Google's Tool Shed:Free Tools & Why We Need Them | Episode 30 | Trades Secrets: Contractor Marketing Podcast

Devon Hayes:

Hi, I’m Devon Hayes.

Amanda Joyce:

I’m Amanda Joyce. Today’s topic is Google’s Tool Shed Free Tools and Why You Need Them. And here’s why you should care. Not only are these tools free, but they can greatly assist you in tracking and improving upon your marketing strategy.

Devon Hayes:

Welcome to Trade Secrets, where we demystify digital marketing to help contractors get the most bang for their marketing bucks.

Amanda Joyce:

This is for you if you’re a contractor looking for actionable marketing insights.

Devon Hayes:

Learn from home service’s industry experts to elevate your business through simplified marketing strategies.

Amanda Joyce:

Let’s dive into today’s Trade Secret.

We say this at the beginning of every episode that this is a really good topic. But before we dive in on these tools, one thing that we really want to make sure that we reiterate, is how important it is for you guys to have access to all of these tools.

They’re all free and they all just, it requires a simple login. We really, really recommend to all of our clients that they make sure that they have access with one email so that you can log into all of these with one simple login, so you’re not scrambling around trying to figure out how to log into Google Analytics and all these other things with different email addresses.

It sounds obvious, but I promise you, if you do the legwork and figure out how to access them and get admin access to all of them in one email, you will be really happy about it in the future.

Devon Hayes:

Yeah. It really does seem to be the thing where it is so hard to find the logins once… You know a lot of these exist, but you don’t know how to get to them, but it is a pain point we see with probably 9 out of 10 clients. It is always pain point. So one email login would be great. So if you’re starting from scratch, just use the same email, if not-

Amanda Joyce:

Or if you’re not, just…

Devon Hayes:

… grant access to one.

Amanda Joyce:

Yeah. Grant the access.

Devon Hayes:

Yeah. To one master, maybe login email. With that, let’s dive into tool number one.

Okay, so this one is your Google Business Profile. You probably already know what this one is. You probably already have access to it, but it’s free and it’s literally the most important thing for your local positioning and local ranking on Google itself. So you want to make sure you have this profile completely set up and fully optimized.

Amanda Joyce:

Absolutely. And make sure you’ve got access to it.

Devon Hayes:

Yeah. So this is where you’re going to reply to reviews. You’re going to give a great description about your company and the areas that you serve. You are going to showcase your services and products and byproducts, that’s kind of forward facing. So we tell our clients to put their services as a product and have a category for each one of those.

But there’s FAQs on here, there’s Q & A’s and this is, you can ask and answer your own questions. That’s a great way to optimize this profile. You can do weekly post updates in the SEO world, it’s argued whether or not this actually has an impact on your positioning, but that top of mind awareness and keeping fresh content on your profile is a trust signal and does kind of let Google know that you are engaged, which engagement is huge, with Google themselves.

They’ve changed the way you update your Google Business Profile, which indicates to us that it’s massively important that you are highly engaged with your profile. So anyways, posting weekly, any company updates, like uploading videos about your company, about the services, about different staff, pictures of your work, pictures of your staff, of your office building. All these things go into this first tool, your Google Business Profile, and in addition to being a great free tool, it helps with your organic and local visibility online.

Amanda Joyce:

Absolutely, absolutely. And you can really think about it just another social channel. If you’re like, “What do I post there?” What are you posting on Facebook? What are you posting on Instagram? It’s very along in the same vein. You just want to make sure that you’re keeping it active as Devon said.

Devon Hayes:

And actually I was, before we move on, I was going to say pro-tip. You can also have a website built for you with a click of a button based off of the information from your Google Business Profile.

So if you’re a brand new business but you have really optimized the heck out of your profile, just go to the contact info and click on website and Google will build a website for you. It’s really limited on colors and fonts and things like that, but it is a free website if you need one. So there’s that pro-tip for you. Okay.

Amanda Joyce:

Awesome.

Devon Hayes:

Number two.

Amanda Joyce:

Okay. Next one is Google Analytics. And this tool is so important. We cannot underscore it enough. We did just talk about it in a previous podcast episode that they just sunsetted universal Google Analytics, which most of us, if you have ever been inside your Google Analytics profile and have looked around and clicked around in it, it was probably universal. And now they’ve released a new version that’s called GA4.

If you didn’t watch that episode, go back and check it out just so you can really learn about how you can take, really maximize it and get the most out of this tool. We go into a lot more detail than we’re going to right now. But for those of you that aren’t familiar with Google Analytics, it’s placed on your website with a single pixel and then it tracks all the stuff and things on your website. It’s really all the things that you can find in there.

It’s impressive from figuring out the path someone’s taking through your website where people typically exit, whether you know how many form fills you’ve had that month. If you have call tracking set up, you can tell how many phone calls you’ve gotten, how many people have clicked on a button. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. So it’s really critical information for you to have.

It was really one of the first tools that Google released, that was really just accepted universally that everybody needs it and then they’ve since built on this tool’s chest, which we’re going to move through. But Google Analytics is really that kind of first stop and making sure you have free information at your fingertips to learn what’s working for you online, what’s not, and you can even learn what’s maybe working offline if you’re running billboards and things like that.

If suddenly you’re seeing an uptick right at in your web traffic after you’ve done some offline efforts, you can, you’ll be able to see that directly in your analytics. And there’s other ways you can get creative as well to track offline through Google Analytics, which we don’t have time to go into, but at the end of the day, it’s a really good just baseline to see where you are and where you’re going and to track the progress that you’re making.

Devon Hayes:

And I think in one of the most simplified metrics that our customers I know really care about, is those traffic acquisition channels. So knowing, is your traffic organic or is it paid or is it coming from social media? This is where you would find that information to see which of your marketing efforts is performing the best.

So I think that’s one of the simplest metrics that I know contractors, business owners really care about when you’re throwing marketing dollars into different buckets, so anyways.

Amanda Joyce:

A hundred percent. Being able to see that traffic and then see what actions are taken off of it, that at the end of the day is where’s the traffic coming from and what traffic is actually…

Devon Hayes:

What are they doing.

Amanda Joyce:

Driving sales?

Devon Hayes:

Yep.

Amanda Joyce:

Exactly. Absolutely.

Devon Hayes:

Beautiful. All right, the next one.

Amanda Joyce:

Okay, next one.

Devon Hayes:

Google Tag Manager or GTM. This is Amanda’s playground.

Amanda Joyce:

Yes. I’ve been getting to know it a lot more lately. It’s been around for quite a while. In its simplest form, it enables you to put one single tracking pixel on your website and then you can house all of your other tracking pixels inside of Google Tag Manager. So you don’t need a developer to go add code anywhere in your header or anything like that.

So if suddenly you want to put a Facebook pixel in place rather than going to your website and figuring out where to put it in your website, you can just add it inside the Google Tag Manager and Google will manage all those tags in that profile, and it all just goes through that one single tag on your website. So it can really simplify things.

I mean, pixels are getting smarter and smarter all the time, but back in the day, certain pixels would actually slow your website down. So this also took some of that load off your website and let it live nicely elsewhere. And again, it cuts out the need for that developer for some of this kind of simple stuff for this pixeling of your website.

But even more importantly, now that they’re pushing us into, they’re forcing us into Google Analytics 4, this GTM is critical because now you have to go in, used to, we could go into the old version of Google Analytics and set up a goal where we’d say, “Anytime anyone hits this page.” Maybe your thank you page from your form on your website, let’s call it a completed goal.

With the new version of Google Analytics, you have to do that inside of GTM and then send it into Google Analytics 4. So now it’s really an integral part of your Google Analytics setup. So if you weren’t using it previously, you’re going, it’s going to have to start using it.

Devon Hayes:

Yeah. Pro-tip, check with your agency, make sure they’ve got this set up and in place for you. It’ll be critical to track their performance and to track user behavior, and to really use the data to come up with a clean marketing strategy.

I was also going to say this is, I mean, this is where if you’re doing any podcast marketing or radio marketing, they’re going to give you a tracking pixel and instead of having them do it on the site, you can do it through GTM or Google Tag Manager. So just another kind of example of who or why you would use this free tool from Google.

Amanda Joyce:

Great point.

Devon Hayes:

Ooh, this next one, Google Search Console. Okay, so this is another piece of tracking, but it’s different than Google Analytics. And that Google Analytics tracks what people do once they’re on your website, but Google Search Console gives you metrics on what they’re doing before they hit your website and are just within Google, that search engine results page itself.

There are measurements in there on your website’s performance, your core vitals, which is a ranking factor, kind of gives you an idea of the overall health of your website, how Google’s crawlers are viewing it, mobile usability, what kind of contrast you have, page speed, which is massively important for ranking, but kind of gives you all that in this one little playground. So that’s a piece of it.

You can look at, track the performance of a specific page on your website. You can see how many times your website is served for specific search queries and what those queries are. It tells you how many times you’re served, which is an impression, and also how many times you’re actually clicked on, when you are served on Google itself. So it’s a great way to understand, maybe you have a ton of impressions for a certain search query, but nobody’s clicking through.

Go through and Google it, what does it look like? What are people seeing? And maybe your SEO title or the short description that’s popping up isn’t the meta description you picked and it’s pulling from the page itself and it’s not really selling or enticing people to click through. Go in and that’ll tell you, go ahead and make that change on your website itself and see if that drives more clicks versus just the impressions you’re getting.

Because the impressions are telling you Google likes the content, but the lack of clicks kind of shows, depending on the content could be their grabbing what they need and it’s a zero click search, but if it’s not a zero click search where the answer kind of pops out without having to click through to a page, you’re going to want to make updates to how that specific page is appearing within Google.

Big, long explanation, but hopefully you understand how this tool can be used. And this is also where… Yeah, sorry.

Amanda Joyce:

Oh, no, no. I was going to say as well, one of the things that I love, I really love the most about search consoles, that feature you were talking about with the impressions and the clicks versus original Google Analytics.

You could just tell, “Oh, this page is really strong because I’ve gotten, maybe I get the most clicks on this page of my whole website.” And so used to, that’s just what we’d focus on, but now you can go back and look at it and getting to see how often Google’s actually showing you is actually way more to me, interesting when you’re assessing what’s your strongest content, more so than how many, if you’re just looking on the Google Analytics side, you can only see how much traffic you’re getting, versus what’s your actual reach on that piece.

And just to reiterate what you’re saying, whether you’re changing what’s showing up in the search results or maybe you’re like, “Dang. Google really likes this piece and it’s a couple years old, maybe we need to go back in and refresh it and double down on it and see how we can get more out of it.” It just gives you a much bigger view. It’s more of like, the view at your website from Google while Google Analytics is showing you what happens once they get there.

Devon Hayes:

Yeah. Definitely. It’s a great way to understand your content and user behavior for sure. And then something else, this is more relevant I think today than it was even two years ago, but this is where you’re going to submit your site map to Google. And in layman’s terms, a site map, it just tells Google or any search engine, all the URLs that are on your website.

So the pages, the blog content, it just says, “Hey Google, this is what’s on my website.” That’s what a site map is. But more recently, Google has been de-indexing a lot of content. There’s just an overwhelming amount of content on the web now. And so a lot of websites are experiencing content that’s already always just been indexed, is no longer indexed. And what that means is, it’s not showing up on Google anymore.

For some reason, Google is like, “Hmm. We find this, this is not relevant, not important, not good enough content. We’re going to pull it off the web.” Once you figure out, “Oh shoot, this isn’t being served. I thought this was a great blog topic.” And you go in and you make some updates and you improve the content, you make sure it’s really delivering value to the user.

You’re going to need to manually or you’re going to want to manually submit this, maybe eventually over time Google will pick it back up. It maybe it discovered it and it knows that it’s there, but it’s not indexing it. You can manually submit URLs in your site map through Google Search Console. So if you’re investing in SEO, if you have an agency, you want to make sure your site map is being submitted and the content that is being written is actually being indexed and stored on Google or else what’s the point? So that’s a pro-tip right there for you.

Amanda Joyce:

Yeah. Definitely. Okay, next one. Google Ads and their keyword tool. So Google Ads is obviously an ad platform that you can use to run ads in the search results and in the Google display network. You can also use it to run your YouTube ads, but even if you are maybe don’t have budget for paid media right now and you’re not running ads or maybe you ran it previously and you just have an account sitting there, there is a keyword tool hidden inside that, that can be really great for just research and kind of understanding maybe where you could be focusing some of the content you’re writing or things along those lines.

So within that, they have both a keyword tool that will just give you volume and cost per clicks for any given search term that you throw into it. So it can really help you understand where the volume lies. I mean, there’s other third party tools out there that are available to you too, some free, some paid, but this is a free Google tool, so we definitely wanted to make sure we highlighted it today.

And in addition, we also have the Discover tools. So you can go in there and say, “Maybe these are my three or four keywords, I’m really focused on service-based keywords that I really want to make sure I’m ranking for organically. Let me throw those in Discover tool.” And it will spit back other related keyword searches that maybe you haven’t considered.

So it’s a really great thing to take advantage of whether you’re running ads or not. Even if you haven’t ever run ads before and you don’t plan to in the near future, you can go in and just create a Google Ad account and you don’t even have to set up a campaign and the tool dropdown menu will be immediately available to you. You can click in there and play around and start tapping into some of that data that Google otherwise holds pretty tightlipped.

Devon Hayes:

Beautiful. Let’s see here.

Amanda Joyce:

Yeah. The next one, I’ll just dive in on this one because ads related as well, but the other one is Google Local Service Ads. That’s another one that is free and you don’t have to run ads if you don’t want to, but you can.

Once you go through the process of applying and being accepted into the program, you have to keep certain things updated year-to-year, but then you can get that Google guarantee badge, which is talk about a trust signal, that then you can put across all of your marketing materials on your truck wraps, on your business cards, wherever you want to do it, but you get that little extra badge of trust from Google and again, you don’t even have to spend a single dollar with them to go through the process to just get that Google guarantee.

And just a quick kind of rundown of what is required to get into the program, it’s definitely regional. It depends on what they require there locally. Maybe you don’t have to be licensed in your given trade in your locale. They might not require proof of licensure, but they will always require a background check on one of the business owners and proof of insurance. And then depending on your local laws, you might have to also provide licensure.

Then there’s a quick couple days where they run your background check, and then you’re in the program and as long as you keep that insurance updated year-to-year and licensure, if it’s required, you can keep waiving that badge everywhere you go and taking advantage of that extra trust signal.

Devon Hayes:

Yeah. And that really is, I just want to pause and talk about that for a second. It really is powerful just having Google guaranteed and having that badge as a consumer, we all kind of trust Google and then getting that guaranteed badge when you’re talking about a contractor or anyone in the home services space, none of us want to be taken advantage of. None of us want to work with a shoddy contractor. None of us want to feel stupid. And so seeing that Google guaranteed badge on a website, it inherently implies trust to the consumer, because that means you’ve been vetted out by this massive global conglomerate and you got the thumbs up.

And so you can’t get that without this thorough background check and proof of insurance and all these things. So it really is impactful to us as consumers. So I really, and being able to have that visual cue without having to say anything and just having that on your site and like you said, your truck wraps and job site marketing and whatever that might be, it really is powerful. So taking the time to do that is huge.

And I know, Google guaranteed is not offered worldwide. We know it’s not offered in Australia and we know there’s certain countries where they don’t have it yet, but they will. So hop on board and be an early adapter once it comes to town. But I mean, it’s the tool itself, the Google Local Service Ads is incredibly powerful and great. A great service having just a set cost per lead, but the value of the badge, you can’t even put a dollar amount on that and how much it helps with conversion. So anyways, didn’t want to be remiss to really call that out.

Amanda Joyce:

Yeah. No, absolutely. Okay, next tool.

Devon Hayes:

Google Trends. This is a fun one. We use this a lot in the SEO world simply because sometimes we’ll have a client in a market and we’re like, “What is going on?” Well, if you can look at the Google Trends and look at the search volume, maybe it isn’t just your company, maybe it’s all pool contractors in a specific market for whatever reason.

The actual search volume for, pool contractor Denver is down year-over-year and it isn’t just you, it’s kind of a nice gut check, but you can see what keywords are trending, how popularly they’ve been over time. You can do year-over-year comparisons, you can compare it. If you’re considering one keyword over another, you can compare the two.

Do you want to do a hot water system installation or water heater install? Just there’s, look at how people are searching and this can help you make a decision. You can narrow it down geographically. You can compare what I think up to three or four terms?

Amanda Joyce:

Yeah.

Devon Hayes:

Yeah. I mean, what else? And you’re in here all the time too with Google Trends.

Amanda Joyce:

Exactly. No, I really like to be able to do that comparison and look back over a long period of time. You can look back, you can even go worldwide, look back over the last year. You can just parse it out and figure out, try to find anomalies in there to help you identify the keywords that you’re going after, or maybe something’s really starting to get a groundswell in popularity, and so it’s not going to come up in a lot of your tools as maybe one of the front-runners of the keyword you’d want to go after, but it’s slowly inching its way up there.

You can decide to target that keyword instead of maybe the keyword everyone else in your market’s gunning for, and you can kind of ride that wave as a new search trend is coming up.

Devon Hayes:

Beautiful. And then last but not least, we have Google Alerts and-

Amanda Joyce:

Yes. Google Alerts.

Devon Hayes:

I don’t know-

Amanda Joyce:

This is one, it’s been around for a really long time, but I mean it’s a great one to just kind of keep track of, keep a thumb on, maybe on your brand in general, on your competitors, on the names of people within your organization, key industry terms, maybe manufacturers, just to shoot you a quick email, a quick note, anytime, something suddenly getting some traction.

Then that way you can keep track of maybe one of your competitors just sent out a press release and you want to know what it’s about or anything along those lines. It’s a quick way to keep you from having to go out and just be perusing all the time to see what’s popping up in search results, Google will be your homie and just shoot you a quick email and let you know what’s going on, so that you can stay on top of things.

Devon Hayes:

And this is a great way to, this is a great lookout for brand awareness. If you have a Google Alert set up for your company name, this is a great way to potentially get backlinks for your website. So if your company name is mentioned and you go to the article and they’re actually not linking back to your website, you can just send them a quick note and say, “Hey, thank you for mentioning my company in your article. I think it was an oversight, but here’s our URL. I would love it if you plugged that in.” Because that’s your brand name out there and you should get a backlink off of it.

Backlinks help you with SEO. And so why not get a free one if they’re already mentioning your company unless, I mean, or if it’s something negative, it allows you to kind of get in front of it and reach out and be like, “Hey, why didn’t anyone reach out to me for comment? I would love to at least be able to say something or defend myself.” Or whatever it might be. Hopefully that’s not the case. But, so it’s a great opportunity for backlinks as well.

So for your name, your company name. What do we say? Any key industry terms, that you can just, that’s a great way to monitor your reputation and then again build backlinks. That’s how you use that tool.

Amanda Joyce:

Absolutely. And in some cases you might, even if you’re watching a competitor and you see they just got some love from an organization that you realize, “Oh, well, I might be able to reach out and ask if we could be featured in their next article.” It can be a way to keep track of where other people might be garnering strong backlinks and you can hop on there and make sure that your competitors not getting too far ahead of you in that world.

Devon Hayes:

Yeah. Definitely. So we will list all of these with links in the episode notes. So we’ll just kind of run through the quick list of tools. And this is not an exhaustive list. There are so many free tools from Google out there. Some of them are sunsetting within the next month or two. So we left those out.

There’s a whole marketing platform. There is, I mean there’s a ton. There’s Google Sheets, Google Docs, Google Drive, I mean, we could go on and on and on. So by no means is this an exhaustive list, but we’ll recap the ones we’ve covered in this episode.

We have your Google Business Profile, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Google Search Console, Google Ads and keyword tool, Google Local Service Ads, Google Trends, and Google Alerts.

Amanda Joyce:

Awesome. There you have it. Those are your free tools that we think can really positively impact your business as a contractor. We hope that if you’re not taking advantage of them yet, you’ll take a peek or you’ll chat with your agency about it. And if there is one that we missed that you feel is really impactful for contractors, please reach out and let us know.

Devon Hayes:

Absolutely. Thanks for listening, and feel free to share this episode with anyone you think that could get some value out of it. We appreciate you.

Amanda Joyce:

That was today’s Trade Secret. Thanks for listening.

Devon Hayes:

Did you find this helpful? We’re just getting started.

Amanda Joyce:

Subscribe, and don’t miss our next reveal.

Devon Hayes:

Until next time.