5 Free Google Tools To Drive Traffic To Your Website

Having an online business or a store with little to no traffic is a sure fire way to crash and burn. The notion around "build it and they will come" doesn't carry any weight in this day and age. It's imperative that every website owner and eCommerce business have a proactive strategy and implement industry best practices in SEO to drive traffic to their websites.

How to Drive Traffic to Your Site-The Free & Organic Way

Everyone likes free traffic. However for Google to send your way free traffic to your website you need to be able to play the long game and be able to convince google algorithms that you can produce top notch content in your field of expertise.

The nature of this long game is SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Think of it as a Marathon vs. a Sprint.

SEO is by far one of the best ways to drive traffic to your site. For the novice this can seem overwhelming at first. However, diving into the basics of SEO and learning the tricks of the trade will allow you to start ranking in Google Search results and bring free organic traffic along the way.

There is a misconception in the industry that only established web properties can gain advantage with SEO and it's not the right strategy for an up and coming site/eCommerce store. This cannot be farther from the truth.

There are a few basic rules, but the key to SEO is content. If you can provide high quality. actionable, meaningful content and add value for your user base you are bound to eventually start ranking.

Please keep in mind though that SEO requires the following traits to achieve success:

Planning
Cadence driven editorial calendar for Blogging
Keyword research
Buyer intent research
Ability to research trending topics
Ability to consistency measure your performance
Last but not least patience and perseverance

SEO takes immense planning and a clear cut strategy. Your planning needs to delve into a series of parameters that are ideal for your online business and then start implementing your SEO strategy.

As an example let’s say you run a local coffee shop and want to build a brand/following using SEO as a game plan. You will need to be focused on all things local first.

The planning exercise for your SEO here would include:

Geomodified keyword research
Audience demographic research
Implementing Google My Business (GMB)
Researching local buyer patterns
Keeping tabs on local weather
Tracking all Local events
Researching Local competitors

Along with the above as you keep fine tuning and building your SEO strategy you will discover a multitude of things that can help you with your SEO content strategy. The idea again is to be proactive and patient.

You may be thinking this all sounds cool but this can’t be free. You would be pleasantly surprised! Google provides a whole bunch of tools you can use for free for each of the items I described above.

The five Google Tools that will help you to up your SEO game are as follows:

Cadence Driven Editorial Calendar-Look no further than Google Calendar

For most micro/small businesses personal gmail would suffice in the beginning. With that being said you can use the Google Calendar and all of it’s incredible features to stay on top of all of your content publishing deadlines.

Use the Google Calendar as an editorial calendar and build weekly/bi-weekly/monthly cadences. Since Google has a whole bunch of tools that come handy for all things related to SEO you can improve your operating efficiencies further by using these tools in a holistic manner.

Keyword Research/Buyer Intent Research/Trending Topic Research:

You can use three of Google’s tools for the above.

They are:

Google Search Console
Google Keyword Planner
Google Trends

Google Search Console:

Although Google Search Console is traditionally used to let Google understand your site structure, address what parts of your site you want google to crawl and index it also has some neat features that will help you to improve your SEO reach.

As an example in it’s monthly reporting it will highlight Total number of clicks, Impressions, Content achievements (ideal for content planning and mapping), Top performing pages (ideal for on page SEO), How do people find your site (ideal to track keywords that you are already ranking for), Top performing queries (again a treasure trove for Keywords), Audience behavior, and last but not least Traffic patterns.

Google Keyword Planner:

Keyword planner helps you in researching keywords you want to target for your website/industry vertical. Although it’s used for PPC it offers incredible insight that can be harvested for SEO as well. Since the source data is being provided by Google itself you can be rest assured about the accuracy of information.

With this nifty tool you can gauge a whole lot of attributes to include:

Discovering Keywords
Number of searches a keyword gets a month
Research how your keywords fit into different categories

Google Trends:

Google trends is a tool that depicts the search trends feature relative to a particular keyword or phrase. It shows data pertaining to various parameters and the trends are a great way to capitalize and monetize on buyer search intent.

If you are looking for content ideas to rank for SEO this tool is invaluable. It helps you in researching seasonal, regional, national and international trends for various types of content planning exercises.

Google Analytics for Measuring site traffic patterns to identify opportunities for SEO improvement:

Google Analytics provides deep insights into multiple user behaviors. These insights provide website owners, content planners and SEO practitioners an ability to understand website visitors and how they interact with the content being produced.

This insight particularly is quite fascinating since it allows you the website/eCommerce storefront owners to see How your users think of your website, Which parts of your site they are engaging the most, What times of day do they engage, What types of devices they use to engage, Time they spend on each part of your site etc. If you extrapolate this information you can build content that gets higher user engagement, and in turn help you to rank your site organically over a period of time.

Conclusion

This post has shown you how to effectively use Google’s free tools to drive traffic to your online business or store! The ones we have covered are sure fire ways to drive traffic and hopefully help you get your store or online business to where you want it!

Shuvel Digital Marketing specializes in implementing these tools for your online businesses and would love to help you in ranking your site and bring the desired traffic and convert that traffic to customers. Until next time!