Free Google Marketing Tools

Free Online Marketing Tools

Google Places provides free location-based listings for all businesses. These listings appear on Google Maps in the "what's nearby" category whenever someone searches for a location or driving directions.

Your business' basic information may already be in Google Places, because the company has long gathered business phone book data. At the least, you should check Google Places to see if the information it may have is accurate. But you can do more with Google Places, and it's free.

You can add photos to your Google Places listing; post special offers; even allow people to post reviews and ratings about their experiences with your business. Of course, that can be good or bad, but overall a good business gets good reviews.

Google Places also gives a business owner access to "Web analytics," statistics about the number of searchers who are exposed to your listing; how many click on it; what they were searching for; and other information that can help you be found more often. Google also offers inexpensive upgrades that can increase your marketing's effectiveness on Google Places and in other forms of Google search.

Google Tags are key words and phrases that you can add to your Google Places listing for a small monthly fee. A tag may highlight a coupon, a video you've uploaded, a sale event, or some other special thing about your business. Customers searching for sales or enhanced information about a product or business will find your tagged listing among their results. A similar service to help buyers find the products you offer is available free of charge.

Google Base is a way to ensure that your products show up in Google search results. You can upload structured descriptions of products that you offer via a "data feed," which is a specially formatted file of key words and other information about your products (including where to buy them online). Your products will then appear in Google search results, and you won't have to depend on them being found by Google's web-crawling indexer.

Google Product Search is Google's shopping search engine, which users access through the "shopping" tab on Google.com. You must have a Google Base account in order to be included in Product Search, and meet other standards described on the Google Products page.

Google Checkout is an ecommerce engine that you can incorporate into your Web site. It includes a shopping cart for shoppers who buy multiple items; credit-card processing services; and fraud prevention to protect you against credit card fraud. From a customer perspective, it's very similar to paying with a Paypal account. But there are enough people who don't like or trust Paypal, that it's worthwhile to offer them both.

Even if you don't want to get into ecommerce or mail order business, Google can help you attract customers to your brick-and-mortar business. Post your comment or question below...