Google Apps For Business

Note: While this article is directed at business websites, most of this post is equally directed at anyone with a website.

Most websites these days have a specific reason for being; over at Pixelweb where we mostly build business websites, one of the first questinos we ask is, what is the purpose of this website? Is it to promote a service? Sell a product? Whatever the reason, you will want to be able to quantify the success of the website.

So the key here is to create a Google account, there is a free offering and one for business. While I would highly recommend the business verison which includes email using your domain name, the free version also comes with the important tools below.

Google Analytics - One of the best free analytics tools on the market, once connected to your website, this will give you all sorts of metrics from how many people came to your website to which keywords they searched to get there, which country they come from, even whether they used a computer or a mobile to access your website! This is really a must have if you want any idea of how well your website is really doing.

Google Web Master Tools - So I'm assuming you want to rank your website in Google? Then using Google Web Master tools is a no brainer, they will even tell you if there are any issues with your website which might be effecting your rankings!

Google Email (Business version) - Most email is run on the same web hosting as the website, while this is not usually an issue, what happens should the web hosting go down? You may feel comfortable when your web hosting company tells you they have a 99% uptime guarantee but did you realise that equates to up to 3 days a year potential downtime! Can your business last for 3 days with no email? Then split the risk and host your email remotely with Google Business mail, we have been doing it for years with no issues.

Google Page Speed - Ok not techincally part of the Google Apps ecosystem this is a great tool to use for your business. It will tell you how fast your website is which Google search takes into consideration when ranking your website, it will also tell you how mobile friendly your website is. This is important when you consider this year over 50% of all traffic to your website will come from Mobile users (mobile phones and tablets.)

For Rocket host clients we are more than happy to help getting your Google Apps account set up.

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