Improve your website with free tools from Google

This is one of the most popular tools offered by Google, and for good reason. It provides statistics and analytics, which you can use to track your website’s performance and collect visitor insights.

Google collects data from users, then converts that into useful information and reports, such as the number of visitors to your website, how long they spend on your site, and page views.

Having detailed insights into those using your website is crucial. For example, if you know where the majority of your visitors are located and the most popular pages they are viewing, then you can tailor your site to suit their needs or interests better.

Google Analytics is useful for smaller businesses or beginners who may not need complex analytics. The platform has simple features and basic reports; but there are also plenty of more advanced features for those looking for deeper insights and analytics. The tool is free too, making it popular for small to medium-sized online businesses looking to embark on search engine optimisation (SEO) but are perhaps unsure on where to start.

Find out more about Google Analytics

This is a great platform if you’re looking to monitor how Google sees your site, by maintaining and helping improve your site’s presence in search results. It offers reports on areas that need to be fixed, including spam, broken links and other troubleshooting issues.

You can get reports on how often your website appears in Google Search, the queries that show your site, and how often searchers click those queries. It will even show you the sites that link to your website.

Another useful tool offered with Google Search Console is the mobile-friendliness test. By entering the URL that you would like to test, this tool tells you how easily potential customers visiting your site can access it on their mobiles. As people use their mobiles to browse the web, it’s vital that your site is easily accessible and mobile-friendly.

This platform is great for business owners looking to get the best out of Google’s search results, and for those wanting to optimise their site’s ranking in search results.

Find out more about Google Search Console

Have you ever wondered how fast your website appears on desktop and mobile devices? PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is a tool that shows you exactly that.

PSI can provide two types of useful data about your page: lab and field data. Lab data helps debug performance issues and field data helps uncover real-world user experiences of those visiting your page.

PSI also offers performance diagnostics, by giving your page a performance score. Anything above 90 is considered good, and anything below 50 is considered poor and in need of improvement. The page is also measured using a traffic light icon system: a green circle for good performance, an amber square for improvement needed, and a red triangle warning will appear if a page is poor.

Find out the speed of your website pages with PageSpeed Insights

This offers the ability to experiment with different ways of delivering your content.

Optimize helps you increase the average number of visits to your website/page by running some test experiments – including A/B, Multivariate and Split URL tests, as well as a server-side experiment – that will ultimately help you achieve a higher conversion rate.

Optimize can help you build and create experiments, which can then be run to test your hypothesis. Reports are created, showing what does and doesn’t work well, meaning you can deploy the winning variant on your website. If necessary, you’ll have the option to Optimize again.

This free tool is great for those with smaller testing needs, or who are not experts in the field, as it allows you to run up to five tests at a time, while also being quite easy to use. However, it may not be the best option if you’re looking for something slightly larger, or your needs are much greater.

Find out more about Google Optimize

Do you have a lot of data, but not sure what to make of it? This is where Google Data Studio steps in. This free tool helps convert any data you have into informative reports that are easy to read and understand.

Data Studio can turn your numbers into useful visualisers, including line, bar and pie charts, as well as other maps, graphs and tables, making all your complex data easy to look at and interpret. These can also be edited with annotations and images, as well as a choice of colour themes to make your data more visually appealing and easy to follow.

This tool is collaborative too – you can share your insights with team members and work on them together.

Find out more about Google Data Studio

We find Google Analytics and Google Search Console very useful. We use them on our own sites and install them as standard on all the websites we design for our clients too. Find out more about our web design services, and see samples of our work