Google tools for SEO and Keyword Research

There are many tools that will help you get the most out of SEO. Here is a list of all Google’s own web applications and tools that offer free keywords research and analysis.

Google Adwords

Google AdWords – This is the most important product for researching your keywords. It’s very user-friendly and does a quick job of plotting down keywords based on prices, website niche, trends and search volume in your country. Used by almost all advertisers being FREE yet most powerful tool for SEO and keyword research.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics – (GA) is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. The product is aimed at marketers as opposed to webmasters and technologists from which the industry of web analytics originally grew. It is the most widely used website statistics service, currently in use on around 57% of the 10,000 most popular websites. Another market share analysis claims that Google Analytics is used at around 49.95% of the top 1,000,000 websites (as currently ranked by Alexa).

GA can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, e-mail marketing and digital collateral such as links within PDF documents.

Google Webmaster Tool

Google Webmaster Tool is a no-charge web service by Google for webmasters. It allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites.

It has tools that let the webmasters:

  • Submit and check a sitemap
  • Check and set the crawl rate, and view statistics about how Googlebot accesses a particular site
  • Generate and check a robots.txt file. It also helps to discover pages that are blocked in robots.txt by chance.
  • List internal and external pages that link to the site
  • See what keyword searches on Google led to the site being listed in the SERPs, and the click through rates of such listings
  • View statistics about how Google indexes the site, and if it found any errors while doing it
  • Set a preferred domain (e.g. prefer example.com over www.example.com or vice versa), which determines how the site URL is displayed in SERPs