Why Does Google Build Tools For Marketers?

Rather through own its own ingenuity or acquisition, Google is without a doubt one of the more industrious entities on the Internet. For consumers, Google represents an eternal gateway for discovering new content on the web. But over the last several years, Google has released applications specifically designed to aid search marketers. It goes without saying that Google possesses one of the most extensive caches of keyword search data, consumer demographic information, customer search behavior, and website engagement on the planet. So when Google makes this information available in any form, online marketers better pay close attention. But surprisingly, many of these tools slip under the radar of even experienced web marketers.

In the not-to-distant past, pay-per-click marketers benefited the most from Google’s generosity. Obviously, the more information that Google could supply to its advertisers regarding how people use its services then the more successful the parties involved – advertiser, customer, Google – would be. I’d say that beginning in 2005 Google started releasing tools designed specifically for organic advertisers, the most important being Google Webmaster Tools. Whereas Google’s motives for creating tools for paid advertisers are directly intended to increase its advertising revenue, I believe that Google’s SEO-centric tools are primarily designed to produce a more relevant search engine result page (SERP) by enabling webmasters to supplement gaps in Google’s crawling, indexing, and ranking technology in a controlled way. A secondary reason why Google has released tools such as Google Insights and Google Trends (both are keyword demand analysis tools) is to encourage web content creators to produce content that searchers are actually looking for, which again, further helps the search engine to better satisfy a user search.

Other companies have designed tools to assist advertisers in analyzing the search marketing landscape, but Google is the place to start because, as they say, its data is “straight from the horse’s mouth” and thus represents a more complete data source compared to most competitive toolsets.