Introduction:
In the constantly evolving world of organic SEO, with Google improving its algorithm every week, its so important to stay ahead of the curve is essential for maintaining your businesses competitive edge. Google Search Console or GSC for short, is an indispensable tool, its free too, and can help you optimise your website’s performance, improve your companies organic SEO, and uncover opportunities for growth.
In this comprehensive guide, we will explore 10 easy ways to make the most of Google Search Console, as well as delve into related topics and provide an extensive FAQ section. By the end of this blog post, you will have a better understanding of how GSC can help your business, to use this powerful tool to your advantage.
10 bullet points summary:
Discover which keywords you should be optimising your company website for using Google Search Console
Improve your website’s Core Web Vitals, which is so important if you want your company website on page 1 of Google
Ensure your sitemap is correct and submitted using Google Search Console
Monitor and optimize indexed pages, are there any pages which cant get indexed?
Identify and fix any crawl errors
Monitor backlinks and improve link building strategy, are there any low quality backlinks, then your seo agency should fix this straight away
Optimise click-through rates (CTR) with effective title tags and meta descriptions
Analyse mobile usability to enhance user experience
Leverage structured data for rich results
keywords
Google Search Console (GSC) provides invaluable data on the keywords which could bring more customers to your website, so you may have a website which ranks number 1 for say for a keyword, yet GSC can help you find other keywords, you may want to improve your seo for also.
By identifying search terms with high impressions, , you can optimise your content marketing and meta titles, descriptions to capitalise on these opportunities.
In 2019, Ahrefs found that the top three search results for a keyword generate 75% of all clicks, so if your business is on page 1 of Google, sometimes this is not enough, your business needs to be in the top 3 results. so optimising for these high-potential terms can significantly boost your organic traffic and we can help your business to obtain more sales.
Improve your website’s Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals
Introduced by Google back in 2020, are a set of performance metrics that measure user experience on your website which some seo agencies simply call “UX” . These include Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which sounds more complicated than it is, First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), all of these should be improved by your marketing company.
Improving these metrics not only provides a better user experience (UX) but can also improve your website’s ranking in organic search results.
Google Search Console offers a dedicated report to help you identify and address issues affecting your Core Web Vitals.
Ensure your sitemap is correct and you update your site map on a regular basis, for example you may have added 100 blog posts, so if these are not added to the sitemap, it makes them harder to get indexed by Google, Bing and Duck Duck Go. A sitemap is an XML file that lists all the URLs on your website, making it much easier for search engines, Googlebot to crawl and index your content marketing and its a piece of cake to add your company sitemap to GSC, so make sure you do this, so all pages, blog posts, evergreen content marketing can get indexed.
Google Search Console allows you to submit your sitemap, and you could do enabling faster indexing, for example, if you were wating for Googlebot to find your company website, via backlinks, well, sometimes you might be left waiting weeks, so to help Googlebot find your company website faster, why not add a sitemap to GSC?
According to a 2021 study by SEO Tribunal, websites with a sitemap indexed by Google have a 23% better chance of ranking on the first page of search results on Google or Bing.
Monitor and optimise indexed Pages
The ‘Index’ area of Google Search Console (GSC) provides a list of all the pages / blog posts on your website that have been indexed, by Googlebot, alongside those that have not, so if a main page / blog post hasnt been indexed, because a “no-index” tab has been switched on, on that page, this needs to be fixed, if you want that page to appear in Google’s results.
Monitor Backlinks
Backlinks are an essential factor in Google’s ranking algorithm in matter of fact some seo agencies think they are the most important ranking factor, out of over 200 so its important your marketing agency builds quality links.
Google Search Console provides a comprehensive report on the external links pointing to your website.
By monitoring your backlinks, you can identify and disavow toxic links, and your marketing agency should disavow these, as well as uncover opportunities for new, high-quality backlinks. According to a 2020 study by Moz, websites with more quality backlinks from unique domains have a higher likelihood of ranking in the top search results.
