Are you looking for the best free Google tools to support your WordPress blog?
Google provides a wide variety of free tools to help bloggers and website owners improve their SEO, get more traffic, be more productive, and so much more.
In this article, we will recommend the best free Google tools that every WordPress blogger should use.
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the most comprehensive analytics tool for WordPress blogs and websites.
It shows you how your visitors found your website, what devices they used, what pages they viewed, and how they interacted with your website.
This information allows you to better understand your audience, so you can plan and execute an effective content strategy. You’ll be able to see what topics and pages convert the best and steadily improve your website over time.
The easiest way to add Google Analytics to WordPress is using MonsterInsights. It’s the best analytics solution for WordPress on the market, used by over 3 million websites.
It enables you to view your Google Analytics stats directly in your WordPress dashboard.
2. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a set of tools that allows website owners to monitor and maintain their search engine presence and rankings.
It lets you see what keywords people use to find your site, notify you of site errors holding back your rankings, and a lot more.
Additionally, you can submit an XML sitemap via Google Search Console to help search engines crawl your website better.
The easiest way to add Google Search Console to WordPress is by using the All in One SEO plugin. It’s the best SEO plugin for WordPress used by over 2 million websites.
3. Google Programmable Search
The default WordPress search feature is quite limited and not very good at finding relevant content. As your website grows, you’ll want a way to help your visitors find what they’re searching for.
Google Programmable Search helps you an easy way to add custom search to your WordPress site.
You have complete control over the content it will search, and you will be able to design the search feature to fully blend into your website.
For more advanced search with customization options, we recommend using a WordPress search plugin like SearchWP, but Google Programmable Search can be an affordable option to get started.
4. Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager enables you to easily add and manage code snippets, or “tags”, to your website. Tags are commonly used by analytics and marketing tools to add tracking or other features to your site.
Adding tags to your WordPress site usually requires custom code. These custom code snippets load an external script, and it’s difficult to manage them all.
Google Tag Manager solves this problem by letting you manage all your external codes from one dashboard.
You only need to add one Google Tag Manager snippet to your site, and then you can manage the rest from a single dashboard.
5. PageSpeed Insights
Having a fast loading website is one of the most critical parts of providing a good user experience and solid WordPress SEO.
Google PageSpeed Insights is a website performance monitoring tool. It shows you how your website is performing on both desktop and mobile devices.
The results are broken down into different sections, so you will see what’s holding your site back. There are also resources and best practices to help you fixing any issues you might be having.
If you’ve found that your website has performance and speed issues, then there are many things you can do to improve this.
First, we suggest using high performance WordPress hosting, like Bluehost or SiteGround.
Next, you may use a WordPress caching plugin like WP Rocket. Caching plugins reduce the load on your server and speed up your WordPress site.
6. Google Mobile-Friendly Test Tool
For many WordPress websites, a high volume of traffic can come from mobile devices. If your website isn’t optimized for mobile, you will create a poor user experience, and you can lose out on search engine rankings.
The Google Mobile-Friendly Test tool will show you how well your website is optimized for the mobile web. It can give you a detailed breakdown of any issues and what you can do to fix them.
The easiest way to make sure your website is optimized for the mobile web is by using a responsive WordPress theme. These themes will automatically adjust to your visitor’s screen size, so they’ll look perfect on mobile devices.
7. Google Ads Keyword Planner
The Google Ads Keyword Planner gives you insights into what people are searching for in Google search. It takes data from the Google search results and paid advertisers.
Using this tool, you can generate a list of keywords relating to your blog and see which keywords get the most searches per month. The data doesn’t provide exact numbers, but it does give general estimates.
This tool can also allow you to generate new ideas for your blog posts, plan your content strategy, and run your own pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns using Google Ads.
8. Think with Google Research
Think with Google Research is one of the best market research tools now. This collection of tools will enable you to understand your market, spot new trends, and grow your website or online store.
The data and insights you can gain depend on which tools you use.
For instance, the Market Insights tool can help you find new regional or global markets to expand into.
There’s another tool that shows retail categories that are growing in popularity, along with the related search terms. This shows you if the niche you’re in is growing in popularity.
For those who have a YouTube channel, or edit videos, you can use the audience finder tool to uncover new audiences on YouTube.
9. Google My Business
Google My Business is a tool that allows you to add your local business information to Google, so it can show your business information in search results.
If you run a local business or provide services to a local area, then Google My Business is something you cannot miss.
Displaying your business information in Google search results will boost your brand’s search visibility, and bring you new customers and potential leads.
You can combine this with the Local SEO features from AIOSEO to further improve your local business listings in Google.
10. Google Optimize
Google Optimize is a tool that helps website owners optimize their websites by running A/B split tests. This allows you to compare two different versions of a page to see which converts better.
For instance, you can run a split test of two different sales pages to see which one leads to more customers.
By split testing, you can gradually optimize pages on your site to get the highest conversions possible.
You may create a split test simply with the drag and drop builder. Google will automatically show the variations to your visitors randomly and gather data.