If you operate a small to medium business and have some sort of office set up with a computer and software I guarantee you that you can save drastic amounts of money by utilizing some of Google’s Free Tools for Businesses. I’m going to provide details on each one below, and how you can start saving money today by switching to taking advantage of what Google has to offer (note, there is no affiliate marketing here, I am not linking you to anything that’s paid for getting anything in return for this post – I just truly believe that Google has inventively turned themselves into a free powerhouse of resources for businesses. I would even recommend enterprise level corporations look into these tools if they aren’t already.
1. Sign up for a free GOOGLE Account!
If you have company e-mail addresses, make sure your employees sign up for a free GOOGLE account with them.
Not everyone knows this! But if you have e-mail addresses set up like [email protected], you can use those e-mail addresses as Google ID’s for access to any of their platforms resources. This even includes things like Analytics and Webmaster Tools. The most logical reason to doing this is so that if you have turn over, you will still be able to access the data because you have control of the e-mail addresses at the domain\hosting level.
2. Use Google Drive to share not-insanely-private documents and files.
Google Drive is completely free, and provides you with a few gigs of cloud storage. Every google account can sign up for one, and then share content within their google drive folder with each other. The benefit to this is that if you ever need to share content with an external resource, you can now easily do so, and you can access your files anywhere that has an internet connection, on any computer!
3. Google Docs isn’t quite Microsoft Office, but it’s pretty darn close!
Google Docs is a full suite now including Sheets (Excel), Docs (Word) and Slides (powerpoint). This makes sharing documents incredibly easy, but also stops you from having to save your files on your local hard drive or a network drive at your office.
4. Google Adwords
Ok, you may not want to pay for google search advertisements, but did you know that they have a completely free Keyword research tool within the platform? You can literally look up any keyword and see how many people are searching for it in your geographical markets, and how much your competitors are paying for them when it comes to advertisements. If you are working on any type of initiative or campaign, there is no reason not to include keyword research in your creative brief.
5. Google Trends
Google Trends is a historic look at search terms, you can literally look up your business and how many times it was searched over time. This is another great tool for your marketing efforts or if you are doing competitive analysis.
6. Google MyBusiness
You can easily add your business to google maps for free. I will write more about this later when it comes to Local Search Optimization, but this is critical for any business.