So many businesses rely on Google to deliver customers and prospects to their websites. According to Business Insider, Google (excluding YouTube) accounts for 85.2% of all web searches. That’s a staggering number and it provides all the reason you need to target your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts to Google. Yet there is an important tool that is often overlooked that can help increase website traffic: Google Search Console. In the article below, I’d like to introduce you to some of the benefits Google Search Console can offer your website and business.
What is Google Search Console (formerly known as Webmaster Tools)?
Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results. It is not a replacement for Google Analytics, but an additional tool that provides a means to see if a website has errors or if your content is being indexed, or included, properly. If you do see problems, Google Search Console shares ways to fix them and then instructs how to resubmit the page or URLs once you have addressed the issue(s). You can also check if your website has security or malware issues, which can be extremely helpful to know in order to eliminate malicious activity.
The Google Search Console reports include dimensions that are specific to Google Web Search data and that can be used to improve the efficacy of a website, specifically: queries, impressions, clicks, average position, and click-through rate. Think of these as the moments that helped bring someone to your website. Or, in brick and mortar terms, the steps a person takes, such as looking in your storefront window, before opening the door and entering.
Depending upon how many visitors your website gets and what your role is in maintaining your website, there are different ways to look at Google Search Console. Trillion utilizes Google Search Console and learns valuable information to make our websites perform more favorably.
Below are a few things that your website administrator should be looking at:
Check that your pages are indexed and no errors are present
The Coverage and Mobile usability areas can render reports that will help you see if any problems are happening on your website.
For example, when I was looking through Trillion’s account as I prepared this blog post, I realized that one of our branding portfolio samples was not being indexed by Google. This means that the portfolio sample would never appear in search results. That’s bad since my team had spent time to photograph the work, write a description of the project and tag content appropriately. It was all wasted time until I made a new request (which takes two seconds) for Google to index and crawl the page. It’s as easy as asking to include a page in the list. Now I hope that a targeted group of people will find the page and that it will be relevant to them—potentially leading to a profitable opportunity for the company.
Check search traffic
Understand the queries and pages that are driving the most traffic to your website. You will be able to see the keywords or phrases that are pushing people to your website. Google Analytics shares some of this information and you may already be familiar with that, but Google Search Console makes the list easily accessible.
You can also see the pages of your website that have the most impressions in Google search results as well as the corresponding number of clicks on those search results. Knowing this could lead you to taking a look at the meta data you have associated with the individual web pages. The meta data is the behind-the-scenes text description that is displayed in search results.
Hide or omit pages from showing in search results
For websites you manage, you can block certain pages from showing up in search results, or omit pages that are showing in Google search results that you do not want to appear. For example, maybe you have an article that has information that is no longer relevant or accurate but it appears on a Google search for your company. In Google Search Console, you can submit and manage your requests for removal.
Now if that same article is something you published to an industry website other than yours, you will not have control of it and will have to ask the specific website owner to remove the content.
Google Search Console makes it easier to be included in search results
WordPress, like many content management systems, generates and updates sitemaps as you add content to your website. A sitemap is a file where information is provided about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them. It’s a good idea to submit those sitemaps, usually via a .xml file, to Google Search Console.
A sitemap tells Google which pages and files you think are important in your site, and also provides valuable information about these files. For example, for pages it will show when the pages were last updated, how often the pages are changed, and any alternate language versions there are of the pages.
Sitemaps are most beneficial to the following websites:
- Your website has more than 500 pages
- Your pages and content do not link cleanly to each other, especially directly from the homepage
- Your website is new or does not have many external websites linking back to it
- Your website has a lot of videos and images or other rich media content
At Trillion, we design and build websites for our clients and then keep improving their value over time.
If you are contemplating a new website, let’s talk. Give us a call at 908.219.4703 or complete the contact form and one of our partners will reply promptly to schedule a time to speak. We’d love to learn about your company and website, and to discuss how Trillion can help.
