19+ Free Google Tools Every WordPress Blogger Should Use

Blogging is all about getting as many people as possible to read your content. The secret to success lies in using the right tools, and Google offers a bunch that you can use for free.

Across our 16+ years of experience, we’ve been enjoying a lot of Google’s free tools to help grow our blogs. These tools, including Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights, have helped us improve our SEO and drive more traffic to our WordPress blog.

Whether you want to track your site’s performance or find the best keywords, Google has something for you.

In this article, we’re going to share the best free Google tools for WordPress bloggers.

In a hurry? Here’s a quick look at the top 5 free Google Tools we’ll cover in this guide:

#	Google Tools	Best For	Key Features
🥇	Google Analytics	Bloggers Marketers	User demographics and top content insights
🥈	Google Search Console	SEO specialists Content creators	Keyword research and sitemap submission
🥉	Google Programmable Search	Content-rich sites E-commerce sites	Custom search functionality
4	Google Tag Manager	Marketers Developers	Custom code snippet management
5	PageSpeed Insights	Developers SEO specialists	Performance insights and improvement tips

Why Use Google Tools for WordPress?

Creating content that is highly engaging and drives conversions can be challenging.

But here’s the good news: There are a lot of free tools you could be using to help speed up your content creation process or rank your blog posts higher on search engines.

Blogging is much easier when you are using the best blogging tools that Google has to offer. These tools help you plan, analyze, monetize, and monitor the effectiveness of your blog content.

Here are a few ways Google’s free tools can help your blog as a small business:

• Performance and speed: Google’s tools like PageSpeed Insights help make your website run faster. And faster websites rank better in search engines and provide a better user experience.
• Analytics: Google Analytics allows you to track user behavior on your website, including pageviews, traffic sources, and user demographics.
• Security: Google reCAPTCHA can help protect your WordPress website from spam and malicious bots by adding a layer of security to your contact forms and comments sections.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Google Search Console offers valuable tools for optimizing your site’s SEO performance. It provides insights into your site’s indexing status, search queries, and backlink profile. As a result, you can identify opportunities for improvement and increase your visibility in search engine results.

With that in mind, let’s explore the best free Google tools every WordPress blogger should use.

How We Test and Review

At WPBeginner, we’re serious about giving you the best information on Google tools. We evaluated each tool’s ease of use, key features, and overall effectiveness.

Our experts also looked at how each tool helps with SEO, boosts traffic, and improves your site’s visitor experience based on the tool’s claims.

Here are some general factors we considered when testing and reviewing the free Google tools:

• Ease of use. We check how easy the tool is to use. Is the interface simple and beginner-friendly? Can you find your way around without getting lost? A tool that’s easy to use means you can jump right in without having to learn a bunch of complicated stuff.
• Key features. We look at the important functions the tool offers. What can you do with it? Does it have cool features like collaboration options, ways to customize it, or links to other tools? Knowing the key features helps you see if the tool can do what you need it to do.
• Reporting tools. We explore the tool’s ability to generate reports and analytics. Can you easily create different kinds of reports? How simple is it to access them, and do they give you detailed information? Good reporting tools are super important for tracking what you’re doing, making smart decisions based on data, and showing off your results.

After considering all of these things, we compiled all our findings into detailed reviews so you know exactly what to expect.

1. Google Analytics

Based on our experience, Google Analytics is the most comprehensive analytics tool for WordPress blogs and websites.

This tool tells you how your visitors found your website, what devices they used, what pages they viewed, and how they interacted with your website.

This information helps us better understand our audience so we can plan and execute an effective content strategy. As a user, you’ll also be able to see what topics and pages convert the best and steadily improve your website over time.

Now, we found the easiest way to add Google Analytics to WordPress is by using MonsterInsights. It’s the best analytics solution for WordPress, used by over 3 million websites.

This integration lets us view our Google Analytics stats directly in our WordPress dashboard.

For more details, you can see our beginner’s guide on how to install Google Analytics in WordPress.

2. Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a set of tools that helps website owners monitor and maintain their search engine presence and rankings.

This tool can help you see what keywords people use to find your site, tell you about site errors holding back your rankings, and much more.

While using this plugin, we found that we can submit an XML sitemap via Google Search Console to help search engines crawl our website better.

We recommend adding Google Search Console to WordPress using the All in One SEO plugin. It’s the best SEO plugin for WordPress, used by over 3 million websites.

For more details, feel free to see our guide on how to add your WordPress site to Google Search Console.

3. Google Programmable Search

Google Programmable Search gives you an easy way to add custom search to your WordPress site.

Do note that the default WordPress search feature is quite limited and not very good at finding relevant content. As your website grows, you’ll want a way to help your visitors find what they’re looking for.

With Google Programmable Search, you have complete control over the content it will search. Another thing we appreciate about this plugin is that users can design the search feature to fully blend into their websites.

For more advanced search with customization options, we recommend using a WordPress search plugin like SearchWP. That said, Google Programmable Search can be an affordable option for getting started.

4. Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager allows you to easily add custom code snippets, or ‘tags,’ to your website. Tags are commonly used by analytics and marketing tools to add tracking or other features to your site.

Adding tags to your WordPress site usually requires custom code. These custom code snippets load an external script, and it’s hard to manage them all.

Google Tag Manager solves this problem by allowing us to manage all our external codes from one dashboard.

One feature that stood out to us is the centralized code snippet management. So, you only need to add one Google Tag Manager snippet to your site, and then you can manage the rest from a single dashboard.

For more details, please see our guide on how to install and set up Google Tag Manager in WordPress.

5. PageSpeed Insights

Having a fast-loading website is one of the most important parts of providing a good user experience and solid WordPress SEO. This is where Google PageSpeed Insights, a website performance monitoring tool, comes into play.

This tool tells you how your website is performing on both desktop and mobile devices.

While using this plugin, we like that the results are broken down into different sections so we can see what’s holding our site back. Down the page, there are also resources and best practices to help you fix any issues you might be having.

For more details on running a website speed test, you can see our guide on how to properly run a website speed test.

If you’ve found that your website has performance and speed issues, then there’s a lot you can do to improve this.

First, we recommend using the fastest WordPress hosting, like Hostinger or DreamHost.

Next, you can use a WordPress caching plugin like WP Rocket. Caching plugins reduce the load on your server and speed up your WordPress site.

If you are serious about boosting your site speed, then check out our ultimate guide to WordPress performance and speed.

6. Google Mobile-Friendly Test Tool

The Google Mobile-Friendly Test tool will tell you how well your website is optimized for the mobile web. We really appreciate that it gives us a detailed breakdown of any issues and what we can do to fix them.

For many WordPress websites, a high volume of traffic can come from mobile devices. If your website isn’t optimized for mobile, then you’ll create a poor user experience, and you can lose out on search engine rankings.

The easiest way to ensure your website is optimized for the mobile web is by using a responsive WordPress theme. These themes will automatically adjust to your visitor’s screen size, so they’ll look perfect on mobile devices.

7. Google Ads Keyword Planner

The Google Ads Keyword Planner gives you insights into what people are searching for in Google search. It pulls data from Google search results and paid advertisers.

Using this tool, you can generate a list of keywords related to your blog and see which keywords get the most searches per month. The data doesn’t provide exact numbers, but it does give general estimates.

This tool can also help you generate new ideas for your blog posts, plan your content strategy, and run your own pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns using Google Ads.

If you are looking for even more ways to do keyword research, then see our list of the best keyword research tools for SEO.

8. Think with Google Research

Think with Google Research is one of the best market research tools. This collection of tools will help you understand your market, spot new trends, and grow your website or online store.

The data and insights you can gain depend on which tools you use.

For example, the ‘Market Insights’ tool can help you find new regional or global markets to expand into.

During testing, we also found another tool that shows retail categories that are growing in popularity, along with the related search terms.

This tells you if the niche you are in is growing in popularity.

If you have a YouTube channel or edit videos, you can use the audience finder tool to uncover new audiences on YouTube.

9. Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is a tool that lets you add your local business information to Google so it can display it in search results.

If you run a local business or provide services to a local area, then Google Business Profile is something you cannot miss.

Displaying your business information in Google search results will boost your brand’s search visibility and bring you new customers and potential leads.

Now, we highly recommend combining this with the Local SEO features from AIOSEO to enhance your local business listings further on Google.

10. Google AdSense

Google Adsense lets bloggers and website owners easily monetize their websites with display ads. Adsense is one of the longest-running display advertising programs.

Once you’re approved for the program, you can add the display ads to your site and start making money.

To easily manage and display your ads, we recommend using a WordPress ad management plugin.

You can also combine revenue from Google Adsense with other income-generating activities like affiliate marketing and selling online courses.

In addition, there’s also Google Ads Keyword Planner within Adsense. This is where you can find popular search terms to rank your content for. You’ll be able to gain insights into what people are searching for so that you can optimize your content accordingly.

For more details, you can refer to our guide on how to properly add Google AdSense to WordPress.

11. Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, Calendar, & Gmail

Google Docs is the most popular productivity tool from Google, but there are other ones as well. You’ll find a wide range of tools for mobile and desktop, including Google Docs, Sheets, Forms, Calendar, Gmail, and more.

When reviewing these tools, we noticed that the main advantages of using Google’s productivity apps are the easy sharing features, full privacy control, unlimited revisions, inline comments, and real-time collaboration, all without needing to hit the save button.

Plus, there are all kinds of innovative ways to integrate these tools with WordPress. For example, you can connect WordPress forms to Google Sheets, integrate Google Calendar with WordPress, and more.

There’s also a premium version of these same tools called Google Workspace. This gives you the same functionality, plus a professional business email address, more cloud storage, support for two-factor authentication, and more.

For more on this, you can see our detailed Google Workspace review.

12. Google Drive

Google Drive is a cloud storage tool you can use to store all of your Google Docs, Google Sheets files, and more. The free version shares 15GB of storage across your Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos accounts.

You can use the free cloud storage space to store any file you want and sync it across other devices with a Google account.

If you’re looking for a place to store your WordPress backups safely, then this can be an ideal option.

13. Google Maps

Google Maps gives you a great way to embed interactive maps into your WordPress website. Adding a map to your website can show your visitors where you’re physically located.

This is a must-have feature for local businesses like restaurants and cafes.

If you are a travel blogger, you can also make use of Google Maps by creating and embedding an interactive map of all the places you’ve been to.

14. Google Alerts

Google Alerts will instantly notify you any time your brand or name is mentioned on the web.

It only takes a few seconds to create a Google Alert for your brand name or keywords, so you’ll get email notifications when you’re mentioned online.

It’s an important tool to use for building a strong brand image. Plus, these alerts can help to notify you of backlink opportunities and potential business partnerships.

15. Google Trends

Google Trends gives you a bird’s eye view of what’s trending in the world of search. You can browse through the latest curated data or search for keywords related to your niche.

Google Trends can be helpful in addition to other research tools like the Google Ads Keyword Planner. When you enter a keyword, you’ll be able to see if its popularity is trending up or down.

You can use these insights to decide on new niches to go into or new article topics to write about.

16. Google Fonts

Google Fonts is a great place to look for free fonts you can use on your website. Typography and font choice play a very important role in the design and usability of your website.

With this free tool, you can download and use these fonts directly from Google or embed them into your website and serve them from Google’s servers.

For more details, see our guide on how to add custom fonts in WordPress.

17. Google Meet

Google Meet, formerly known as Hangouts, is a free conference call and video meeting tool from Google. It offers secure messaging, phone, and video conferencing for teams and businesses.

This is perfect for smaller teams who want to have quick conversations and easily share Google Docs during the call.

Users can join video meetings with a dial-in number or meeting link.

At WPBeginner, we like to use Google Meet for our team meetings because it has a very intuitive and easy-to-use interface. The app does well when it comes to easily presentation your screen. From our experience, we found that Google Meet generally has reliable performance with very few browser-freezing issues.

Google has also recently introduced new call backgrounds along with low-light features that automatically improve call video quality.

While Google Meet is free, it costs $9.99 per month to get access to premium features, such as recording calls, capturing transcripts, and holding meetings of up to 1,000 participants.

That said, for most small businesses, the free version should be enough.

18. YouTube

YouTube is not just a video hosting service; it’s also the second most popular search engine on the web. Millions of users are looking for video content on YouTube all the time.

Adding videos to your blog content can help you get more engagement, but we recommend that you never upload videos to WordPress. Instead, we recommend hosting them on YouTube.

We have our own WPBeginner YouTube channel where we host all the videos that we embed on our blog.

If you want to add your YouTube videos to WordPress, then see our guide on how to easily embed videos in WordPress.

19. Google reCAPTCHA

reCAPTCHA is a free service by Google that protects websites from malicious attacks and spam by determining whether a visitor is a human or a bot. Using advanced risk analysis and machine learning, it’s a more advanced system than the traditional CAPTCHA system.

When a user visits a website with a contact form or user registration page, they may see a reCAPTCHA challenge.

Typically, it involves an ‘I’m not a robot’ checkbox, or users may need to click specific images to verify that the user is indeed a human.

If you want to prevent spam or fake accounts in your comments, email lists, or membership programs, connecting your form builder with reCAPTCHA is a must. For more information, you can read our post on how to easily add reCAPTCHA to the WordPress comment form.

Other Free Bonus Google Tools

There are many more free Google tools that can be immensely helpful for your WordPress blog. Some of them are:

• Google Photos
• Google Keep
• Google Translate
• Google News

Google is often launching new tools and services, and many of them are available for free or at a very competitive price.

We hope this article helped you find some new free Google tools that every WordPress blogger should use. You may also want to see our list of useful tools to manage and grow your WordPress blog and our guide on the proven ways to make money online blogging with WordPress.

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