I am not against Bing or Yahoo!, but in Australia, Google far outstrips the other two popular search engines, with Google accounting for 95% of all searches in Australia. So Google is one of the most singular important tools any start up has to use.
Google is more than Google Search
Google has an array of tools that can improve your business. If you are overwhelmed with them, focus on the ones most important. These are:
Google Plus
Everyone seems to think Google Plus is over! Actually Google Plus is second most popular social network to Facebook, with 400 million users recorded at the end of 2012, with higher traffic than Twitter.
Google Plus is drawing all its Google products together, tying in:
- Search
- You Tube
- Gmail
- Chrome
- Google Maps
- Google Places
And soon Adwords and Google Shopping. If you want to be found on search you need to adopt Google Plus asap.
There is a hugely engaged crowd on Google Plus, slight skew to males, design, photography, engineering, geeks, but an incredibly affective way to "hang out" and engage your customers. Also check out the new Google Plus Community feature, its like Yammer and Facebook rolled into one.
Google Images
Google recently changed it image search functionality. There are a few useful tips here to help you.
How Google Images works
Google's robots analyze dozens of factors on and about webpages (like captions, descriptions, and other contextual information) to understand and index the images on the Web. Google also applies sophisticated algorithms to the Images index to remove duplicates and to ensure that the highest-quality results show up first.
Google automatically crawls websites to find images, so there's no way to directly up load or add images to the Google Images index. If you don't see your image appear when you think it should, see tips for including an image.http://support.google.com/images/answer/175288?hl=en
In certain circumstances, you can sometimes remove or block an image from appearing in Google Images results.http://support.google.com/images/answer/181721
Google Analytics
This is one of the most powerful tools Google offers. It gives you deep data on your website and content. From the most popular pages viewed, to how long people have stayed on a page, where visitors are coming from (referring sites), mobile access to your site, etc. In addition you can set goals, monitor campaigns and optimize your online presence according to your visitor.
Google Alerts
Simple and easy to set up specific search terms and let Google run the results direct to your email inbox. You can see what people are saying at anytime about you or your competitors, simply by using Google Alerts.
Google Apps
This is one of the few Google tools to cost, but from $5 per month, it is a worthwhile investment. Google Drive, has taken over Google Docs and you don't need a Microsoft license to use it.
Easy document sharing, collaboration and group editing is pretty easy with Google Apps. GTalk supports internal communications, which consolidates all your domains. Android is built in, so if you are not an Apple iPhone user, an added benefit.
Google have launched an online calculator to show what your money gets you.
I put in a spend of $5 per person x 5 people in my office:
Here's what I got for my money:
- 123 gb extra email space
- 2.8 times more productivity while mobile
- 139 hours saved on dealing with spam
- Saved $62 per year on data recovery services
- Instant message
- Video chat
- Voice chat Online documentation collaboration
- Shared calendars
- Fully mobile
A bit gimmicky but give it a go http://smb.gonegoogle.com
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