Jassen: Okay, great. Now, one of the things that I know about how you run your business is that you are a huge fan of all the Google tools that are available to you.

James Orr: Absolutely.

Jassen: I know we don’t have the time to go really in depth on each tool but could you give a quick rundown of the free marketing tools that Google makes available for promoting your business?

James Orr: Absolutely. So here’s the quick list of nine – and you’re right, we really don’t have time to go into detail but I will mention each one and you could do your own research on it. I’ll tell you what it was generally used for.

The first one is Google AdWords. Google AdWords is Google’s advertising program. You can buy advertisements on the Google network. You can also do keyword research. So if you want to find out how many times people are searching for Denver CPA you can go on to Google AdWords and do a search and find out how many people are searching for that, whether that trend is up or down, how much people are paying for that keyword. You can do all that research on Google AdWords plus buy advertising from Google on there for specific keywords. That’s number one.

Number two, we mentioned before is Google AdSense. Google AdSense is the program where you put ads on your website and when people click on those ads you get paid part of what the advertisers are paying google. So that’s one of the ways to make money when you’re doing lead generation. That’s another great resource from Google. It’s called Google AdSense.

Number three is Google Analytics. This is the little tracking code you put at the bottom of your website and allows you to track, measure and therefore focus on and improve your marketing efforts. You can find out where your traffic’s coming from or putting articles out on somebody’s article directory type sites – is that really helping you? You can measure that with Analytics. You can use that as a measuring tool for improving your website.

Google FeedBurner is that RSS e-mail subscription type of interface where people want to receive updates whenever you publish new contents to your blog, they can receive that via RSS with Google FeedBurner. The other thing I like about FeedBurner is that it allows you to see what articles people are clicking on so that you can go and write more articles about that particular topic. Maybe you find out that certain types of topics you’re writing about are more popular than others. Well, focus on more of those. It’ll get people what they want. So you can go ahead and use that too.

Google Groups – great tool for going and finding and networking with certain niches. So if you want to focus on the electrician niche you, you can go and actually find an electrician group on Google Groups. Start hanging out there, find out what their problems are, what their challenges are and then become a part of that community and market yourself there as well.

Google Website Optimizer is number six. That is used for improving your website conversion. Remember before, Jassen we’re talking about testing headlines to see which one works best?

Jassen: Yes.

James Orr: Well, Google Website Optimizer is the tool you would use to do that. They take care of all the crazy math about how many people you need to actually visit it before it becomes significant. So they’ll tell you clearly which one is going to be the winner if you have two different headlines. They’ll swap them out and alternate between two different headlines if you’ve got visitors coming to your site and they will then show you which one is the best one for getting conversions. So that’s called Google Website Optimizer.

Jassen: Nice.

James Orr: Google Webmaster tools – a great resource for people that own websites you could put your site map which is basically just a list of all the different pages on your website. You could feed that in the Google Webmaster tools and then Google will know to go to all those pages to see if they can index them in search engines. The other thing that’s nice about Google Webmaster tools is that it allows you to see all the different keywords that you are ranking for. So if someone types in “Denver CPA service,” are you even coming up? Is your website showing up at all for that search? Instead of having to go and look through Google and see if you appear on page seven, Google will actually tell you what keywords you’re ranking for, where you’re ranking and that could change overtime so it keeps tracking that for you. You can look back and see if you’re improving, things of that nature. So it’s very helpful.

Google Trends is number eight. That allows you to do keyword and market research. Do you want to see if certain types of words in your industry are increasing in popularity overtime or decreasing? What is the new home buyer tax credit – is that what they’re calling that thing?

Jassen: Yes, the new home line of credit right now – the $8,000 for first time home buyers.

James Orr: Yes. So if you want to see if that thing is decreasing in popularity or if it’s increasing in popularity you could go to Google Trends, type in that keyword and it’ll show you a graph over time of the number of people searching for that. So you can use that as a way to figure out topics that are coming in to vogue or leaving the public’s mind and you can focus on those words when you’re writing content or articles.

The last one here is Google Alerts. Google Alerts is great because it allows you to spy on your competition or you want to see every time another competing CPA firm in your town is doing any marketing on the Internet. You could put in their name in Google Alerts and Google will e-mail you once a day or once week or whatever frequency you set whenever that name shows up in any new web searches. You can also do it to put your own name of your business in there and see when people are talking about you. Whether it’s good or bad or whatever you can go and see if someone says negative about you, you can go and defend yourself. Whatever you need to do, make comments or contact the owner. Whatever you need to do in order to stay on top of people doing that and you do use Google alerts for that. So those are the Google tools.

Jassen: Google Alerts is a great service. I have bunch of alerts set up and I love seeing what people are saying about either myself, you, my business, our industry, niches that I’m tracking things. It a very powerful tool, I love Google alerts.

James Orr: Yes. It’s free. By the way all these tools are pretty much free. The only one I think you need to pay money for is AdWords and that’s when you’re buying advertising.