Google Search Console training
Google Search Console training – Official trailer (new series). Do you want your website to be found on Google? Join Daniel Waisberg, Search Advocate at Google, as he helps you optimize your Google presence and drive organic traffic to your website in the new Search Console training series! Don’t miss the first episode, due out in a few weeks!
Google Search Console → https://goo.gle/searchconsole
Search Console Help → https://goo.gle/schelp
Subscribe to Google Search Central → https://goo.gle/SearchCentral
93% of Internet activity starts on a search engine. So leave nothing to chance when it comes to optimizing your website’s presence!
How can you monitor and improve the SEO performance of your web pages? You thought Google Analytics was your only ally? Make no mistake, Search Console is also a Google tool you won’t be able to live without after reading this article.
But how do you set up your account and use Google Search Console?
We’ll tell you all about it below!
How do I set up my Google Search Console account?
To get started, go to the Google tool home page, log in with your account and click on “Add a property” :
Next, copy and paste your website URL into the box that appears:
To finalize the creation of your free Search Console account, Google will ask you to verify that you are the owner of your site.
To do this, you have several options:
- By importing a specific HTML file onto your site.
- By adding a specific meta tag to your HTML code. Google will then check that the tag has been integrated in the right place.
- By using the tracking code in your Google Analytics account.
Your account is created!
Tip: Even if you don’t use it as a means of verification, linking your Google Analytics account to Search Console will give you a more detailed report on the pages visited, the keywords targeted, and the geographical areas from which your traffic originates.
To do this, go to your Google Analytics platform, and click on the “Admin” tab, then “Property Settings”. This is where you’ll find the “Adjust Search Console” button:
That’s all there is to it!
What exactly does Search Console do?
Once your account has been created, you need to understand how this Google tool can add real value to your SEO strategy.
Check that your site is indexed by Google’s robots
The first step in getting your site listed on Google and generating traffic is for it to be found by the search engine robots. To put it simply, Google is constantly analyzing new and existing content on the Internet, and references it in its index so that it appears in search results.
To check that your site is properly indexed, and therefore visible to users, go to the “URL Inspection” category in the left-hand toolbar. The Google tool will tell you directly whether or not your site has been indexed:
What if your site isn’t indexed? You probably find yourself in one of the following situations:
- You’ve just created your site and Google hasn’t had time to spot it yet: be patient!
- You have cyber-security problems that force Google to mask your domain.
- Your site contains code errors or non-indexing tags that hide your content from Google. Right-click on your site and select “display page source code” to check!
Analyze the quality of your organic traffic
The power of Search Console compared to Analytics, Google’s other tool?
You can quickly get a report on :
- The total number of clicks on your page
- Average click-through rate
- Number of prints
- Your average search engine position
- The exact search terms that users type in to click on your content
- The pages that bring you the most traffic
- Your performance in Google’s enhanced results
Go to the “Overview” section, then click on “Open report” :
You then have access to your performance over the selected time period:
You can also analyze your ranking by page or keyword. This is an interesting analysis to carry out: are the keywords that led to your page actually the ones you targeted during your copywriting?
And don’t forget to check how many times you appear in Google’s rich results. This means that your enriched data has been integrated by the search engine!
Bonus: With Search Console, you can access data going back 16 months!
Understand who your audience is
Do you know who sees and clicks on your content? Having an idea of your audience allows you to propose content that will be all the more adapted to them, and which can therefore ultimately generate more traffic.
To do this, stay on the open performance report above.
You can find out exactly how many visits to your site you’ve had by country of origin by clicking on the corresponding category:
Another interesting piece of information for your SEO strategy is the number of visits per device used:
If the number of mobile searches is increasing, have you taken care to adapt your site to the mobile format to facilitate navigation?
Check your website’s internal and external links, as well as the quality of your backlinks.
To build an effective SEO strategy, you need to look for backlinks. Simply because it’s one of Google’s top ranking criteria!
But how do you analyse the number and quality of the backlinks you’ve obtained?
Go to the “Links” category in the left-hand bar. Here you’ll find an overview of inbound links, their originating sites, and your own internal links:
If you click on the main landing pages, you’ll see the ranking of your pages according to the number of backlinks obtained. It’s a good way of finding out which of your content generates the most links. This could be the opportunity to contact new editors or journalists to present your best-performing pages, and try toobtain new backlinks?
Getting a backlink is great, but a quality backlink is even better! To find out which sites have cited your content, click on “Main source sites”:
Best practice? If you want to assess the quality of a backlink, use the Moz tool to analyze the domain authority of the site in question. Google will take this into account in its referencing, and a link from a site with “high authority” will be valued all the more highly.
Improve the technical performance of your website
The technical performance of your website is one of the criteria taken into account by Google in its search engine optimization, since its aim is to offer its users the best possible experience.
Search Console offers you technical improvements to enhance the quality of your website. To discover them, go to the “Enhancements” category in the left-hand toolbar:
The “Mobile Ergonomics” section lets you know exactly which elements need to be improved to optimize your visitors’ browsing experience on mobile, for example the size of text or the placement of clickable elements, and the number of pages concerned:
Bonus: To find out how to optimize your SEO on mobile, follow our new comprehensive guide.
In the “Logos” section, the Google tool enables you to check that your information is properly understood and processed by the search engine, so that it appears in enriched results, i.e. displaying additional information to your content:
To check that your site doesn’t have any security alerts that could penalize your SEO, simply go to the “Security issues” tab and follow the recommendations if necessary:
Finally, make sure your pages contain no errors that could prevent them from being displayed or indexed! To do this, click on “Cover”:
Below is a list of the problems encountered and the pages concerned. To help you, each of the errors listed leads to a help link in the Search Console help guide. No more error pages on your site!
Search Console: a Google tool you can’t live without!
Whether you want to analyze your current SEO performance, understand your target audience, avoid indexing errors, or evaluate the power of your backlinks, Search Console will be of invaluable help!
Do you have any questions about using a Google tool? Send us an e-mail or give us a call, and our SEO team will be happy to help you.
