Using Google Search Console to Improve Your Marketing

Google Search Console is an analytics tool that allows you to monitor website traffic, performance, and more. Essentially, Search Console provides a comprehensive overview of how well your website is performing in Google Search results.

This includes which keywords helped people discover your website, how often your site shows up in Google Search results, and how often people click through to a website when using particular search queries. You can also figure out which sites link back to your website.

You can use this information to optimize your website for Google Search results, which helps you increase website traffic. Improving your search engine rankings means your site appears closer to the top of search results, so people can easily find your website.

You can even use Google Search Console to notify Google about indexing problems or request that an updated page be re-indexed. This is an essential part of SEO for small business website owners.

Alerts are another important feature of Google Search Console. Depending on your settings, you can receive alerts when Google Search Console discovers an issue with your website.

As soon as you receive an alert from Google Search Console, you can check it out and update your website accordingly. Google can alert you when there's a problem with indexing, spam, and more.

If you need to troubleshoot a problem with your website, you can do that using Google Search Console as well. Google Search Console allows you to troubleshoot issues related to AMP, mobile usability, and more.

If you have a website, you should have a basic understanding of how search engines work and how to use Google Search Console to maximize your search engine rankings.

How Google Search Console works

Getting the most out of Google Search Console means understanding how this tool works and what you can do with it.

Reports are one of the most important parts of Google Search Console, giving you a detailed look at your website based on various metrics. You can use the information you gather from these reports to make changes to your website, which in turn helps you grow your audience.

Find out more about the different types of Google Search Console reports you can get below.

Performance

Performance reports give you an idea of how well your website has been performing in Google Search results.

For example, you can look at all the details about your search traffic, including where it's coming from, which queries show your site, and how that traffic changes over time.

You can also find out how many of your search queries are coming from mobile users, which you can use to optimize your website for mobile and drive more traffic. You can even see which pages people click on and which they avoid when your website shows up in Google Search results.

The Performance report is designed to give you a detailed look, so you can determine what changes to make, if any.

On-page SEO can improve search engine rankings in some cases, but you may simply need to re-index web pages you've updated or fix indexing problems with Google.

Performance reports are frequently used by SEO companies to help measure the performance of a website and identify any weak spots in SEO.

Index coverage

The Index Coverage report provides a detailed look at the indexing of your website, which includes which pages have been indexed as well as any reported indexing problems.

Indexing helps make your website easier to find in Google Search results, which helps you grow your audience. As is the case with most principles of SEO, indexing can be tricky to get right. You have to make sure web pages are indexed, but you don't want to index internal search engine results. You also need to make sure there are no indexing errors affecting your search engine rankings, plus you may need to re-index old web pages if you've recently updated on-page content.

The Index Coverage report will show you which URLs are indexed and which aren't, in addition to providing explanations for pages that weren't indexed.

Ideally, you want to see a slight increase in the number of indexed pages on your website over time. As your website grows and you continue adding more pages, those pages should be indexed. Drops or spikes in indexed pages could be a sign that you have an indexing problem.

Links

The Links report is a simple type of report that shows you which sites link to your site most, your most-linked pages, the target text that's used for links to your website, and more.

The goal of the Links report is to show you which blog posts or web pages people are most interested in while helping you prevent linking issues.

You can identify links that may come from spam sources and check your backlinks profile to make sure there are no issues. If you discover any issues with backlinks, you can address them before they affect your website further.

Backlinks are an essential part of website analytics and engagement, so you should try to create content that encourages backlinks from authoritative websites. You can use the Links report to figure out what content people are linking to, so you can create similar content in the future.

How to analyze the data from Google Search Console

When you pull your first report from Google Search Console, you might be a bit confused by what you're looking at.

Learning to read reports is a big part of the learning curve with Google Search Console, and the results you get from Search Console depend on your ability to analyze the data you pull from reports.

You can start by looking at your Performance report. You can use the section at the top of the report to sort your results by queries, pages, countries, devices, and search appearance.

This helps you break down each metric on a page-by-page or query-by-query basis, so you can determine which pages are getting the most traffic and which queries are leading to clicks.

Once you've selected one of these options, you'll see more options that allow you to sort your results.

For example, you can look at total clicks, total impressions, average click-through rate (CTR), and average position for each web page. You can even change the date range, so you can look at data from the past year or monitor site performance over the past month.

The Index Coverages report is pretty simple because there aren't a lot of advanced options. When you open the Index Coverage report, you'll see 4 options: Error, Valid with warnings, Valid, and Excluded. Select all of these options to look at how the number of indexed pages has changed over time.

Ideally, you should have more indexed pages as your site grows. You can use this report to make sure the number of indexed pages on your site is increasing steadily, plus you can look at any indexing errors to figure out why a page wasn't indexed. Check on all your index errors and fix as many as you can.

Checking out your backlinks is also a pretty straightforward process. All you have to do is click the Links report, then you'll be able to look at different types of data regarding links.

You can use this report to check which sites link to your site the most, which web pages have the most backlinks, which pages are most linked from a specific site, what target text points to your site, the top sites linking to your page, and more. You can even look at site-by-site reports to see which pages a site links to.

For most of these reports, you'll see an export button that looks like an arrow pointing downward at a line. If you click this button, you can export the data from a report to a CSV file or a Google Sheet.

Benefits of Google Search Console

There are plenty of website design tips that can help you make your site look better and rank higher in search engine results, but that's only part of the battle. If you want to rank highly in search engine results, you need to combine on-page SEO, SEO-focused content creation, and additional SEO efforts. Google Search Console helps you take care of all the little parts of SEO that don't involve your website content or the actual code behind your website.

The best part about Google Search Console is that it can help you improve your Google Search ranking. Ranking highly on search engine results pages (SERPs) is one of the best ways to drive organic traffic to your website, which helps increase lead generation and drive sales.

To put it simply, websites that rank highly in Google Search results tend to perform better across the board, which includes revenue.

Because Google Search Console is developed by Google, you can trust the accuracy of the reports you pull for your website. Google Search Console gives you an in-depth look at how your website is performing specifically for the Google Search engine, so you can troubleshoot any problems and improve your search engine ranking. Third-party SEO tools can also be helpful, but you can't beat getting the information straight from the source.

Whether you're an SEO expert, a website owner, or a business owner, you should be using Google Search Console for your business. The higher you rank on search engine results pages, the more money you can earn through your website.

How to get your website on Google Search Console

Now that you know about the benefits of Google Search Console, it's time to start pulling reports about your website so you can improve your SERP ranking.

First, you'll need to get your website set up with Google Search Console. Here's what you need to do before you can start using Google Search Console to pull reports and improve your website.

Verification

Verifying site ownership is the first step of getting your website on Google Search Console. There are a few different methods you can use to verify site ownership:

• HTML file upload
• HTML tag
• Google Analytics tracking code
• Google Tag Manager
• Google Sites, Blogger, or Domains account
• Domain name provider

You can also use multiple verification methods to verify that you own your website, which can be helpful if one verification method fails. This verification will last indefinitely until Google Search Console can no longer confirm your verification token.

Set target country

The next thing you need to do is set a target country, which is the country where most of your website traffic comes from. For most people, this will be the country they live in and operate their website from.

If your website draws a lot of traffic from a different country, you might want to set that as your target country. You can learn more about setting a target country in the intro to Google Search Console videos.

Link Google Analytics

Once you've got your website verified and your target country set, you can link your Google Analytics account to Google Search Console. To do this, sign into Google Analytics and click on Admin.

Next, find the property you want to link (your website) and select it, then click Property Settings. From here, you can scroll down to Search Console settings and link your Google Analytics account to Google Search Console.

If you're setting up multiple websites with Search Console, repeat the process with each property.

Setting permissions

Different users can be given different permissions with Google Search Console, so you can set up any permissions at this point.

A Full Owner can pretty much do anything when it comes to pulling reports and making changes in Google Search Console, while a Full User can view reports and take some actions. Restricted Users can simply view most of the data that's pulled in reports.

Run a security check

Once you've got your website connected to Google Search Console, take a moment to run a security check to make sure there are no security issues with your website.

If you have any security issues, you'll see an alert at the top of Google Search Console. If you see this alert, click it to identify and fix security issues with your website.

Add a site map

You don't have to add a sitemap to use Google Search Console, but it can help your site get discovered and indexed quicker.

Site maps are easy to create, and you can find basic tutorials on YouTube or simply use a template or widget from a website builder.

Build a website with analytics tools

From data tracking to analyzing data and figuring out what steps to take next, analytics can be overwhelming. The good news is that Google Search Console makes it easier to analyze your website with reports about crucial performance data and more. You can even use Google Search Console to find and fix security issues and indexing errors.

Do you need help building a website and getting started with Google Search Console? Mailchimp makes it easy to build your own website with our website builder. Plus, our marketing and analytics tools help you master your marketing plan, which includes improving your SERP ranking and driving more traffic to your website.