A Brief Overview Of Google SEO And How To Use Its Search Console

Whether you’re a business that carries out its own marketing and SEO optimisation in-house or an agency delivering SEO services to multiple clients, you’ll no doubt have a host of useful tools online to help you in your quest to raise your target website up the search engine rankings. But since Google is the prime search engine and is now used for 92% of all internet searches worldwide, Google SEO tips and guidance are amongst the most valuable resources around when it comes to working out how best to optimise your website to appear as high as you possibly can in the search engine results.

Why Use Google Search Console?

From absolute beginners at SEO to global, award-winning SEO agencies, there’s simply no reason not to use the Google Search Console SEO audit tool for insights on how your webpages are performing for you. For one thing, it’s entirely free of charge and puts massive power at your fingertips in terms of analysing how your website is performing.

If you haven’t yet exploited this powerful tool to its full capacity, you may wonder what all the fuss is about. Here, we outline a number of its key features and explain why UK SEO companies and individual site owners alike all find they love it once they get to know it.

Firstly, you may already use Google Analytics to find out more information about your traffic and conversion figures. But did you know that linking Analytics with the recently improved Google Search Console SEO audit tools will give you far more insight into where your visitors are coming from and why? For instance, the Landing Pages report on the Search Console shows you which pages on your website are receiving what traffic. By linking to Analytics, you can mine down into that data to see exactly what search query was entered by each user to cause them to alight on a specific page within your website.

So if you’ve recently made improvements to a page, then this report can tell you, for instance, whether those changes have had the desired effect. If not, you’ll have a better idea about what’s not working, so you can optimize that. Equally, you can find out over time why specific pages aren’t as popular as you’d like them to be and what search metrics are causing that.

Other reports include Countries, Devices and Queries, which UK SEO companies and individual site owners can use to establish the same factors, only broken down by country, search query and the type of device people are searching on. Again, insights like this can guide you to the right way to adjust content and settings if you aren’t getting as much attention as you’d like for certain pages.

Another great feature is the Performance Report. Unlike the old search console, which has now been retired, the Performance Report in the new version will now give you up to 16 months’ worth of data. It shows SEO companies and others using it the overall performance of their sites in Google. However, it doesn’t just display the number of clicks you’re getting. You also learn how many of these actually then result in each page being viewed by a user (the click-through rate ratio, or CTR).

This means you can identify pages users are less likely to engage with – that is, they have a low CTR. There are then various ways you can ‘fix’ them and ultimately see a Google website ranking enhancement. These might include optimising page titles and descriptions, for instance. Alternatively, perhaps you need to tweak your Call to Action to be more compelling. You can then use the Performance Report to check on the results after a few weeks and compare the page’s previous performance with its current performance, to check the changes you’ve made are working.

Some Other Key Features In Google Search Console

That’s just a brief overview of general principles. Looking more specifically at a few of the more technical aspects of Google Search Console to boost your Google website ranking, here is a review of some of the most important areas to focus on:

1. Index Coverage: Under this tab, you can find out how many of your pages have been indexed by Google and how many haven’t. The report will also give you a list of the errors and warnings that may be preventing Google from indexing certain pages. Clearly, if Google can’t assess your pages for quality, it’s far less likely users will find them in the search engine results. Likely problems include page redirects that aren’t working properly, broken code and so on. Google will notify you of any new errors so you can address them immediately, but it’s also worth checking this tab on a regular basis. Fix the error and mark it on the tab, then Google will be able to test and hopefully index the page from thereon in.
2. Site Speed: On the Enhancements tab, you’ll find one of the more recent additions to this Google Search Console top Google SEO tool, a speed report. This gives you a reasonable assessment of how quickly your pages load on both desktop and mobile devices. It’s an important measure, because Google knows its users want results fast or they’ll move away to other sites. The report will tell you which pages have problems that are preventing them from loading quickly so you and your SEO agency can address these.
3. Mobile Usability: This one’s important because overwhelmingly, your target audience is searching for your site on a mobile device. You don’t want any barriers to them being able to find you, so this vital report will help you identify any issues that might be preventing that. This Google Search Console top SEO tool will show a list of pages that are either valid (accessible on a mobile device) or have one or more errors (not mobile-friendly). You can then correct the errors, ask Google to validate your pages and you’ll receive updates that either all is well or there’s more work than needs to be done.
4. Backlinks: One of the top ranking factors Google uses to determine the position of your webpages in its search engine results is the quality of your backlinks. The more links you have pointing back to your website from authoritative sites, the better Google will view you and the better you’ll rank against your competitors. But not all backlinks are good; quality being better than quantity, so you’ll want to check your backlink profile and address any problems. This is another thing made possible by Google Search Console. The backlinks report will tell you who is linking to your website so you can check their validity and request that any unnatural or spammy links are removed. As a final resort, you can use Google’s own Disavow tool to break the link.

This is just a brief summary of some of the areas where Google Search Console can illuminate your webpages’ performance and offer you the opportunity to make changes that could ultimately result in a massive Google website ranking improvement. It can get highly technical, though, and a reliable provider of SEO services will usually use findings from Google Search Console in conjunction with other sophisticated tools for best results.

If you’re unsure of where to start but want to see massive improvements in your search engine rankings, why not contact the team at Position1SEO? We will carry out a full audit of your website using the best SEO analytics in Google Search Console and other top SEO tools to determine what’s working well and what’s proving less effective in terms of your search engine results. We’ll then tailor a meaningful, pragmatic and targeted SEO strategy to suit your budget and your website’s needs. Call us on 0141 846 0114 or contact us via our website, https://position1seo.co.uk/, to get the ball rolling.