Google Search Console is Free!

When I advise start-ups on conversion rate optimisation the first thing I do is set them up with Google Search Console tool (previously Google Webmaster Tools). Unlike many free solutions Google Search Console provides webmasters with a comprehensive set of tools. It informs and improves a site’s performance from an SEO, user experience and conversion rate perspective.

What is the Search Console?

Google Search Console is a fantastic free site performance tool that seeks to give webmasters the information they need to effectively manage and improve their digital experience. Without this tool set up you will be largely in the dark about many aspects of your site’s performance. Many companies end up paying a lot of money to SEO agencies for tasks that they could manage themselves.

Once you have Google Search Console set up you will be in a much stronger position to set SEO targets to improve your SERP’s ranking. It will also help you identify many of the issues that might be holding your site back in Google search. It can also help you identify and fix your user experience problems.

How do I set up Google Search Console?

All you need to do is login into an appropriate Google account and go to webmasterstools/home and “Add a property” within the Search Console. Then follow the simple instructions to confirm your ownership of the site.

The easiest way of doing this is often inserting some code into the header of your site before the closing </head> tag. Alternatively, if you have Google Analytics on your site you can also use that to validate your ownership of the site. If you get into difficulties just contact your website builder or designer for assistance.

Initially you won’t have any search data to look at but you can check the console for any signs of errors or usability issues identified by Googlebots. These are the programs or spiders that Google uses to crawl your site to understand the type of content you have and index pages for Google search.

The Google Search Console Dashboard:

The dashboard of Google Search Console provides a useful overview of the health of your site. This includes site and DNS errors, server connectivity issues, URL errors, page not found (404s), and a graph of the total clicks over the latest 28 days. This is great, but you can get much more detail about your site by digging into the left-hand navigation menu.

Search Appearance:

This includes structured data which helps Google understand the mark-up of your pages. It can add rich snippets (or Schema.org) and other information to your search result. Rich snippets describes the structured data mark-up that webmasters add to HTML. This enables search engines to better understand what type of information is present on a web page. Rich snippets are the visible result of structured data that appears in SERPs.

You can add structured data to your site using a plugin for WordPress.org such as JSON-LD. You can also add structured data to your page using the Data Highlighter tool (see above). Which you can access in the Search appearance section of the navigation.

Rich cards provide data to Google about events, products, or opportunities on your site. Google has five types of rich cards; recipes, events, products, reviews and courses. Google Search Console provides sample mark-up for each type of card and a Structured Data Testing Tool to validate your mark-up.

The HTML Improvements tab informs you about any issues related to your page tags. Whether it is missing title tags, duplicate title tags and whether title tags are too long or short.

Accelerated Mobile Pages provides you with data on errors relating to your AMPs. It informs you how many AMPs have been indexed by Google. It also allows you to test AMPs and submit them to Google for indexing.

Search Traffic:

Under this section you can view Search Analytics which provides data on search results, including keywords, clicks, impressions, CTR and average position. This information is essential for understanding how successful you are with SEO and identifying key words where you have good authority. Use the data on your average ranking for keyword phrases to inform new content development. Build on areas where you have good authority and understand which words have the most potential from a volume perspective.

This section also shows how many external links there are to your site and who is linking to what content. This information is crucial in understanding how effective your link building strategy is and also what content other sites are most interested in. External links (called back links) are important to your SEO strategy because they are one of the few ways that Google can tell how well regarded your content is to other web users. It also helps direct more traffic to your site and explains why so much effort is put into link building.

About Google

Be careful about placing links to your site on random blogs. Google is looking for links from sites with a good authority and may potentially penalise you if it becomes aware of such activity. However, where you are getting lots of external links to your content from good authority sites. You should explore creating more content on this topic to capitalise on the interest shown. Some black hat SEO’s find this process so time consuming and difficult that they create private blog networks to control the whole process themselves.

Search Analytics also provides additional information on internal links, security issues, international targeting (useful for segmenting content by language) and mobile usability issues identified by Google. Mobile usability is especially important to monitor as Google continues to give more and more priority to mobile users.

Google Index:

Index status confirms the number of pages on your site that Google has indexed and so can be found via the search engine. Blocked resources tells you about pages where the Googlebot can’t access important elements on your page. Google may not be able to accurately index the page. Remove URL allows you to hide URLs from search engines as the page may contain out-of-date information or may just be obsolete for whatever reason.

Crawl:

The Crawl section of Google Search Console provides you with data on errors detected by Googlebots when crawling your site. Although page not founds (404 errors) may not harm your SEO ranking it can damage the customer experience. It is important to monitor crawl errors on a regular basis.

Generally I would advise initially deleting all the page not founds for both desktop and mobile. You can then check back in a few days to see which ones have been replicated since you removed them from the console. Many 404 errors don’t recur as they are not even correct URLs and so this way you can concentrate on those that matter.

This section also shows how many pages on average are crawled by the Googlebot. But don’t wait for the Googlebot to crawl your site if you have new or revised content to index. Use the Fetch as Google function below to test how Google crawls and renders a page on your site. This identifies whether Googlebot can access a page on your site and you can then submit the URL for indexing. This is especially useful for a rapidly changing site as you don’t want Google displaying old or out-of-date content.

Robot.txt Tester

The Robot.txt tester allows you to edit your robot.txt file and check for errors. Robot.txt files tell Google which parts of your site you don’t want to be crawled and indexed by a search engine. The Sitemap tab allows you to submit a new sitemap to Google which helps it to understand how your site is structured and assists in the indexing of individual pages by Google. It also tracks how many pages you have submitted for indexing and how many pages Google actually indexes.

The Security Issue tab shows if Google has detected any potential security problems with your site. If your site is hacked then Google provides a number of resources to help resolve the problem.

Finally, the Additional Resources tab includes 9 links to free resources such as Email Markup Tester, PageSpeed Insights, Google My Business and Custom Search. Check these out as a number of them can help improve your search engine marketing and grow your organic search traffic.

Conclusion:

When seeking to improve your SEO performance Google Search Console should be your first port of call. There is little point in spending money on an SEO agency until you have fully digested what the Search Console is telling you. Even if you decide you don’t have the time or expertise to resolve all the issues identified by this tool. Use Google Search Console to inform and prioritise objectives for your agency to follow. Furthermore, use Google Search Console to monitor your SEO performance over time. A successful strategy should be capable of improving key metrics over time.