As a consumer, you use Google as the first step to answer all of life's curiosities {not to mention, as a completely acceptable verb}, right? From splitting a bill, to comparing calories on your favorite foods, to even setting a timer, Google has successfully established itself as being more than just a search engine...and more of a loyal, dependable best friend.
As a business owner, Google is your opportunity to be in front of potential customers at the exact time that they are looking for something your company offers or sells. With that goal, there's a lot of upkeep to maintain a top spot on the results page. Remember "Mobilegeddon" back in April {the algorithm update that favored mobile-responsive websites and had some brands frantically adjusting on the fly}? As of Monday, the tech powerhouse released major news of company changes that will have us calling Google by it's new name, Alphabet.
Company CEO, Larry Page, took it to Google's blog to explain that Alphabet will be a larger mother-company consisting of Google and many other current endeavors consisting of projects within Life Science, such as glucose-sensing contact lenses.
In awe yet? It's easy to get overwhelmed by the company's constant changes, but there are a handful of free tools that ensure you've covered the search engine optimization basics. Here are our favorites to get you started:
1. Tagxedo - Builds word clouds to show your your keyword density.
2. Ubbersuggest - Extracts key phrases and suggests keywords and then displays them into a list format that can be easily copied and pasted
3. Google Keyword Planner - To generate long tail keywords using Google Auto Complete.
4. SERPs Rank Checker - Free keyword rank & SERP checker.
5. Google Pagespeed Insights - Check the performance of your site
6. Siteliner - Crawls your site and generates reports on duplicity, broken links, and internal page rank
7. Peek - Unbiased website user testing. See and hear a 5-minute video of someone using your site or app.