Google Launches a Hub of Holiday Marketing Resources

With the holiday season approaching, online shopping is more relevant now than ever before.

According to Google, 71 percent of U.S. adults plan to do more than half their shopping digitally. What’s more, 66 percent of these people say that they will shop more at local small businesses.

Google wants to help these customers find their favorite local retailers online. That’s why the search and advertising giant is launching a new hub of holiday marketing resources.

Indeed, the mini site consists of personalized recommendations to help businesses reach shoppers across various Google properties. These include Google Search, Google Maps, and Google Shopping.

The post on Google for Small Business Holiday Hub reads:

“Take the guesswork out of this [holiday] season with personalized recommendations to help you meet shoppers where they are across Google Search, Shopping and Maps.”

Here are some of the resources available and how marketers can use them to enhance their online strategy this holiday season.

A Hub of Holiday Marketing Resources for Businesses

1. Grow My Store

Grow My Store is a powerful new tool for online retailers. It analyzes your site’s customer experience and shows its performance relative to others in the same retail category.

To use the new tool, enter the URL for your online store. After that, Grow My Store will return tailored recommendations to help you improve your retail site.

Note that Google doesn’t verify ownership of the site before providing reports. As such, this tool is also useful for competitive analysis.

2. Local Opportunity Finder

Businesses looking to attract customers to a physical location can use the Local Opportunity Finder tool.

Expectedly, it focuses primarily on improving visibility via Google My Business (GMB). Like Grow My Site, this tool provides personalized recommendations on ways to improve your GMB profile.

Note that Local Opportunity Finder is only available to businesses in the United States.

3. Marketing Lessons from Google

Google’s holiday marketing hub also contains a few short tutorials to help marketers prepare for the shopping season. It ranges from lessons on SEO best practices to how to list products in Google for free.

Other lessons include:

Making it easy for customers to find you
Creating an effective social media plan
Five options for getting your business online

Besides these tutorials, the hub also links to several existing guides on using various GMB features.

4. Live Streams

Finally, the holiday marketing hub links to at least one live stream scheduled for October 14.

The one-hour live demonstration intends to show users how to use Shopify with Google Merchant. The stream should also include tutorials on using the two new tools — Grow My Store and Local Opportunity Finder.

Marketers can register here for free.