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In digital marketing, we talk a lot about SEO and, like it or not, an SEO strategy is vital if you want your business to rank high on Google search results. In this post, we look at the important role that Google Search Console plays in your SEO strategy.
So what is Google Search Console?
Hubspot summarises as follows: “Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) is a free platform for anyone with a website to monitor how Google views their site and optimise its organic presence. That includes viewing your referring domains, mobile site performance, rich search results, and highest-traffic queries and pages.”
The metric analysis provides valuable insights into how your website is performing in organic search and will alert you to a myriad of issues from broken links to site errors so that you can resolve them quickly and improve the functionality of your site.
The fact is every website is going to experience issues that will impact usability and affect customer experience but Google Search Console will help safeguard your digital experiences and here are 6 key reasons why the web tool will improve your organic rankings.
1. Search Appearance
Results acquired from using Google Search Console will show you how your business is ranking on Google and give you a preview of what your page looks like in Google’s search engine page results (SERP). The search appearance feature on Google Search Console, reveals how your videos, blogs, rich snippets and more are performing.
What are rich snippets?
A rich snippet reveals more information to the user beyond the title tag, meta description and URL and is more effective in getting a better organic click-through rate.
Here’s a great example from a review of a software solutions company where as much information as possible is used to encourage users to click on the results.
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2. Improve HTML Elements
Did you know Google Search Console provides suggestions as to how you can improve your HTML? Let’s say you forgot to add a meta description to your web page. Well, now you can take the opportunity to optimise it for specific keywords which will improve your ranking.
You can also use Google Search Console to observe your title tags and ensure they are at the correct level of hierarchy. Title tag (H1) should be on your page, and other headlines should go through H2 top 6.
3. Increase Organic Search Traffic
The innovative web tool has an entire section dedicated to search traffic which means by using Google Search Console the only way is up! Valuable insights will reveal how your users have found and clicked on your site from using an organic search on Google.
These reports will help you see how your content strategy is performing, the amount of traffic your pages are getting and will show you the actual search queries that are bringing visitors to your site. Knowledge is power and will help supercharge your content strategy.
4. Monitor Link Reports
Internal and external links all contribute to SEO and help build exposure to an audience. But backlinks to other sites are also important in helping your content be seen. Google Search Console will reveal key data on the website pages that are linked to the most.
And it goes without saying, the more established websites that are linking to your site the more Google will pay attention and see that your content is of high value. High-value content = higher page rankings.
5. Solves Google’s Indexing Issues
Using the URL Inspection Tool you can check if your site pages are in the search index or if Google has been prevented from indexing them. If a page isn’t in the index you can request for it to be indexed.
Problems with indexing can result from error pages, pages with broken links or could be due to no-index, redirects or canonical tags which will affect how your site is crawled.
6. Receive website messages
You can also configure GSC to get notifications directly to your email when issues arise. You can quickly resolve issues like security risks, spam errors or pages that are unable to be crawled because pages that can’t be crawled won’t be indexed and won’t show up in search results.
Having messages direct to your inbox will inspire you to take action faster so the problems don’t have a lasting impact on your business and damage your site’s ranking.
Key benefits of using GSC
We’ve demonstrated why Google Search Console is an important tool from Google and how it will provide businesses with valuable insights to understand how their site is performing.
Dervix summarises Google Search Console feature benefits perfectly and we’ll briefly run through them here:
Website health. You will have a complete overview of website statistics and rates and know instantly whether your website has experienced any issues.
Crawling. You’ll get the confirmation you need that Google can locate and crawl your site.
Indexing. Fix indexing problems for new and existing content.
Organic traffic. Traffic data analysis will help you to focus on the content that needs to be better optimised for search engines.
URL Inspection. Find code errors or canonical tags that might affect SEO and user experience.
Backlinks. You’ll be able to find out which websites are linking to you!
Mobile Usability. GSC provides information on how mobile-friendly your website pages are so you can identify any issues with mobile performance.
Sitemaps. Any indexing issues that bots have encountered on your site will be reported as well as the current status of your submitted sitemaps.
Other relevant tools and reports. Google Search Console provides everything you need to know about your site performance from security issues, to troubleshooting issues, redirects and more which all go into improving your site ranking.
Core web vitals. Valuable insights can be gained on your website’s performance for both mobile and desktop.
So there you have it. Google Search Console is an essential tool to help monitor and review your site performance so that you can identify and resolve issues quickly.
Your website is your business and Google Search Console will help to ensure your website delivers on speed, security and customer satisfaction. Plus it's free, so why wouldn't you avail of its excellent features now that you know how it can advance your marketing efforts and improve your presence on Google.
