Using Search Console to Achieve Better Marketing Results

The Google search engine tools are critical to your success. Optimize your content with Search Analytics. See what brings people to your site and generate new keyword ideas from Google Ads. Discover where they are coming from and how they found you.

Google Search Console Features

Google Search Console is a powerful tool from which every website benefits. If you are unfamiliar with its workings or how to set it up, SEO Design Chicago can help you get everything activated for you properly. 

Some of the top Google Search Console features are:

• Make sure that Google can find, crawl, and index your website

• Have Google crawl pages and reindex if necessary

• Fix problems with crawling and indexing

• Identify websites that link to your site

• Review security concerns

• Investigate Core Web Vitals to get your website loading faster than your competition

• Troubleshoot mobility problems

• Review traffic trends from up to the last 16 months after installation

• View quantity of Google SERP impressions

• Find out which searches include your website

Get Started with Google Search Console

Google Search Console is an invaluable tool for anyone with a website. It provides insights into how your site is performing on Google Search and offers guidance on improving your visibility to attract more relevant traffic. Here’s a guide to help you get started with Search Console and make the most of its features.

Where Do I Start?

Use the webmaster tools available in your Google Search Console to monitor the performance of your website every day. SEO Design Chicago will help you understand the usefulness of GSC and webmaster tools for the success of your website.

Understanding Google Search Console

Search Console gives you detailed information on how Google crawls, indexes, and serves your website. This helps you monitor and optimize your site’s search performance. You don’t need to check Search Console daily, as you’ll receive email alerts if Google finds new issues on your site. However, it’s a good practice to check your account monthly or after making significant changes to your content.

Steps to Get Started

1. Verify Site Ownership: The first step is to verify that you own the site. This grants you access to all the information available in Search Console. Learn more about verifying your site ownership here.
2. Ensure Google Can Find and Read Your Pages: The Index Coverage report provides an overview of all the pages Google has indexed or tried to index on your site. Review this report to identify and fix page errors and warnings.
3. Submit a Sitemap: While Google can discover your site’s pages without a sitemap, submitting one via Search Console can expedite the process. Monitoring your sitemap through the tool provides additional insights. Learn more about the Sitemaps report here.
4. Monitor Your Site’s Performance: The Search Performance report shows how much traffic you’re getting from Google Search, with breakdowns by queries, pages, and countries. Analyze trends in impressions, clicks, and other metrics. If your traffic is declining, debugging the drop can help you prioritize your efforts.
5. Link GSC to the Paid and Organic ReportWhen you link Google Search Console to Google Ads, you can enable the paid and organic report. The paid and organic report shows how often pages from your website are showing up in organic search results and which search terms triggered the results to display on the SERP.

In-Depth Learning

For a deeper understanding of Search Console, focus on the reports most relevant to your role. Here are some useful reports for SEO specialists, digital marketers, site administrators, and web developers.

Reports for SEO Specialists, Digital Marketers, and Site Administrators

• Manual Actions Report: Check if your site has any manual actions issued against it, which could affect its visibility on Google Search. The report details the issues, their locations, and how to resolve them.
• Removals Tool: Temporarily remove content from Google Search results. Requests are effective for about six months, giving you time to address the content permanently.
• Change of Address Tool: If you’re migrating your site to a new domain or subdomain, use this tool to inform Google and help transfer your search results to the new site.
• Rich Result Status Reports: Review your structured data implementation. The report highlights errors, warnings, and information on how to fix issues to improve your site’s appearance in rich results.

Reports for Web Developers

• Index Coverage Report: Understand site-wide indexing issues, including errors, warnings, and excluded pages. The report also shows the number of impressions your pages have received on Google Search.
• URL Inspection Tool: Debug page-level indexing issues. This tool provides the current index status of your pages, allows you to test live URLs, request re-crawling, and view detailed page information.
• Security Issues Report: Identify and address threats affecting your site, such as hacks or misuse that could harm visitors or their devices.
• Core Web Vitals Report: Ensure your site provides a great page experience. This report shows how your pages perform based on real-world usage data, known as field data.

By leveraging these reports, you can enhance your website’s health, findability, and optimization for Google Search. Explore Search Console today to start improving your site’s performance and visibility.

Integration of Google Search Console

Adding Google Search Console to WordPress or other CMS Platforms

Linking Google Search Console to a WordPress site used to be an automated feature that you could do through Yoast.  As of late 2019, that functionality has disappeared. Now you must link GSC to Google Analytics, which sometimes requires hosting access.

Adding Google Search Console to WordPress is not a difficult task, but if you need advanced support, we are here to help. We are available for hourly consulting on Squarespace, Shopify, WordPress, and Joomla issues regarding GSC integration.

Linking Google Search Console With Other Google Products

Why Should You Link your Google Ads Account to GSC?

Google Ads and Google Search Console are two great tools. They become super valuable to a webmaster or marketer when you link them. Linking your Google Ads account to Google Search Console lets you see if customers are reaching your website by organic traffic or paid ads. Google explains Google Search Console and how it works, and they go into detail about paid and organic reports and how it works.

Why Should You Link Your Client’s Google Ads Account to GSC?

Many marketers also ask what value is in linking the Google Ads account to Search Console. We always recommend doing this as more data is better for all clients. If your organic content is not at the top, the next best way is through ads at the top of the page.

Most Important Reasons to use Google Search Console

There are a good number of tasks you can perform with GSC. Here are the top ten: 

1. Determine your most popular pages.
   Google Search Console will tell you which of your pages bring the most visitors to your site.
2. Identify security issues on your website.
   You read in the news reasonably consistently about different companies being hacked and having their data breached. Sometimes they are large companies; sometimes they are small ones. Make sure that your website is as secure as possible at all times.
3. Make sure that your schema markup is functioning correctly.
   If you are using schema markup or other structured data on your site, Google Search Console ensures that it functions properly with the Search Engine Results Pages.
4. Enter a sitemap.
   Once you submit a sitemap to Google, it will make it much easier for the bots to crawl and organize all of the pages on your website.
5. Find out which keywords searchers are using to find your website.
   This helps with your SEO strategy if you do not see the expected results or want to transfer some of those successes to other pages.
6. Check where your visitors are finding you.
   Businesses that require having users from different world areas will benefit from knowing whether their site is attracting users from the right countries.
7. Find out what kind of devices your visitors are using.
   At this point, everyone should have a mobile site. Even if you are confident that your site looks great, it is good to know that mobile users will visit your website.
8. Verify that your site is mobile-friendly.
   It’s more than just looking good. You should make sure that there are no errors on the mobile version of your site. There can be issues that arise on the mobile version of your site that are not immediately visible. GSC can identify them and alert you. 
9. Figure out which websites link back to you.
   Even if you are new to SEO, you must know by now the importance of backlinking. This feature helps you determine where your backlinks come from.
10. Check to see if you have any broken links.
    Broken links provide a poor user experience for any of your visitors. By finding and fixing any bad links, especially 404s, your users will have a much better experience.

Google Search Console is a powerful free tool with many great features. SEO Design Chicago has a great deal of experience working with it. We can help your business understand your user traffic better, and we can help you take advantage of all of these great free features made available.

Reach out today to SEO Design Chicago to see how we can help you with Google Search Console!