phrase that connects to your site. So you get a whole detailed range of information around your search profile, as well as the health of your site. You can run analytics on different parts of you the health of your site. You can also register sitemaps and your robots.txt files all that technical SEO stuff happens within Search Console it is an absolute must. You should be looking at this data at least quarterly if not monthly if you’re into a high-traffic site.
And last but not least it’s optional but pretty powerful if you really want to run with it and that’s running your mail through G-Suite you can really reduce your spam by using those tools but it also opens up you know Google shared drives, using Google Docs, Google Sheets, Calendars, shared calendars. All of that environment for running your business or they’ll help you on your business happens within the GE an account. So that’s it in a nutshell, if you need a hand setting up these tools again we do it day in day out is connect all those dots so often we see parts of the Google set up over here parts are hidden over here in a different account we can help you streamline that into one account and get your business really humming within the Google environment.