December 20, 2021
Are you neglecting your most powerful SEO tool?
Any business or website that doesn’t utilise Google Search Console (GSC) is missing out on a huge opportunity to improve their SEO.
This platform and it’s potential is often not used to the effect it should be. This can be because businesses or webmasters are time poor; implementing an SEO strategy without having time to properly monitor and update it.
Often, website owners are not fully aware of the potential Google Search Console has in terms of improving their SEO, if used effectively.
As well as being a free-to-use platform, it provides incredibly helpful tools for measuring and improving your search engine optimisation.
As the most useful SEO tool out there, GSC is definitely a platform every website owner should be using as much as possible.
The GSC Tool is the Google Search Console Platform.
Originally called the Google Webmaster Tool, this is a free-to-use platform offered by Google to help you survey and improve your SEO performance.
Everyone with an online business knows the importance of SEO. To get seen by the right customers, you need to ensure you drive steady traffic to your site through targeting the correct demographic.
This is not simple, as there is a lot of competition out there, especially in the online world – and this only continues to grow exponentially.
This is where SEO comes in. SEO is the process of optimising your site for better search engine performance.
It comprises following Google’s guidelines for what makes a great site, giving your website every chance possible to be ranked highly by Google.
The higher you are ranked by Google, the more web browsers and potential customers you have access to.
How many times do you personally venture past the second or third page of Google? Pretty much never, right?
If you’re like most people, you probably don’t even bother with looking past the first page – or the first few search results.
The problem is, this is the same for the average consumer – including your customers.
2021 statistics show that only 0.78% of people click on results from the second page of Google.
Therefore, you’ve got to do everything in your power possible to get on that first page of Google.
Google Search Console (GSC) is a tool offered by Google, which helps you do this. It outlines the best practices for increasing your search engine ranking, as well as giving you insight to where your current rankings are, and how you can improve this.
Therefore, when it comes to SEO, Google Search Console is an absolutely invaluable platform.
Google Search Console should be used to monitor and enhance your SEO strategy. In fact, without using GSC, it’s going to be very difficult to keep your SEO working effectively and bringing in good results.
The following Google Webmaster Tools should be used to improve your SEO:
This section of GSC allows you to see how your site appears in search results.
There are two ways you should approach your search appearance:
Both these approaches are important for increasing your search ranking.
The first approach will help you get higher rankings through Google’s algorithms, and the second will drive more organic traffic to your site.
Google Search Console provides a report that shows you any issues occurring with your HTML. These are problems Google has come across whilst crawling your website.
This could be factors like:
You’ll need to fix any issues Google has identified, otherwise your search engine rankings will be at risk.
You can use the following guideline to make sure your metadata is up to scratch, per Google’s guidelines:
Google Search Console provides a report which gives in-depth insights into your website. This includes how many times your website was shown in search engine results, which will help you evaluate how your SEO is doing.
You’ll be able to see:
You can also use filters to streamline your results, such as:
You can also use Google Search Console to gain info on your links; both outside links to your site and internal links (within your site).
Backlinks to your site will show you:
This will provide you with info on who is linking to you, and why. Looking at what pages outside sources are linking to on your site will give you ideas on what kind of content people are valuing, and what kind of content you should create more of.
Internal links to your site will show you the amount of internal links to a certain page. Use this for SEO purposes by noting and utilising the following:
This is a report Google provides on the usability of your site on mobile devices.
This is a really important metric to take note of, as Google can penalise sites that are not up to their standards in terms of mobile responsiveness.
Google Search Console will show you aspects of your mobile usability that are not up to scratch, such as:
Make sure you fix all areas the report identifies – mobile usability is a weighty ranking factor for SEO.
‘Crawling’ is how Google reads your site, using search engine bot. Essentially, how Google evaluates your site and judges what the content is about.
It’s also how your search engine rankings are determined.
Google Search Console provides you with info on what Google finds on their latest crawl, including:
You’ll need to fix any issues that Google Search Console identifies – these will be harming your SEO efforts.
Google wants your site to be the best it can be, as much as you do. It’s ranking signifiers are designed to evaluate what makes a site valuable, informative, and helpful to users.
This platform has been created to help businesses create excellent quality content and websites – the kind of content both Google and users will value highly.
A good level of SEO comprises many components, and also requires regular maintenance, monitoring and updating. Google Search Console is your platform to carry this out effectively, and makes search engine optimisation much simpler.
It can be thought of as a guide or rule book when it comes to SEO, showing you the best practices to follow and actually identifying any problems you need to fix.
That’s why we consider GSC to be an absolutely essential tool, and definitely one that should not be overlooked or wasted.
Your SEO will be much more difficult – and much less successful – without the use of Google Search Console. That, we can pretty much guarantee you.
If you need any more info on SEO and how best to implement it, we have a range of free blogs which delve into every topic of search engine optimization and how to make your website fantastic. Check out more blogs like this here.