Entrepreneurs, marketers, and SEO experts can utilize Google Search Console as a valuable tool to improve the online visibility and organic traffic of their websites, but it can be a little daunting to use at first. The secret to transforming all of that useful data into actionable insights for your SEO strategy is understanding how to utilize Google Search Console properly.
This post will demonstrate how to use Google Search Console to improve search rankings and increase traffic.
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What is Google Search Console?
Google Search Console (GSC) is an online tool that assists website owners with optimizing their sites for higher search engine rankings. On top of being 100% free, it’s also currently the most extensive and up-to-date SEO dataset you’ll find.
It provides a plethora of data and information about a site’s performance in organic search results, such as search engine indexing, click-through rate, and keyword ranking positions. It also enables website owners to diagnose and correct website issues, examine manual action alerts, and submit sitemaps and URLs to Google for indexing.
What Is Average Position in Google Search Console?
Average Position in Google Search Console refers to a tool used to measure the average rank of a website’s pages in Google search results.
It can be used as an SEO tool to measure the success or failure of SEO strategies and to identify areas for improvement. It may also be used to determine the effectiveness of content marketing, as it can have a significant effect on rankings.
A website’s average position is a reliable sign of how effective its SEO is. It is crucial to monitor if the average position is rising or falling, since this may indicate how successful the SEO strategies are. A website may receive more organic traffic as a consequence of improving its average position, which may increase sales or conversions.
How to Use Google Search Console
Before you can start using Google Search Console, you need to do the following:
- Verify site ownership: This will give you access to all the information on GSC. Follow these instructions to verify site ownership.
- Make sure your site’s pages can be found and read by Google: The index coverage report provides you with a summary of all the pages on your website that Google has indexed or attempted to index. Examine the list provided and attempt to correct page warnings and errors.
- Check for mobile usability errors: The mobile usability report highlights problems that might have an impact on how people interact with your website while using a mobile device.
- Submit a sitemap: This may speed up the discovery of your website.
- Monitor website performance: The search performance report provides breakdowns by queries, pages, and countries to demonstrate how much traffic you’re receiving from Google Search.
How to Use Google Console for SEO
You won’t be able to fully utilize Google Search Console’s stats and tools if you’re just glancing over the data once in a while.
Here’s how to utilize Google Search Console effectively, get the most out of the platform, and use the data to inform SEO strategies and boost website traffic.
1. Confirm That Google Understands Your Targeted Keywords
Publishing consistently high-quality content that showcases your company’s knowledge and experience in your industry is a tried and tested technique for raising the overall number of keywords that your website ranks for.
Use Google Search Console immediately to see whether your content is contributing to and ranking for your desired search phrases instead of waiting 30 days.
With each content piece you write, use GSC as follows:
- Select a keyword goal or keyword cluster that is pertinent to the position you want the website to achieve.
- Create content that is optimized for the appropriate target term.
- Post the material you create to your website.
- Verify after a few days that Google has recognized the value of your content and is displaying it in the SERPs for relevant search phrases.
If you notice that your content isn’t showing up for any of the target keywords you were initially aiming for, it’s probably because Google doesn’t think the content is high-quality or related to the term.
Here are a few things you can try to fix this:
- Examine your metadata: Ensure that your goal keywords are used in your metadata.
- Edit the content: Concentrate on including keywords in your headers and subheadings, and add additional semantic richness and depth to the material
- Build domain authority: Without domain authority, you may not appear in SERPs. Backlinking can increase the authority of your site, but it may take some time before you see results.
2. Verify That Google Is Correctly Indexing and Crawling Your Site Pages
Your site’s pages must be properly crawled and indexed by search engine spiders before they can rank for relevant keywords. Use GSC to find out what pages have been indexed and when they were last crawled.
Here’s why this information can help boost your site’s traffic:
- A web page’s on-page optimizations won’t be taken into account by Google’s algorithm until it is crawled again.
- Your crawl budget can be exhausted if your website has tons of pages. Adding “noindex” and “nofollow” robot tags to any low-value pages to ensure that Google only crawls essential pages.
- Using GSC to submit a sitemap can help you gain more control over which pages of your website Google promotes to searchers. Google will learn from a sitemap what pages on your site are most valuable and ought to be crawled and displayed more frequently.
3. Address Page Performance and Technical Issues
To rank on Google, you need to do more than just create relevant, high-quality content. Google’s degree of confidence in your company and how your visitors perceive it are both significantly influenced by the technical performance of your website. Your sites should be responsive, load quickly, and offer a great page experience to users who find them through search.
It might be a little frightening to troubleshoot technical issues with your website, especially if you don’t have a lot of experience working on the backend of your website. However, Google Search Console streamlines the process so that website owners may find and fix any technical or page performance issues that can affect their search rankings and positions.
The following signals are taken into account by Google’s ranking algorithm to determine how well a web page performs overall:
- Core web vitals: This refers to your website’s loading times, interactivity, and visual stability.
- Mobile friendliness: Because of mobile-first indexing, Google favors websites that load quickly and are responsive on cell phones.
- Security: Users should be able to browse websites safely and securely.
- HTTPS: Compared to HTTP, HTTPS is more secure. Because HTTP protocols lack encryption, having too many URLs with them may hurt SEO performance.
You can see any issues Google found and the specific web pages being affected on Google Search Console.
To resolve any issues, follow these steps:
- Identify the page that is being blocked and the error type that has been mentioned.
- Try to fix the problem on your website’s backend or use an appropriate plugin.
- Use the “Validate Repair” option in your GSC account to validate the fix after the issue has been rectified.
- After your validation submission has been confirmed, wait for Google to confirm whether the problem has been addressed. This usually takes about 28 days.
4. Use Google Search Console’s Daily Rank Tracking to Conduct SEO A/B Tests
You can use Google Search Console to A/B test particular adjustments to attempt to increase your average positions across all of your keywords.
Here’s how:
- Select the particular variant you want to test together with the page you want to test. Do not run more than one variation at a time.
- Make the necessary changes to optimize the page.
- After 7-10 days, check GSC to determine whether there are any improvements
Final Thoughts: How to Use Google Search Console for SEO
Google Search Console helps identify where you need to focus your efforts to improve your overall search performance. One of the simplest ways to boost your internet presence is to analyze GSC data and use it to guide your SEO strategy.
Here’s a summary of how to use Google Search Console for SEO:
- Check after a few days whether Google matches your content to the term you’re aiming for so you can put strategies in place to improve its ranking across additional search queries.
- Decide which pages Google should crawl first in order for your targeted pages to rank higher and show richer results.
- Follow the specific instructions provided by Google Search Console to troubleshoot and fix page issues.
- Run SEO A/B tests to identify the most effective optimizations, which you can subsequently apply to further pages.
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