Many of our readers send comments after we share lists of useful tools for marketing or productivity, complaining that their budgets are already stretched too thin. This is especially true after two years of COVID pandemic. Many businesses had to close down or saw their revenues significantly reduced. For this reason, we decided to prepare a list of free Google tools for business owners who want to conduct their marketing activities on their own and be more productive.
One Account for all the Free Google Tools for Business Owners
One of the things that Google does better than other software companies is simplicity and ease of use. There is no need to remember many complex logins, allow tools to interconnect or anything else.
Once you sign up for a Google account, your username and password will unlock all the free Google tools for business owners. In a sense, your Google credentials are the most valuable digital signature you own. For this reason, you must be careful to protect them against unauthorised access. The best way of doing it is using a password manager. If you do not want to pay for it, then make sure that you generate a strong password (Google will tell you) and change it frequently.
Discover the Most Useful Free Google Tools for Business Owners
Now, let us not waste any more time with introductions and start giving you what we promised. You can use the following online tools from Google for free to manage your business and marketing activities:
1. Google Workspace
Google Workspace is probably the best and most effective of all free Google tools for business owners. In a recent rebranding move, Google brought together the most popular tools used both by businesses and individuals under one umbrella. These tools are:
- Gmail – one of the most popular email clients
- Meet – Google’s tool for video conferences
- Calendar – plan your daily schedule with clarity
- Chat – platform for text chats
- Docs, Sheets and Slides – document editing tools
- Sites – Google’s free site building platform
- Forms – a simple way of creating surveys
- Keep – useful for creating to-do checklists
- Jamboard – a free tool for creating mindmaps and other visual presentations
- Cloudsearch – a special tool for a quick search for your own content stored in Google tools, like Gmail and Docs
- Apps Script – for business owners with some coding knowledge, a useful way of building custom solutions.
2. Google Business Profile
We wrote extensively on the importance of having a Google Business Profile listing. This is one of the most useful free Google tools for local SEO. It is the first place Google will search to confirm your business location in order to show your business among local search results.
This is also the platform where you can collect valuable customer reviews and receive ratings. These two elements are crucial for your business reputation. When users find your business on Google, they see your rating and the number of reviews. Based on them, they decide whether they will even bother to click on the link and visit your site, let alone make a booking or a purchase.
3. Google Retail
This is among the more recent free Google tools for business owners. It allows retail businesses to list their products across various Google properties, including YouTube, Maps and Assistant.
Also, you can create a Trusted Store and display your customer ratings or manage your inventory across Google using Merchant Centre. Please note that any Trusted Store must pass a Google test for reliable shipping and customer storage before you can display the respective badge.
4. Google Analytics
You must be familiar by now with Google Analytics. It is one of the essential free Google tools to analyse the traffic to your website, understand how users interact with it and learn valuable insights about your customers.
This is probably one of the useful solutions for understanding:
- How your keywords perform
- Which are the most popular content topics on your site
- What are the sources of your website traffic (social media, Google, paid search, referrals)
- What page most users are browsing when they leave your site.
These data can help you optimise your site and your content strategy to meet your visitors’ needs.
5. Google Alerts
Online reputation management is a critical issue for any brand or business. Negative comments (whether truthful or false) can determine a lot of people to stop buying from you or make their first purchase. You do not want to leave these comments unaddressed.
But first of all, you must know that they exist in the first place. This is what Google Alerts does – you can specify any keyword – your brand name in this instance – and you will get alerts in your email when it appears in content across the web.
6. Google Drive
This is one of the most useful free Google tools for secure document storage. You know that hard drives can fail, USB sticks and DVDs can get damaged or lost – in short, physical data storage devices are not 100% reliable.
Cloud storage offers you the guarantee of security and accessibility from any device and anywhere across the globe where you have internet connection. Among other services, Google Drive offers one of the most generous free storage plans – 15 GB. This is more than enough for business documents, spreadsheets and slides.
7. Google Fonts
Fonts are extremely important for branding and marketing. Top brands hire designers to create unique fonts for them. For smaller businesses there’s Google Fonts. This is a huge repository of fonts, many of them free.
If you own a website available in various international languages, you can find Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Hebrew and Arabic fonts on Google Fonts, as well.
8. Google Search Console
Is your site properly crawled and indexed by Google? Are any issues and errors that may affect the way users can access your site? You can find out all these any many other site health and optimisation information in Google Search Console.
You will also receive helpful tips for correcting these errors. You can do some of these tasks on your own. For others, you may have to hire a developer.
9. Google Digital Garage
Here is one of the best free Google tools for business owners. You can learn and get certification for many useful skills for any entrepreneur in the 21st century. The courses you can enrol in are structured in three categories:
- Digital marketing
- Career development
- Data.
You can select courses based on various other filters:
- Duration – between 2 hours and +20 hours
- Learning provider
- Difficulty – beginner, intermediate or advanced.
Key Takeaways
You can manage your time, skills and digital marketing strategy using free Google tools for business owners. Most importantly, you only need one account for all these tools and you can access them from any device – desktop, laptop, smartphone or tablet. Thus, you can choose where to work from and enjoy the same benefits of Google tools from any place in the world.