How to Improve SEO with Google Search Console

Business owners, marketers, and SEO professionals may utilise Google Search Console to improve their site’s digital visibility and organic traffic.

However, despite its rising popularity, the Google Search Console interface isn’t exactly the most sophisticated or user-friendly. As a result, the number of searches for “how to utilise google search console” has risen over time.

Knowing how to utilise Google Search Console correctly is essential for turning all of that rich data into actionable SEO insights.

We’ll go through four methods to leverage this free platform to improve your rankings, increase traffic, and create high-quality content in this post. You’ll discover how to:

1. Confirm that Google understands the relevance of your content.
2. Check that Google is properly crawling and indexing your web pages.
3. Troubleshoot technical and page performance issues.
4. Run SEO A/B tests with the help of GSC’s daily rank tracking.

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a free tool that allows marketers and SEO experts to monitor and evaluate their SEO results. In order to make their website more search engine friendly, users may also discover and fix technical and page performance concerns.

The platform is not only entirely free to use, but it also has the most extensive and up-to-date SEO dataset accessible anywhere.

How to use Google Search Console (overview)

Google’s Search Console technology has been improved over time to provide comprehensive search engine performance statistics while also improving dashboard capabilities.

Although new features have been introduced and adjusted over time, the platform’s objective has remained the same: to provide direct advise to business owners, marketers, and SEO professionals on how to improve their SEO performance—from both a content and technical viewpoint.

Here’s how to utilise Google Search Console for SEO at a high level:

• Track keyword rankings, impressions, organic traffic, average position, and click-through rate (CTR).
• Understand index coverage and confirm that Google crawlers are properly indexing web pages.
• Submit sitemaps, disavow files, and removals.
• Identify and troubleshoot page experience, Core Web Vitals, or mobile usability issues.
• Confirm Google sees schema.org markup so web pages can appear in rich results.
• See security issues or manual actions Google has identified.
• Analyze essential backlink data like total external links, internal links, top linked pages, top linking sites, and anchor text distribution
   

These activities are all necessary for not only understanding but also enhancing your SEO performance. And excellent SEO is critical for a variety of marketing goals and objectives, including increasing traffic and conversions, building your reputation, better understanding your customers, and expanding your online footprint. For these and other reasons, utilising the platform on a daily basis should be an important element of any complete digital marketing plan.

Google Search Console vs. other keyword tracking platforms

Popular SEO systems like Ahrefs and SEMrush are used by many digital marketers to obtain crucial data about their keyword rankings. These tools are useful for comparing your performance to that of rivals, but because they scrape the SERPs for keyword ranking data, the data might be inaccurate and out of date.

Because they only scan a small number of SERPs and don’t do so on a regular basis, such tools only view approximately 30-40% of your website’s overall keyword ranks. Compare the total number of keyword ranks seen by Ahrefs against Link Graphs GSC Insights (which is generated using Google’s API) for the same website.

That’s a huge discrepancy in keyword ranks data. No other tool compares to Google’s dataset when it comes to finding SEO truth.

But why is it crucial to know all of the keywords that your web pages rank for?

Because each appropriate keyword inquiry is a chance for your company to gain new consumers and clients.

How to use Google Search Console to drive more traffic to your site

If you simply use your Google Search Console dashboard to check your total impressions and clicks on a regular basis, you’re unlikely to get the most out of its analytics and capabilities.

When it comes to maximising the value of Google Search Console and turning that data into strategic SEO choices, here’s how you do it correctly.

1. Quickly confirm that Google understands the keywords you’re targeting

The greatest method for boosting the overall number of keyword phrases for which your website ranks is to create high-quality content on a regular basis that displays your brand’s knowledge and experience in your business specialty.

You may utilise Google Search Console to immediately validate that your content is pulling its weight and ranking for your targeted search phrases instead of waiting 30 days.

Here’s how to use Google Search Console in this manner for each piece of content you publish:

1. Choose a relevant keyword target or cluster that you want the web page to rank for.
2. Optimize your content for that relevant target keyword.
3. Publish your content on your website.
4. After a few days, confirm whether Google understands the relevance of your content and is showing it in the SERPs for relevant keyword phrases.

For instance, we recently released a blog post comparing the accuracy and functionality of several keyword monitoring tools. The keyword term “precise SEO rank tracking” was used to improve the blog.

We checked Google Search Console a few days after publication to see if Google was picking up on our content’s relevancy. We saw that the blog received over a thousand impressions for our target keyword phrase, “accurate SEO rank tracking,” and hundreds more impressions for over 256 other short and long-tail keyword phrases with similar search intent.

We were able to determine if we optimised this material properly within a few days because Google Search Console updates keyword rankings on a regular basis.

We could then concentrate on additional SEO variables to improve the content’s position across those many search queries once we knew it was ranking for the right keywords.

If you see that your content isn’t ranking well for the target keywords you intended (or isn’t ranking at all), it’s probable that Google doesn’t consider the material to be relevant or of high quality. Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Check your metadata: Make sure your page title, meta description, and other meta tags are SEO-friendly and include your target keywords.
• Revise the content: Focus on your headings and subheadings for keyword inclusion and enhance the content with more topical depth and semantic-richness
• Use a content tool: A content tool can guide your writing process by suggesting powerful terms to include in your content. Here are a few tools you can try for free from LinkGraph, CognitiveSEO, or LSIGraph
• Build your site authority: Your site might not have enough authority to rank in the SERPs. You may need to take some time to build your site authority with backlinking.

If you want the time and effort you put into generating a high-quality piece of content to be worthwhile, it must be able to stand on its own. That implies your website will rank for relevant search searches, resulting in impressions and organic traffic. Google Search Console is the simplest and most efficient approach to ensure that your sites are performing as expected.

2. Check that Google is properly crawling and indexing your web pages

Your site pages must be properly crawled and indexed by search engine spiders before they can rank for relevant search queries.

The easiest method to discover which of your pages have been indexed, when they were last crawled, and whether Google recognised any enhancements—like breadcrumbs or sitelinks—that would affect how your SERP result displays is to use Google Search Console.

Why is this data so important for marketers and SEOs looking to improve their overall SEO performance? Here are a few reasons why:

1. When you make on-page optimizations to a web page, Google’s algorithm will not weigh those improvements until the page’s next crawl. Don’t try to confirm the effectiveness of your optimizations until they have actually been seen by Google! 
2. For websites with hundreds to thousands of landing pages, you could potentially max out your crawl budget. Make sure Google only crawls your most important pages by adding robots tags with “noindex, nofollow” directives to any low-value pages!
3. Enhancements help your web pages more clickable in the SERPs. If you add schema.org markup to your site to appear in certain rich results, confirm that your code is correct and they are indeed showing up in the SERPs!

You may also upload a sitemap to Google Search Console if you want greater control over the pages of your website Google recommends to searchers. A sitemap tells Google which pages on your website are the most essential and, as a result, should be crawled and promoted more frequently.

3. Troubleshoot technical and page performance issues

Relevant, high-quality content isn’t the only criterion for Google ranking. Google’s degree of trust in—and your visitors’ impression of—your business is heavily influenced by the technical performance of your website.

Crawlers from Google want to ensure if your sites are responsive, load quickly, and give a good user experience for those who find them through search.

Troubleshooting technical issues on your website may be scary, especially if you don’t have a lot of experience working on the backend of your site. However, Google Search Console makes it easier for site owners to detect and fix any technical or page performance issues that may be affecting their keyword ranks and placements.

To determine the overall quality of a web page’s overall experience, Google’s ranking system considers the following signals:

• Core Web Vitals: This includes the site speed, load times, interactivity, and visual stability of your web pages.
• Mobile Usability: Due to mobile-first indexing, Google likes web pages that are responsive, fast-loading, and high-performing on mobile devices.
• Security: Web pages should provide safe browsing and be secure for users.
• HTTPS: HTTPS is more secure than HTTP. Too many urls with HTTP protocols could result in worse SEO performance because of the lack of encryption

Google will notify you in your Google Search Console account’s Experience feature if your web pages suffer in any of the aforementioned categories. They’ll let you know what issues they found and which web sites they found them on.

This website, for example, contains over 109 landing pages that Google considers to be of low quality. Unless these technical issues are resolved, this website’s overall SEO performance—and hence organic traffic—is unlikely to improve.

If you notice comparable page experience metrics in your Google Search Console account, you should take the following steps:

• Identify the specific web page that has been flagged and the specified error type.
• Send this information to your web developer or whoever will attempt to resolve the issue on the backend of your website.
• Once the problem has been fixed, confirm the problem is resolved by using the “Validate Fix” feature in your Google Search Console Account.
• You should get confirmation of your validation submission. It will take Google about 28 days to confirm whether the issue has been resolved.

It’s critical to rapidly detect and fix technical and page performance problems. Although there are other tools for troubleshooting page experience issues, Google Search Console provides the most clear advice on where to concentrate your efforts.

Check in on a frequent basis to ensure that everything on your website is in good working order.

4. Run SEO A/B tests with the help of Google Search Console’s daily rank tracking

You may use Google Search Console to A/B test particular improvements to attempt to increase your average placements across all of your keywords after you know your web pages are ranking for relevant keywords and that your page performance, security, and mobile usability satisfy Google’s criteria.

You can easily confirm whether those improvements were successful using Google Search Console’s daily keyword tracking.

Follow these steps to perform a split test in Google Search Console:

1. Choose what page you want to test and the specific variant you would like to test. Don’t test more than one variant, or it will be difficult to determine which resulted in improved rankings, impressions, or organic traffic
2. Make your optimization to your page (whether that be a page title, internal links, web design, meta description, etc.)
3. Wait 7-10 days
4. Log in to Google Search Console to see whether the page improved in impressions, average position, clicks, or click-through-rate

My content team, for example, tried to enhance the total keyword rankings for a piece of long-form material on our website by raising the content’s word count and thematic depth. Our authors increased the page’s word count from 1500 to nearly 4000.

On December 29th, 2020, the website’s material was updated. The Google Search Console stats for the landing page for the last six months are shown below.

It’s apparent that Google reacted to the modifications we made to our content. Our average rank rose by almost 20 places and our impressions improved by 420 percent in only seven days. As a consequence, we experimented with the same variant (content length) on other pages of our website and found comparable results.

While Google Search Console makes it simple to examine the results of split testing, there is no way to monitor the changes you make to your website inside the platform. Try a keyword rank tracking tool like GSC Insights or Rank Science that includes SEO A/B testing capabilities to track your optimizations and Google data in the same platform.

The easiest method to narrow down which adjustments in your SEO testing truly result in increased ranks and impressions is to use Google Search Console. The improvements may then be re-used on other pages of your website.

How to use Google Search Console for better SEO

Every appropriate keyword inquiry, as previously said, offers a fresh chance for your company to gain actual consumers and clients. When it comes to iterating on your own website and determining whether your SEO plan is on track, Google Search Console’s data is unrivalled in terms of accuracy and scope.

Although Google maintains their ranking algorithms under wraps, they do make it extremely obvious through Google Search Console where you should focus your efforts in order to improve your overall search performance. One of the most effective techniques for increasing your internet exposure is to analyse that data and use it as a roadmap.

You’re not getting a comprehensive view of where your website stands if you’re not regularly using your Google Search Console account.

So here’s a quick rundown on how to get the most out of Google Search Console:

1. Confirm within a few days that Google associates your content to the keyword you’re targeting, so you can then implement tactics to elevate its position across even more search queries.
2. Prioritize the most important pages Google should crawl so your targeted pages can rank more quickly and display rich results.
3. Troubleshoot and resolve page experience issues with Google Search Console’s direct guidance.
4. Run SEO split tests and quickly learn which optimization was successful, so you can then implement it on additional pages.