There are so many incredible Google business tools out there. It can be hard to know which ones make sense to use for your eCommerce business.
Running a small business is demanding. It doesn’t leave a lot of the time it takes to pore through the 200+ Google small business tools that could make your days more productive.
With that understanding, in this article we’re going we’ll walk through the hypothetical day of a small business owner. While we do it, we’ll show you how these 42 Google tools could help your business grow.
42 Essential Google Business Tools for Your Ecommerce Business
Google Tools for Business to Start Your Day
Marketing Tools from Google
Google Business Tools for Running Your Small Business
Google Tools for Lunch
Google Business Tools for When Your Day is Full of Meetings
Google Business Tools for When You’re Not “At Work”
Google Tools for Business to End Your Day
Whether you’re a designer selling t-shirts nationwide, a tech writer about to release his third ebook, or a local florist just embarking on your ecommerce business, it’s going to be a busy day.
Google Tools for Business to Start Your Day
Your morning starts as you sit down with your computer and a cup of coffee. You pore through Google news for the headlines specific to your business, and you have a few keywords that you check every day. You take a few more minutes to check Google for Startups then it’s time to check your email.
1. Google News
helps you find the latest news in your industry with targeted keywords.
2. Google for Startups
helps startups achieve with tools and community.
Your inbox is full of Google Alerts this morning. You scan the emails looking for articles that will yield some competitive insights. The G Suite Marketplace helped you create an automation to take care of the emails in your inbox that you won’t get to right away.
After you hit send on an urgent email, it’s on to Google Analytics. One of your product pages has way more hits than it usually does, so you head to Google Search Console to see where the boost might be coming from.
3. Google Alerts
let you monitor web mentions of keywords and phrases relevant to your industry and brand. You can choose daily, weekly, or monthly email or RSS notifications.
4. The G Suite marketplace
offers a range of apps that can help you integrate or automate different functions for your ecommerce business.
5. Google Tag Manager
is a simple system that uses JavaScript and HTML tags to track and deliver analytics for your website. For many users, it is easier to set up than the traditional Google Analytics set up.
6. Google Analytics
offers insights into your site visitors, website traffic, and other valuable data. GA insights can help you determine KPIs as your business scales.
6. Google Search Console
helps you to understand your organic search traffic. It can also help you troubleshoot the speed and performance of your website.
One of your landing pages, however, isn’t doing so hot. First, you click over to PageSpeed Insights to see how the page is loading. That looks fine, so you table that search for later and update your Google My Business profile.
Next, you check on your Google shopping data. Amazing things are happening with your Google Smart Shopping campaign and the updates you made to your Selz store.
7. PageSpeed Insights by Google
lets you test the loading speed of your site on both mobile and desktop. This Google tool offers helpful recommendations to resolve performance issues.
8. Google My Business
is an online storefront for your local brick-and-mortar business. GMB is essential for local ecommerce SEO.
9. Google Shopping
is a premium tool for ecommerce business. This tool will ramp up your sales with optimized ads, online product placement, and advanced analytics.
10. Google Smart Shopping
is an option for remarketing campaigns that use automated bidding for ad placement.
Marketing Tools from Google
You circle back to that poor-performing landing page. First, you run through the tools that you check on the regular – Keyword Planner and AdSense. You check Think with Google for ideas, then wander over to YouTube for inspiration and analytics. Okay, the first execution wasn’t perfect, but there’s hope.
11. Google Ads
lets you create PPC (pay-per-click) ads for specific keywords. If your bid is successful, your ads show up to the right or above the organic keyword you are advertising for.
12. Google Ads Keyword Planner
is an essential tool for keyword research.
13. Google AdSense
lets you make money from your already-popular blog, video channel, or website by connecting your site with interested advertisers.
14. Think with Google
offers your commerce business mountains of data on consumer trends, industry research, statistics, and other marketing resources.
15. YouTube
is the second most popular social media channel with millions of daily users. YouTube can be a marketing powerhouse for your ecommerce business.
Google Business Tools for Running Your Small Business
You’re full of ideas about the marketing strategy for your ecommerce business. After making notes in the collaborative Google jamboard (and some doodles in Google Drawings) it’s time for budgets. Yay?
You quickly reconcile purchases from last week in Google Sheets, then make a note to check Google Public Data Explorer because you’re seeing a ton of sales in a new demographic. It could mean a whole new market!
HR is next because things have been busy enough that you’re actively looking to expand your team. Job Search by Google was a huge help when you were trying to pull together a job description. Google Hire can support the hiring process, your least favorite to-do.
16. Google Jamboard
is an interactive whiteboard, and part of the G Suite.
17. Google Drawings
lets you edit drawings with other people on your team in real-time to visualize ideas, develop infographics, and more.
18. Google Sheets
is Google’s spreadsheet platform in the cloud.
19. Google Public Data Explorer
gives you access to international databases and institutions like the World Bank, the U.S. Census Bureau, and more. It is a helpful tool when your business is looking at new markets or starting demographic research.
20. Job Search on Google
is a platform for posting and finding jobs.
21. Google Hire
is an app that will help streamline the recruiting process, from attracting candidates to managing interviews.
And why is your phone buzzing? It’s your Google Assistant reminding you to eat lunch before a slew of afternoon meetings.
22. Google Assistant
is your personal digital assistant. You can use it to find contacts, send messages, set reminders, and more.
Google Tools for Lunch
Lunch means time to read your favorite movie forum on Google Groups. As you laugh at a witty response, your Google Calendar reminds you that the choir concert tonight starts at 5:30, not 6:30 the way you remember. Luckily, Google Duplex can call in a reservation to your family’s favorite restaurant for dinner tonight.
23. Google Groups
offers a space for collaboration. Anyone can create a Q&A, customer support, or forum for customer engagement and interaction.
24. Google Calendar
lets you create multiple calendars for the different worlds you balance as you run your business.
25. Google Duplex
is an AI that takes care of tasks over the phone for you.
Google Business Tools for When Your Day is Full of Meetings
Back to work, and it’s time for a quick Google Hangouts meeting with your favorite supplier. He lives two states over and has a question about his link to your updated ecommerce website. (It’s a beautiful Selz theme!) There’s some copy on his home page that you can see, but he can’t. You tell him to use Google Resizer so that he can make a correction. As you talk, the two of you work on a shared Google doc so that you can work together on your updated supply list.
26. Google Hangouts and Google Duo
are apps for voice calling, video calling, video conferencing, and messages.
27. Google Resizer
helps you better understand your user experience by letting you see your website in different sizes and on different devices.
28. Google Docs
lets you create and edit word documents in the cloud.
Next, a meeting with a local nonprofit whose event you’re sponsoring. Once your meeting is over you dig into a Google Slides presentation for a potential investor. This is someone you want on your board soon, so you spend some quality time in Data Studio, play with Google Fonts, and add some Google Charts to make the presentation perfect.
29. Google for Nonprofits
is a suite of Google business tools that help nonprofits market and organize their efforts.
30. Google Slides
lets you create and edit slide presentations in the cloud.
31. Google Fonts
is a web directory of licensed fonts.
32. Google Charts
help you visualize data with a range of charts, from the traditional org chart to treemaps and histograms.
Google Business Tools for When You’re Not “At Work”
For some people work is 9 to 5, but as a small business owner, you keep the hours that make the most sense to you. It’s time for dinner, but on the way to the car, you get an idea that you have to add to your Google Keep.
The minute you’ve added your note a late Google Voice call comes in about a digital project your team is doing in Google Firebase. You have all your details on the project, including promotion on Google AdMob, in your Google Drive. You share the results of a recent Google Forms survey to finish the call and then glide into dinner.
33. Google Keep
is a simple way to create, access, and organize your notes, photos, and lists, and it syncs with your other frequently used Google tools.
34. Google Voice
lets you bring together multiple phone lines for your commerce business. You can develop custom voicemail messages for incoming callers and it has analytics for your new numbers. This tool is helpful for both talk and text.
35. Google AdMob
lets you monetize your mobile apps with ads. This is one of our favorite Google small business tools for promotion.
36. Google Firebase
is a simple tool that lets you develop quality apps quickly.
37. Google Forms
gives your ecommerce business a simple way to write customer surveys and collect survey responses.
Google Tools for Business to End Your Day
Your family heads home after the concert, and you and your teenage son set up camp in the kitchen for some homework. Using Google Patents and Google Scholar, your son gets what he needs for his research paper outline. His research ends up inspiring the blog that you are already writing. You update your Blogger blog and online store.
38. Google Patents
lets you peruse the full text of their comprehensive collection of U.S. patent data.
39. Google Scholar
is a collection of academic literature including but not limited to articles, books, abstracts, theses, and court opinions.
40. Google Blogger
is an easy-to-use blogging platform.
You finish the day with a quick peek at Google Trends and Digital Garage. You check your email one last time, then wander into the living room for some R&R.
41. Google Trends
lets you look at how popular terms and keywords change over time and in different locations.
42. Google Digital Garage
offers free tutorials and certificate learning for digital marketing, data and tech, and career development.
A productive day’s work for your growing Selz ecommerce business!
Did we leave any of your favorite Google business tools for ecommerce off the list? Let us know in the comments! Want more information like this? Sign up for free tools from Selz.