There is a plethora of paid tools and software that can help with your SEO strategy, each with its merits.
However, there is a free tool that is often overlooked or not given the credit it deserves.
That tool is Google Search Console, which offers several excellent features to enhance your SEO efforts by providing insight into how Google views your website.
Google Search Console isn’t just one tool but a collection of tools that provide information related to search traffic, crawling data, and search engine appearance. You may have heard of it under its previous names, Google Webmaster Central or Google Webmaster Tools.
To start using Google Search Console, you’ll need to complete a few steps, such as opening a Google account if you don’t already have one and verifying your website. Verification can be done in several ways, including using SEO plugins like RankMath.
You’ll also need to configure settings, such as whether your website should display with or without “www,” how often Google should crawl your site, and adding additional users if others work on your website.
Once set up, you can begin using Google Search Console’s reporting features and leverage the insights to adjust your SEO strategy accordingly.
Here are some of those features:
Search Analytics
This feature shows the keywords Google ranks your website for and how highly it ranks for those keywords. It provides vital information about which keywords are performing well and which ones need further optimisation to climb higher in search engine results.
Many website owners are often surprised when they discover how Google views their keywords. Some assume they have optimised for specific keywords, only to find out otherwise. This data allows you to make informed changes to pages, content, and linking strategies to improve SEO performance.
The metrics displayed are:
- Total Clicks: How often users clicked your website from Google’s search results.
- Total Impressions: How often your website appeared in the search results, even if it wasn’t scrolled into view.
- Average Click-Through Rate: Your total clicks divided by the total impressions. This will give you an idea if your website looks appealing to potential visitors from the search results.
- Average Position: Shows your site’s average ranking for a given keyword. A lower position indicates that your site might need significant improvements.
Crawling Speeds
The speed at which your website loads is a critical ranking factor for Google. Slow loading times can result in lower rankings, while faster speeds can improve them. Google Search Console’s crawling stats provide data on how quickly Google’s crawlers can download pages, measured in milliseconds.
This data allows you to monitor your website’s performance over time and identify issues affecting speed, such as large image files or resource-heavy plugins. Addressing these issues can help improve your rankings.
Fetch as Google
Google doesn’t crawl every website daily or even monthly. High-traffic news sites may get crawled hourly, but smaller local businesses might only be crawled every couple of months.
If you’ve made updates to your website, you don’t have to wait for the next scheduled crawl to see the impact. Google Search Console allows you to request a crawl on demand. While there’s a monthly limit to how often you can use this feature, it’s invaluable for getting new content and SEO changes noticed more quickly.
URL Inspection Tool
Check how Google sees your individual links using the URL Inspection Tool. It will let you know your page’s indexing status and, if it’s not indexed, it will let you know why.
It also displays the page’s mobile usability status, AMP status, and structured data information. This can help you improve your ranking in mobile search results and enhance your page’s rich snippets.
Page Indexing Report
This is a comprehensive overview of how well your site is covered in the Google Index. It’s very useful in identifying issues that affect your site’s visibility in search engines.
You might need to resolve crawling issues or improve the quality of the content in the pages labeled Crawled – Currently Not Indexed and Discovered – Currently Not Indexed. You’ll also want to double check if the Excluded pages aren’t accidentally given a noindex tag or being blocked by the robots.txt file.
Monitor your Page Indexing Report regularly to see how the changes you’ve made to your site are affecting your indexing.
Sitemap Reports
An XML sitemap file lists all your site’s pages, making it easier for Googlebots to navigate and index your site and rank your pages correctly. This leads to more site traffic since you’ll have improved visibility in the search results.
You can submit your sitemaps using this tool. It will also display your submitted sitemaps and their dates of submission, Google’s last read date, and any issues that occurred during processing.
Every time you update your site, it’s essential to update your sitemaps. This tool will let you know if Google has acknowledged these changes.
Page Experience Report and Core Web Vitals
User experience is one of the greatest factors that can affect how your website ranks. The Page Experience Report will help you evaluate your site’s mobile-friendliness, safe browsing status, HTTPS security, and the absence of intrusive interstitials and dialogs.
The Core Web Vitals, on the other hand, displays metrics in key areas of user experience.
- Largest Content Paint (LCP): Measures the loading performance of the meaningful content on a page.
- First Input Delay (FID): Measures a page’s responsiveness or the time it takes before the user can interact with a page.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures a page’s visual stability or how much the layout moves when loading.
Here’s an example on how you can use these metrics to provide a better user experience. A poor LCP score might mean that you need to improve your loading times by optimising your images. On the other hand, if your FID is more than 100ms, you might need to minify or compress your code.
Remember, Google highly values user experience and considers it a crucial part of web design. They’ve even incorporated UX metrics into their core ranking algorithm, so ensure that you’re providing a positive user experience by utilising the Page Experience Report and Core Web Vitals.
