Google’s Search Console is a free SEO tool that helps you understand how Google crawls, indexes and analyses your site. It will tell you how your search traffic is doing, which keywords you’re ranking for, how many impressions you’re getting on your pages and where you have errors on your site.
To use Google’s Search Console you will need to verify ownership of your site. You can do this in one of the following ways:
- Adding a HTML tag to the of your site
- Signing in to the domain name provider
- Using Google Analytics
- Using the Google Tag Manager account
- Uploading a HTML file
We’d recommend linking your Google Analytics account to your Google Search Console. While Google Analytics can offer insight into who is visiting your site, Google’s Search Console can provide you with internal information such as who is linking to your site, if there are errors on your site and which keyword queries your site is appearing for in search results.
Here are a few ways in which you can grow your organic traffic using Google’s Search Console…
HTML improvements
The HTML improvements section helps you detect errors in your meta descriptions and titles as well as alerting you to any non-indexable content on your page. It also highlights any duplicate content on your pages, which could be negatively affecting your search ranking. Once you’ve identified these errors, you can correct them to improve your SEO.
Identify internal links
Internal and external links can help to improve your search ranking. The link report in Google’s Search Console can tell you who is linking to your pages, anchor text and the most linked to pages.
Crawl for errors
Having errors on your pages could be affecting how much traffic you’re getting from Google and your Page Rank. Google’s Search Console can help you identify any errors the Google has found while indexing your pages.
Mobile usability
In 2015, Google announced mobile friendly designs as a ranking signal. Optimising for mobile became even more important earlier this year when Google announced that its new mobile index will become its primary index, making it even more important for websites to offer a quality mobile experience if they want to achieve a high search ranking.
Use the Mobile Friendly test to check if your page has a mobile friendly design and make any necessary changes to optimise for mobile and improve your search ranking.
Add a sitemap
Adding a sitemap is a useful way of alerting Google about any new or updated content on your site that has not yet been indexed. The map is a file that contains a list of web pages on your site; Google reads this file to learn about the content that your site contains and therefore may improve your search ranking.
Google’s Search Console can provide you with valuable internal insight about your site and the traffic you’re getting. It can help you identify where you need to improve your SEO to attract more organic traffic.
If you don’t already have a Google Search Console account, create one today to gain valuable insight into your organic traffic.