For the majority of websites, approximately 70% of their traffic will come from Google. It's been a mainstream Search Engine for over 10 years and now is a household name.

Given this, Google has create a suite of tools to aid web developers and SEO Consultants optimise their websites.

Use it as a competitor analysis and keyword tool. Great tool to give you a detailed breakdown of the usage of a search term. Allows you to investigate current trends (Rising Searches) or drill down to investigate related search terms. Use it to identify competitor websites and whether or not people are over taking you on brand related search terms or direct domain searches.

Features





Example


Competitor Brand Terms
Use Google Insights to check searches for competitor domains. This will allow you to see if they are overtaking you in domain searches. You would also want to do this with your top brand terms and compare based on your competitor brand terms. ie. like for like.

Shows your search competitors and top keywords. Mostly used to find out your search competitors for based on keywords or to find out possible sites via the 'Also Searched For' listing. ie. any site showing up there might be worth considering to advertise on.



Example Site Comparison
http://trends.google.com/websites?q=cgb.ie%2c+carsireland.ie%2c+carzone.ie%2c+loadzacars.ie%2c+whatcar.ie&geo=ie&date=all&sort=2


Allows you to investigate potential search terms to target. Order results by competition and 'Local Monthly Searches' to identify good opportunities to capture low hanging fruit and gain some quick results.




Shows traffic and profile information for sites that have signed up to AdSense, used as an additional tool to identify competitors websites ('Sites also visited'), related site keywords and audience.




Once you have an understanding of your conversions (goals and actions), then it's time to play with website optimizer to see what page changes affect your conversions.

Feature vs. cost Google Analytics is the definitive Web Analytics platform. The core tool to use for breaking down your site into defined actions.






Versatile tool!




Great program to view your analytics data on the go. Allows viewing of custom reports and juggling multiple Google Analytics account.



Allows a group of people discuss items and give input on a particular thing - think website visitor surveys! and group feedback on products/services on a website.



Useful for tracking the top SEO sites and blog posts.






When your doing something on your site to enhance the Google search results pages, you'll be able to test that it's configured properly here. Any errors show up and are identified with steps to resolve the problem.

Things like







www.google.com/analytics/
www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
http://adwords.google.com
www.google.com/insights/search/
www.google.com/trends/
http://trends.google.com/websites
http://adwords.google.com/