8 Free Google Products that your business should be using

Google is known to be the leading search engine in the world. But Google is more than just a search engine and it has hundreds of products and services. I am sure you’re using a handful of free Google products without even realizing it. Do you watch videos on YouTube? Do you have a Gmail account? Ever used Google translate, Google maps or Google Docs? Probably yes, then you’ve been using different free Google products all that time.

You can find which products or services you’ve been using through Google Dashboard, take a look at some of the services that I’ve been using.

Free Google products for businesses

If you’re a business owner, then there are several free Google products that you can use in favor of your business. We will list 8 of them and how to make the best out of them for your business.

Google Assistant
Google Calendar
Google Search Console
Google Analytics
Google AdSense
Digital Garage
Google My Business
Google Trends

Google Assistant

Google Assistant is basically a virtual assistant, it’s ready to help you anywhere, anytime and with almost everything. It can help you with over one million action like; setting tasks and To-Do lists, communicating tasks like sending text messages or reading your emails. It can fetch almost any local information you need; like finding the nearest ATM machine or calling the nearest pharmacy, cool right? It can also give you quick answers to any question you have or even tell you a joke.

You can have the Google Assistant on your phone, tablet, smart watch, car and speaker. All you’ll have to say is “Hey, Google” and shoot.

Having a virtual Assistant can easy many tasks, especially if you’re always on a tight schedule. Plus, you won’t have to pay a monthly salary, it’s a free Google product.

Google Calendar

Google Calendar is an online calendar that keeps track of all your life’s important events; birthdays, events, doctor’s appointments in one place. You can share your calendar with someone, add tasks and Add-ons. You can sync your calendar with phone or tablet. Moreover, you can create events and invite people to them. Timer saver, right?

Google Search Console

Do you have a website for your business? Google Search Console is a practical and proficient tool. It’s more of a control center and performance dashboard for your website, it also helps Google communicate with website owners, how? The tools and reports that the search console provides helps you measure your website’s performance and sends webmasters information about your website’s issues, errors, or even penalties. The URL Inspection tool provides detailed information that you can use to optimize and enhance your website. You can also test and improve your website’s mobile usability and submit sitemap and URLs for crawling.

It is an essential and critical tool for businesses with websites and a free Google tool too.

Google Analytics

Another functional free Google product for website owners is Google Analytics that helps you analyze your website’s traffic. Since websites are the digital presence of businesses, monitoring and analyzing the traffic gives you a better perspective about your audience and helps you create more effective campaigns for them.

Over 50 million websites around the world use Google Analytics

How can you use Google Analytics?

Simply, sign up for Google Analytics account, then, put several lines of tracking code - provided by Google Analytics - into the code of your website. This code records various activities of your website traffic, such as age, gender and interests of them. Google Analytics combines the data collected from your website in four ways:

User level (actions by each user)
Session level (each user’s visit)
Page view level (each page visited by users)
Event level (button clicks, video views, etc.)

You can read more articles related to Google Analytics

The AdSense tool is a cost per click (CPC) advertising tool that places contextual Google ads on your website. It’s a way to monetize your website. Website owners insert ad code into their sites and have targeted ads appear that are relevant to the website’s content.

So, how does it work?

First, you choose the ad that you want to place on your website. Ad types include text, display, or a mix of the two.

Then, you choose where you want your ad to appear by pasting ad code in your website.

After that, advertisers will bid for the ad space in an auction.

Finally, when these ads are seen or clicked, you’ll automatically earn money.

Digital Garage

The Google Digital Garage is a wonderful platform for young entrepreneurs, small business owners or simply anyone who wants to learn more digital and marketing content. It offers a range of free tutorials from Google on everything from learning how to code to online marketing and more.

You can even get a certificate once you’re done with the course and you aced the test. So, if you’re currently looking for a new job or you want to upgrade your skills, Digital Garage content is very informative, and the certificates will make your CV shine.

The content is available in different languages and the great news is that Arabic is one of them.

You’ll find a variety of topics, that will help you grow your digital knowledge from Social Media to Search Engines.

Google My Business

The ultimate tool for business owners; it allows you to manage how your business appears on Google maps and search. By using Google My Business you can add pictures, location and working hours of your business. Does your business receive reviews on Google? You can monitor and reply to customer reviews through this tool. Pretty effective, right?

To use this tool, you’ll need to follow the following steps

Create an account on Google My Business
Enter your business’s name, address, phone number, website URL and details
Verify your business either by (phone number, email, instant verification or postcard)
Optimize your business listing from the dashboard by adding all the info details - make sure they’re always up to date -

Don’t forget to add a profile photo, cover photo and your menu. Google recently introduced an option for the audience to follow businesses on Google and receive updates and news. You can utilize this to inform people of working hour changes, a new addition for the menu or anything else that might interest your audience. Also, make sure you monitor and reply to any reviews you get, you wouldn’t want a negative review of your business on Google for everyone to see.

Google Trends

Google Trends is a brilliant tool for marketers, content creators and business owners. It is a search trends feature that shows how frequently a search term is entered into Google’s search engine relative to the total search volume over a certain period of time. You can use the tool to explore daily search trends for certain countries. For example, the below screenshot shows the daily search trend in Egypt on the 15th of April 2019. You’ll find that the 2nd and 5th search were of Notre Dame because of the accident that happened there on that day.

Besides monitoring daily and real time search trends you can also check certain search terms and topics’ trend data over a certain period of time for specific countries or worldwide. You can also compare between the same search terms’ trend in different countries.

For example:

If you sell gardening tools in different countries, you can look up a certain search term like: shovel over the same period of time in your top markets like the following screenshot:

This tool is very insightful when you’re creating marketing campaigns, social media content, blog content and it can also be beneficial if you’re planning to launch certain products for specific markets.

Google it

Google has managed to evolve from a search engine to a platform that has numerous products and tools, and the best thing about it? They’re for free. These tools and products serve as the right-hand for business owners, entrepreneurs and almost everyone. So, how many Google products do you use on daily basis?