No matter how well-designed or appealing your website is, it’s all for nothing if your audience cannot find it. This concept is especially true for eCommerce or online stores. One way to make sure your target audience can find your website is through search engine optimization (SEO).
There are a plethora of SEO and website-optimization tools available to businesses today. Among these tools, Google Search Console is one of the most effective and popular. In contrast to many other SEO tools, it’s free. It also gives a wide range of valuable and beneficial information for firms with a website.
Keep reading if you’re looking to leverage Google Search Console to improve your SEO. We’ve compiled a list of helpful tips to help you get the most out of the Search Console.
What Is Google Search Console?
Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool offered by Google. With the help of GSC, you can keep track of, manage, and optimize your site’s position in search engine results and organic traffic metrics. You don’t need to register for Google Search Console to appear in Google search results, but you may use it to learn more about how Google views your site and make improvements.
About 15 years ago, Google introduced Search Console under “Webmaster Tools.” In recent years, it’s gone by a different name, and its functions have evolved, but its primary goal hasn’t changed.
Quick Navigation
- Find Ranking Opportunities
- Improve Your CTR
- Identify Backlinks
- Identify Opportunities to Improve HTML
- The Bottom Line
- Frequently Asked Questions
What Can Using Google Search Console Do?
Google Search Console is a goldmine of data for all sorts of websites, but it’s particularly handy for those that represent companies and brands. It can assist you in determining which keywords people use to reach your website and analyze key metrics such as impressions, average position in Google search, and click-through rate (CTR). To get a comprehensive picture of how your website is performing, you should use Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
If you run into any technical glitches, you can use GSC to fix them and make sure your pages are correctly indexed and available to searchers. GSC can even tell you via email if it discovers problems with your site, and you can alert Google after the issues have been resolved.
Although the features mentioned above are simple, they are all essential if you want to keep your website in good working order and continue to grow your brand or company through it.
Find Ranking Opportunities
While exploring new content ideas for your website is an excellent strategy, keep an eye out for new ways to rank your older content. Many of your web pages may appear on Google’s second or third results page for various keywords. These are the search terms or phrases you can focus on improving your search engine rankings and instantly increasing your traffic.
With GSC, you can monitor how your content ranks for specific keywords. To make the most out of your search engine optimization efforts, it’s a good idea to look for search terms or phrases that you’re already performing well for and start concentrating your attention.
By navigating to Search Analytics on GSC and selecting Pages and Positions, you can quickly identify these underperforming keywords. By doing so, you’ll obtain a list of pages depending on their average position on the search engine results page. Because the top six results receive the most clicks, you should concentrate on the ones slightly below this threshold.
It’s still possible to quickly improve ranks between 7 and 15, which is why it’s essential to keep an eye on them. There are a lot of simple adjustments that can help these pages rise in the ranks. For instance, keep in mind what users search for when creating content. However, there are times where adding more content, link building, and images may be all that is necessary to improve your SEO.
Improve Your CTR
One of the most crucial things in digital marketing is paying close attention to your CTR. Your website may be relevant to many search queries (high impression share). Still, if you’ve discovered that your page isn’t generating enough clicks to support that quantity, you should work on improving your SERP appearance and CTR.
If you want to improve your CTR, here are some suggestions.
Title Optimization
Your titles need to be attention-grabbing. There should be more emphasis on the beginning of a title than on the middle or end. With this strategy, visitors will be able to tell right away whether or not your material is relevant to them and will be more likely to click through.
Additionally, mobile devices account for about half of all internet traffic, making this a critical strategy. In light of their smaller screens, the title may not appear entirely, underlining the relevance of this strategy for presenting your viewers with the most critical information first.
Here are other considerations when optimizing your page title, based on the findings by Backlinko:
● Titles containing questions have a click-through rate that is 14.1% higher: Using a rhetorical question to pique your audience’s attention is a great way to get them intrigued about your content and encourage them to read on.
● Titles between 15 to 40 characters long are 8.6% more likely to be clicked: Post titles with too few characters may appear more prominently in search results, but this doesn’t do your CTR any favors. Users may not want to click on the link because there are not enough details in the title. Remember that despite your description being there, most people only consider the title when deciding whether to click on it. On the other hand, a lengthy title is also not ideal since Google will truncate it.
● CTR may drop by 14% if you use Power Words: Power words include terms like “best,” “ultimate,” “secret,” and “amazing.” An example would be “Secrets To Finding the Ultimate Real Estate Broker in Lancaster, PA” In reality, telling visitors that anything is “secret” only makes them assume you’re trying to con them. You’ll be offering them a “secret” that isn’t much of a secret. In addition to this, spammy and malicious ads tend to use these words in their titles, which is why most opt to avoid them.
Add Meta Descriptions
A meta description is a 155-character snippet that appears beneath the title of a search result. They summarize what the webpage is about, add context, and assist searchers in deciding which one to visit.
Meta descriptions are duplicated on 30% of websites, while 25% have none at all. Condensing the content of your pages and providing the most pertinent overview in meta descriptions can enhance your CTR. Research shows that meta descriptions increase click-through rates by 5.8%.
Improve Your URLs
There is a surprising amount of attention paid by users to the URLs that appear beneath the titles of search results. Use keywords in your URLs instead of long sequences of numbers to improve your CTR.
These few easy tricks will help you improve a piece of content’s searchability and clickability.
Identify Backlinks
As part of a link-building strategy, backlink research is becoming increasingly vital. Even Google takes this into account when determining how relevant your site is.
The more backlinks pointing to your website, the more people will see what you have to say. Your material will benefit from more visibility. However, the only links that count are those that come from reputable, authoritative websites; links from low-quality, unreliable sources might even damage your online reputation.
It’s possible to see which other websites have linked to yours in the “Top linking sites” section of GSC. The “More” option at the bottom allows you to view the entirety of the report. When you expand the report by clicking on a domain name, you’ll find all the pages to which it’s linking.
It’s also possible to examine which pages have backlinks from different websites by filtering your report on Linking sites in descending order. Analyzing the findings, you can see what types of content, whether research articles, how-to tutorials, or infographics, are the most effective in attracting backlinks from relevant websites.
With this information, you’ll be able to narrow down the types of content you’ll utilize for link-building objectives, and improve your internal links structure. Also, look for patterns in the subjects that generate the most backlinks.
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Identify Opportunities to Improve HTML
To rank well in Google, you need more than just high-quality, relevant content. Your website’s technical performance has a significant impact on both Google and your customers’ perceptions of your business as well. Search engine users expect dynamic, fast-loading sites and a good user experience. This is what Google’s crawlers are looking for.
However, debugging technical issues on your website might be a bit frightening, particularly if you lack a substantial understanding of your website’s backend. Fortunately, thanks to GSC, site owners may now discover and fix any page performance or technical issues that could negatively affect their keyword ranks and positions. GSC allows you to diagnose the possible problems on your site with Page Experience and Coverage reports.
Website Optimization for Desktop
Activating the Google Search Console on a website allows it to start gathering data, which is then separated and analyzed, creating numerous reports that can be very helpful in determining whether or not the website is functioning correctly, what the problems are and how to address them.
Mobile-Friendliness
Site responsiveness, page loading speed, and mobile-friendliness are factors that Google considers while crawling websites. Users of Google Search Console can see which pages in their sites need to be optimized for mobile viewing. GSC can be used to identify and optimize pages that are not responsive on mobile devices.
Speed of Site
Google has always emphasized and campaigned site speed as a critical aspect of the user experience. With this in mind, GSC provides a Speed report to help site owners, wherein URLs are categorized based on their speed and any issues affecting performance. You can use this tool to delve deeper into a particular problem and see instances of slow web pages to aid you in prioritizing performance improvements. This feature allows you to monitor your website’s performance and keep track of any changes you’ve made. You can utilize the report to see if your website’s performance improves after the update whenever you fix a problem.
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are new ranking elements tied to a great browsing experience for users, and they primarily involve specific website optimization metrics. They have a significant impact on search engine optimization and user satisfaction.
An entire portion of the GSC dashboard is devoted to Core Web Vitals. The report is focused on three metrics:
● First Input Delay (FID): This measures the amount of time between the user’s first action and the browser’s response.
● Largest Contentful Pain (LCP): This involves the page’s content loading time, which should be as quick as possible.
● Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This measures any layout changes that occur abruptly and affect visual stability.
The Bottom Line
Google Search Console is a valuable tool for staying on top of your SEO strategy, improving them, and coming up with new content ideas. In this article, we’ve shown you how to improve Google search ranking using GSC. Some of the things you can do include finding ranking opportunities, improving your CTR, identifying backlinks, and determining opportunities to improve HTML.
Don’t allow your marketing to suffer any longer. Using Search Console to optimize your digital marketing techniques and strategy can help you generate more leads and conversions. Learn more about how you can leverage Google Search Console to grow business SEO by scheduling a discovery call with Improve & Grow today. In addition, visit our website today to have a professional website audit done for free.
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