Are
you experiencing stagnant growth with your SEO efforts? Discover how to analyze
Google Search Console data effectively to uncover untapped opportunities for
enhancement.
In the realm of digital marketing, two standout SEO tools
reign supreme: Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
While Google Analytics (GA) provides insights into user
behaviour, Google Search Console (GSC) is specifically tailored to optimize
technical aspects for better search engine performance.
Utilizing Google Search Console is indispensable for
assessing website performance. Keep reading to explore the comprehensive guide
on leveraging Google Search Console to drive significant results for your
website.
Key highlights:
·
Explains the role of the Google Search Console (GSC) tool in SEO Optimization.
·
Covers important GSC features like search performance analysis and index
coverage.
·
Provides a step-by-step guide for setting up and accessing data within
the tool.
·
Suggest strategies for leveraging GSC insights to get the best results.
·
Also, highlights the importance of SEO expertise in effective SEO
implementation.
What is Google Search Console?
GSC is a cutting-edge,
real-time update SEO tool Google provides for free.
It’s a dashboard, where you can check various metrics like SERP
positions, CTRs, impressions, and more.
It also tells if there are any problems, like if Google can’t find some
web pages or if there are errors on the site. It even helps to check the
mobile-friendliness of the website.
Key Features and Functionalities of GSC
1. Search Performance: This shows your site’s performance on the results page of a search
engine – including clicks, impressions, and average position.
2. Index Coverage: Highlights pages on your site that Google
indexes and updates any indexing issues.
3. Mobile Usability: Identifies mobile indexing issues that could affect how a site appears and performs on mobile devices.
4. Sitemaps: Allows you to submit sitemaps to Google, helping
search engines understand the structure of your website and crawl accordingly.
5. Security Issues: Alerts you to any security issues on your site,
such as malware or blocked content.
6. Externals and Internal Links: Displays information about both
the type of links pointing to your site, helping Google understand URLs and
link structure.
7. Manual Actions: Notifies you if Google has applied a manual
action against your site due to violations of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
8. Core Web Vitals: This provides insights into your site’s
performance based on Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics likeLCP,
CLS, and FID.
9. Enhancements: Highlights opportunities to enhance page experience in search results, such as structured data markup for rich results.
10. URL Inspection: This is also a URL inspection tool and lets you
know if there are any broken links or
orphan pages.
How to set up and Access
Data from GSC?
Visit the Google Search Console
website and sign in using your Google account credentials.
Don’t have an account? then you’ll
need to create one.
The process is easy. We have broken
down into 4 steps.
1. Open your account
2. Verify your account
3. Add sitemaps to the Google
Search Console
4. Add a user to the account
1. Open a Google Search Console Account
Visit the official Google Search
Console page to create an account.You can open an account in
two ways: either with a domain name or a website URL.
Choose either to go with the domain name or just paste your website link to add
a property.
2. Verify Site Ownership
Domain Property
Verification
Type your domain and check if it is
registered with any listed providers.
Select your provider and start
verification by signing in to your account and following the instructions.
If your registrar is not listed,
select “Any DNS provider” and sign in to your domain provider’s account to
manage DNS or Domain Name Servers.
Choose to add a TXT record and
paste the record from the Search Console to verify it.
URL Prefix
Property Verification
For URL verification, you have to
upload an HTML file to your website.
Under the other verification
methods, you’ll see a code. Copy that code.
Go to your website’s integration
settings, paste the HTML tag in the custom code section, and update your
website. Go back to GSC again and click on the verify button. Once done, you’ll
receive a confirmation mail.
Google Analytics
Existing Google Analytics account
holders, with a tracking code embedded, can verify user prefix property with
it. All you have to do is simply access the Google Analytics verification box in
Search Console and click on the “verify” button.
For things to work out smoothly in
the future, check if you have selected “edit” rights in Google Analytics for
the item linked to that property’s tracking code. You have to first add
Analytics tracking code such as analytics.js or gtag.js—to your site.
Google Tag Manager
If you want to verify using Google
Tag Manager, verification can be done with a single click.
Go to the Google Tag verification
box in Google Search Console and just press the “verify” option.
Make sure the Tag Manager snippet
is already up on your website change the permissions for Tag Manager to
“Publish.”
3. Add a Sitemap to the Google
Search Console
Now, that your website is added,
the next step is getting your content noticed.
Go to “Sitemaps” in Search Console
and paste the URL of your XML sitemap into the box labeled “Enter sitemap URL.”
Hit “Submit” to add your sitemap,
which helps Google find and crawl important content on your website.
4. Add a User to the Google
Search Console
A website can have multiple users.
They can access some or all of the data in Google Search Console.
Navigate to Search Console >
Choose a property > Settings > Users and permissions > Add user.
Type their email address and select
either full or restricted access. You can always come back to adjust settings
or revoke access.
Important GSC Data for SEO
Results
Your account is set up now. Your
website is also added. Next, you can check the performance of your website.
While there are many metrics that you
can get on GSC, the key performing areas for a website are the following four:
1. Total Number of Clicks: It is the
number of times people clicked on your site in Google search results.
2. Impressions: Indicates
how often a site’s pages appear in Google search results.
3. Click-Through Rate (CTR): The
percentage of users who clicked on a site out of those who saw it in search
results.
4. Average Position: The average
ranking of your site’s pages in Google search results.
Importance of Each Metric in SEO
·
Higher clicks mean more people are coming to your website – which
shows your content is resonating with the user query.
·
More impressions mean a site is showing in top results for
specific keywords – a positive note for your SEO efforts.
·
A high CTR indicates your content is well-optimized with a title,
meta description, and structured data for showing up snippet results.
·
An average position of a webpage shows the stability of the
content position. Your content answers all the search queries related to the
particular keyword – beating all the competition.
Each mentioned metric is an important factor in getting a website
ranked, showing results, and conversing. Every 3-4 months, it is advised to get
an SEO audit of your website to check nothing hampers your
website performance.
Identify Opportunities for Improvement with GSC Data
Let’s be honest, merely staring at
the white dashboard with blue graphs won’t get you transformational results.
It is important to sit and identify
opportunities for SEO improvement based on Google Search Console (GSC) data. Be
it a loss in traffic for a page or any troubleshooting issue, each metric and
pattern should be carefully recognized as an area of improvement.
Follow the steps to do it the right
way:
Start by analyzing search
performance data
· By search performance, we mean identify pages that show some results but have the potential to perform better.Discover High-
· Potential Keywords
· Check the performance report tab
and look for content opportunities. Find keywords or landing pages with high
impressions but low clicks or low average positions. These keywords represent
unique opportunities to improve your rankings and attract more traffic.
· If a blog post ranks on the second
page of SERP for a keyword with a high search volume, optimizing the content
with images, adding updated information with semantic entities, or building quality backlinks could
help improve its position and increase clicks.
· Sometimes underperforming pages
with fewer clicks or impressions have low visibility or lack relevance to user
queries. If a product page on your e-commerce site receives fewer clicks and
impressions than similar products, it may indicate that the page needs
optimization for relevant keywords or better meta descriptions.
2. Evaluate Click-Through Rate
(CTR)
Sometimes your content piece
appears in search results but has a low CTR. The reasons could be not so
enticing title or not exactly matching the user query.
You can revise the meta title and
description to better match user intent. Further, highlight unique benefits
that can encourage more clicks.
It is a good opportunity to identify content opportunities to enhance search snippets with rich snippets, such as FAQs, ratings, or product information. Showing direct answers through rich snippets can improve visibility and attract more clicks.
Adding
structured data markup to a recipe page can enable rich snippets in search
results, displaying additional information like cooking time and ratings, which
may entice users to click on the result.
3. Enhance your Page Experience
You also get a page experience
report from GSC, that helps us understand the performance of each webpage.
1. Check the total impressions you
got from good URLs. Having a positive number is an indication that the URLs
have a good page experience in the eyes of users and search engines.
2. Then, look if there are any
“Failing URLs” in Core Web Vitals. The performance is either indicated as
“Poor” or “Need improvement”. Work on these pages by optimizing images, formatting
your content, checking security issues, and enabling compression. Read this
blog on improving website page load speed to know the best practices.
A positive page experience can give
your website an advantage, especially when content quality is similar to
competitors.
4. Investigate
Technical Issues
GSC also provides insights into
technical issues like crawl errors, mobile usability issues, and security
issues.
Addressing these issues in technical SEO can improve your website’s user
experience. A seamless user experience makes the user journey
Setting up and accessing data from
GSC is a straightforward process. Once set up, website owners can monitor
important SEO metrics like total clicks, impressions, click-through rate (CTR), and average position – which are
important for optimum website performance.
Website owners can audit the
above-discussed key metrics and functionalities like performance on search
results, index coverage, mobile usability, and security issues with GSC. These
insights enable website owners to identify areas for improvement and optimize
their websites for better search engine visibility and user experience.
For professional assistance in implementing these strategies and improving SEO, you can contact us. We’d be happy to help you.
