As a small a medium size business you always have to be on the look out for services that you can use to make your hard earned dollar go further. Everyone knows Google is the king when it comes to search engines but did you know that they also offer some great services that will help you grow your business online. Here a list of a few of my favorites that you can integrate quickly to your online activities.

Google Adwords

Most business owner know by now what Google Adwords is. For those of you who don’t it is the ads that show up on the top and right hand side when ever you do a search on Google. They also show up on the content partner web sites when ever that page is shown. This is a huge network and reaches up to 80% of online users according to Google. This is a Pay Per Click model of advertising and you only pay for an ad when someone clicks on it. If you don’t have an account you can always sign up at http://adwords.google.com

Google Analytics

Having such valuable information like what keyword phrase someone searched to find your web site or what web site they came from to visit you could be priceless if you know what to do with it. Google Analytics enable you to track this type of important details of your web site visitors. It is also integrated with Google Checkout and Google Adwords to make your life a little easier. This service is free to use with your Google Adwords account. To find out more information on it go to http://www.google.com/analytics/ you can sign up for it inside your Adwords account.

Google Website Optimizer

This is a new tool that is still in beta but should be available Q1 of 2007 for everyone. With Google Website Optimizer you can use the power of Multi-variate testing to optimize your web site. Instead of using the traditional A/B split testing you can test several things at once giving you more information for your marketing dollar. This will be a very a great tool for those who decide to integrate it onto their web sites. You can visit http://services.google.com/websiteoptimizer/index.html to sign up and get additional information about it.

Google Local Search

Local searches are on the rise and Google current handles about 30% of them. If you have a business that caters to a geographical region then you will want to be listed with them. With more and more people every month searching for specific things in their local area it can be a vital tool for your business growth that currently not a lot of businesses are taking advantage of. You can go to http://local.google.com then look for “Add/Edit your Business” link to put your business online.

Google Checkout

If you are wanting to add some type of online payment processor but don’t want the hassle of setting up a merchant account then this could be a good solution for you. This will help you easily add features to help you accept money online. Since they are wanting to compete with such online payment processors like PayPal you can get some great deals for processing your payment through them. At the time of this writing they also will give you Adwords advertising credits for using Google Checkout. To get more info go to https://checkout.google.com

Google Radio ads

This is a brand new service that is only available to select advertisers but look for it to be available to the general public early 2007. This essentially will allow advertisers to buy radio spots just as easily as you put up your Google Adwords ads. This will make it so that you can track not only your online ads but also your radio ads as well. Google bought dMarc Broadcasting in January of 2006 to help them facilitate the transition to radio ads. If this takes off as well as the PPC ads did you will begin to see Google’s influence in the offline marketing arena shortly. When it does become available to the general public you will be able to find it at http://audioads.google.com

This by no means is a complete list of all of Google’s services but this are the ones that I like. If you keep an eye on what they do you can find some very interesting trends. Make sure you start by taking advantage of what a billion dollar company has to offer you and help grow your business today

**This is an article that I wrote a few years ago when I first started my Tampa SEO Company. I thought it would be useful to republish**

I was checking out some stats on my adwords account when I see one of there new features

Demographic bidding now available on select sites in the Google content network
Demographic bidding helps you display your ads to specific gender and age segments on some sites in the Google content network, giving you more control over who your audience is and greater insight into how your ads perform with those audiences.

There are two ways you can use demographic bidding. First, you can modify your bids for a particular audience segment, such as increasing your bid for 18-24 year-olds and males. Second, you can exclude certain demographic groups from seeing your ads if they aren’t meeting your ROI goals.

Run Demographic Reports (found in the Report Center) to guide your bids for certain groups. These reports can show you campaign performance metrics (including impressions, clicks, CTR, and conversion data) by the age and gender of the users who saw your ad.

This will make things a lot more interesting for sure.

The Search Engine Optimization industry evolved from the exploding commercial and social Internet development movement of the early ‘90s. Just fifteen or so years ago, at the time of the World Wide Web boom, businesses were only beginning to understand the increasing need for developing a marketable website – what is now the realm of the search engine optimization specialist. No one seemed to talk much about what made for the best web sites – outside of easy page navigation, cool design, and fast-loading pages. That’s because few seemed to fully understand the depth and grandiosity of the opportunities. And most new web development companies were more than busy enough just building web sites without needing to care much if those sites were actually performing for their clients.

Let’s fast-forward through a brief Internet history. As the ecommerce boom rippled out globally, hundreds of thousands of companies were literally online within days. Or maybe millions within months. Let’s just say it happened so fast, nobody could keep track! (I’d be more than willing to revise this statement if anyone out there has a reputable source for factual data on the matter!) Anyway, it’s safe to say that today, there are millions upon millions of web sites out there. And today, if your business doesn’t yet have an online presence, you already know that you can barely exist outside the range of your own home community.

Significant Industry Growth

Back in 1995, the United States had less than a thousand web design companies. Now, there are more than 40,000, and the affordable SEO industry is widely expected to grow another whopping 20 per cent over the next two years. This is encouraging news, despite recent speculation among governments, small and large recession. Fueling the incredible growth in the industry, essentially, is the relatively fast development of smaller web design companies, and the continued automation of medium and large business selling virtually any sort of service you can imagine around the globe. Yet another contributor in the success in the field is the steady decline in the cost of web development fees.

The past decade has seen an incredible transformation in commerce, with the Internet driving e-commerce, led increasingly by more and more sophisticated web design. With the rise in e-commerce comes a natural curiosity about how to host web sites that can track visitor activity and report on commercial advertising results in much the same manner as other forms of marketing. In addition, web site owners also want to increase numbers of random searchers easily targeting their web site.

When a potential visitor goes to Google to find, say, a screwdriver, Bill’s Hardware wants to be the first listing that comes up on the search engine list. This is where organic search engine optimization comes into play. Search Engine Optimization is the science of establishing, for any given website, a higher ranking in the search engine results than their competitors.

A web consulting firm can help small, medium, and big companies improve their search engine rankings, traffic, sales, and overall profit. These firms can develop professionally customized SEO campaigns that guarantee results.

I was reading on the Google blog about the quality score improvements and the changes that they have recently made. They made a few big changes with this past update:

• ‘First page bid’ will replace ‘minimum bid’
• A more accurate Quality Score
• Keywords no longer marked ‘inactive for search’

With minimum bid out of the way Google will be able to raise the price you will need to pay to get on the first page. The hope of course is that advertisers will further improve the quality of the content they place for bid.

And since Google is also now computing the Quality score dynamically you can see that this round of updates will further weed out some of the “undesirable” advertisers from the halls of Googledom and make it all the more difficult to make it to the first page without spending a small fortune.

Now with those types of changes Google still would like to give the Search Marketers that suck a chance to have their ads seen so…The inactive for search keywords will now just be pushed to a page that doesn’t get as much traffic as the first page.

But this does beg the question…

With no keyword being inactive and no minimum keyword bids can an advertisers just spam the network with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousand of keywords just for the sake of traffic that gets less noticed all for one cent a click?