How to use Google services to optimize your SEO

Most of the ranking value of your website on a search engine result page (SERP) undeniably comes from following all the SEO best practices when writing original content. But using the tools provided by the Search Engine itself (mostly free with Google) will help you optimize your ranking and give you an edge on your competitors.

Here are 6 Google services (all free except for AdWords) you have to integrate in your SEO strategy to boost your ranking on the world’s leading search engine:

1. Google keywords tool & Google trends (free service)

These two tools will give you tremendous insights on what people search on Google:

Google AdWords Keyword Planner (free,  you must create a Google AdWords account) enables you to find the most popular keywords typed in Google by search volume for any geographic location and language. This is a great way to find out the popular keywords use to search for your products, services, or information.

Google Trends (free no account creation required) enables you to find the trends in keywords searched on the Internet over time. It’s particularly useful to compare different sets of keywords and find out which ones will be the most popular in the near future depending of if they’re trending up or down. You can easily compare different search terms and Google provides you with some other keyword combinations for your selection.

These tools offer a great way to know what keywords or phrases are the most popular for you to include them in your content.

2. Google Webmasters Tools (free service)

This Google service will help you understand how Google sees your website and what you can do to improve its understanding of your content. This service used to be a simple “add my website URL to Google” in order to make Google aware of the existence of your website but it is now a quality control centre of your website’s SEO.

The main reason it’s a best practice to declare your website to Google Webmasters is because it speeds up the indexation (or crawling) of your website. If you maintain an up-to-date sitemap.xml file and have a mechanism that warns Google Webmasters that the sitemap file has been update, Google them crawl your website within hours.

On top of that, Google Webmaster Tools now offers a dashboard that enables you to see when you website’s content showed up on search queries. The “Traffic Search => Search Queries” dashboard enables you to see:

• What keywords were typed in Google that displayed your content’s web link
• How many times your web link was displayed
• How many clicks your web link received
• Your content web link’s ranking for that search query

It’s powerful stuff!

Note: This information on keywords is on the verge of being retired from Google Analytics because of the limited amount of data Analytics is now able to collect from direct visitors to your website.

Go to Google Webmasters.

Here’s how you setup Google Webmasters:

1. Create an account with Google Webmaster. You’ll need a Google account.
2. Add your website to help Google index your website (there are several options to authorize Google Webmasters to crawl your website.
3. Make sure your website has a regularly updated XML sitemap file and declare it to Google Webmaster. Here are two tools you can use to either create an XML sitemap manually, or use a Plugin if your CMS is WordPress.
4. Check your website’s SEO health and fix broken links or any other issues Google points out.

3. Google Plus and Google My Business (free services)

Google My Business (previously called Places) used to be Google’s directory of businesses. But since Google has launched its own Google Plus social network, the directory has merged with the network. In other words you can merge your Google My Business with your Google Plus Page.

Google is extremely biased and pays tremendous attention to what you publish on Google Plus. You can post links to your content on Google Plus and have readers “plus” them (the Facebook Like). The more “pluses” you get, the more it tells Google how relevant a piece of content is.

There are plenty of other cool reasons to having a presence on Google Plus (such as the YouTube integration or Hangouts for example) but from an SEO perspective, it’s simply that Google will favor its own social network over competitors to rank linked content. So the more followers you have and the more “pluses” your content has on Google Plus, the more your website will be perceived as an authority in Google Search’s ranking.

Also, as of December 2012, Google Plus is the second largest social network in the world. After Facebook, and ahead of Twitter. UPDATE: As of March 2015, Google Plus is now ranked #5 with 120M monthly visitors after Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. See monthly updated eBizMBA Rank.

Go to Google Places for Businesses or go to Google Plus.

4. YouTube (free service)

YouTube is the second largest Search Engine in the world. If this fact wasn’t enough alone to start posting content there, YouTube also enables you to stream video to your website and have that content be available (if tagged with the right keywords) simultaneously on YouTube, on your blog, on any other website, and on any social network. YouTube is where your video content is published first and Google will favor that in its indexing of the content related to your brand.

Go to YouTube.

5. Google AdWords (performance based billing)

Google AdWords is Google’s Ad placement service that enables a website to create traffic by paying for keyword related Ads on Google Search results page. While I don’t believe that Google has officially acknowledged this, it would make tremendous sense that Google favors websites that keep Google in Business by feeding it advertising dollars. Suspicion of financial bias aside, Google Ads are links back to your website based on supposedly relevant keywords and Google takes those into account to index and rank your website.

Go to Google AdWords.

6. Google Analytics (free service)

Google Analytics is Google’s free Web analytics tools that enables you to track visitor behaviour on your website (number of visits, where visitors come from, what they do on the site, etc.). You can also set it up to eCommerce transactions, Search form behaviour, and Google AdWords traffic.

Google analytics is free because you’re sharing your analytics data with Google (anonymously). It’s a great tool to understand the performance of your website from a content perspective, a promotional perspective, and a customer profile perspective.

The knowledge you gain from Google Analytics’ insights enables you to adjust your SEO, your editorial content, your reach on social media, etc. Not bad for a free tool.

Go to Google Analytics site.