The most important Google SEO Tools at a glance

Sooner or later the name ‘Google’ will crop up when men­tion­ing the topic of search engine op­tim­isa­tion. With a US market share of over 68 percent this search engine giant is crucial for the field of SEO. Almost all SEO measures are aimed at better vis­ib­il­ity in Google’s search results. After Google, you will find search engines like Bing and Yahoo in second and third place re­spect­ively. The good news is that the industry leader offers lots of free tools that ad­min­is­trat­ors and de­velopers can take advantage of. Here is a summary of the best Google SEO tools:

Ori­gin­ally known as Google Webmaster Tool, the  Google Search Console delivers detailed in­form­a­tion about how Google clas­si­fies a website. It shows the owner which parts of their site can be improved. Ret­ro­act­ive analyses help the owner un­der­stand the site’s past de­vel­op­ments at a later point in time. The Google Search Console provides an overview of:

• crawl errors
•  indexing status
• search queries
• keyword de­vel­op­ment
• visitor figures
• backlink profile

The tool also allows you to submit your current sitemap to Google.

Google Analytics is the Google SEO tool for pro­fes­sion­al web analysis that virtually every website owner uses.  The extensive analysis of user data makes it possible to un­der­stand a website’s traffic. You can find out which search query brought the visitor to your site, how long they stayed, when they left, as well as in­form­a­tion on the quantity and origin of visitors. The practical Real-Time feature provides ad­di­tion­al help for analysing campaigns. This way you can see exactly what effect a viral campaign has on the traffic. In order to use this tool, you first have to generate a tracking code on the Google Analytics website and then insert it into the source code of your website.

Google’s Keyword Planner is a free tool for eval­u­at­ing and analysing search terms. With the planner’s help, you can find new keywords and retrieve important para­met­ers regarding relevance and search volume. The search is carried out by entering a group of words, a website or simply via a Google category. The search volume of the keywords is then displayed. Users can also:

• see flow stat­ist­ics
• create and interlink keyword list
• select suitable com­pet­it­ive bids and budgets for campaigns

Cache is not a Google SEO tool in the tra­di­tion­al sense; rather it is a somewhat hidden ad­di­tion­al feature of Google search. Google Cache gives you the option of seeing a website in a text-only version. When all the images, an­im­a­tions, and designs have been removed, the remaining version is what’s left over for Google Crawler to read. These features help the user further un­der­stand how Google in­ter­prets the nav­ig­a­tion, the format­ting, and the images on a page. This also means you can determine whether in­di­vidu­al areas are not being properly detected, or not being detected at all (because of using Flash or Java Script, for example).

How to use the Cache feature:

1. Search for your own website using Google
2. In the organic search results you will find a small green arrow right after the URL.  
3. Click on the arrow and select the “cached’’ option.
4. On the overview page click on the “text-only version’’ and change to a pure text view.

Just like the Cache feature, Suggest is also not a Google SEO tool per se. It is a feature of standard Google search and is free. It is quite amazing: just by typing a couple of letters into the search bar, Google can guess what you are searching for. The auto­com­plete feature finishes the phrase with relevant search sug­ges­tions. These sug­ges­tions are based on search frequency, search behaviour, and the search term. Those re­spons­ible for SEO can in­cor­por­ate these search sug­ges­tions (which are usually long tail keywords) into their own keyword research.

The PageSpeed Tools can be used to evaluate a website’s per­form­ance and improve it. These features are available for desktop and mobile sites. The sug­ges­tions for im­prove­ment (e.g. reducing the size of Java Script) will be pri­or­it­ised (from high to ex­per­i­ment­al) in a list. There are many other features belonging to the Google Developer Tools that help you integrate features and ex­ten­sions into your site like social media plugins, APIs, Google Maps, YouTube and in­ter­act­ive games.