Hello everybody, Today I'm going to tell you how you can use the Google search console to improve your rankings on google. You can also optimize your content and increase traffic to your website. Google search console is a free tool that gives you an inside view of what Google thinks about your website. It shows you how your content is performing in search results what keywords ranking for and a long list of issues that Google's encountered as it tried to crawl render and index your site.
Now, these are issues that you are going to want to pay attention to because these are things that are potentially preventing your site from ranking in search engines. In the first place and cleaning these up and improving them over time should really move the needle and how much traffic you are seeing to your site.
Learn Google Search Console to improve your rankings and increase Traffic
Now first things first if you have not already claimed your website in the Google search console you are gonna want to start there. Doing this is very easy but something that you need to remember is that you need to verify each variation of your website. Now when I say variation what I mean is HTTP versus HTTPS or the WWV version versus the non-WW version. A lot of webmasters don't think to do that and they only claim the single version but Google treats each of these variations as separate versions of your website so you need to make sure that you have access to each of those.
Once you've gone through the process of verifying it's gonna take a few days before Google starts to show you any data but once it does they'll usually email you a quick notification you're gonna want to log in there and take a look and when you log into Google search console you're going to see three main areas. There's the performance reports index coverage and enhancements.
Performance Report
I'm gonna walk through each one of these and the first is the performance report now this is probably the area that most people get excited about because it shows you exactly what keywords your website is ranking for. So, I can see this website is getting a lot of traffic for the keyword things to do in CT this weekend and showing me how many clicks and how many impressions. A click means somebody actually clicked on the search result. The impression means your listing appeared but maybe the person didn't necessarily click on and showing me how we've trended over time.
One of the really cool things about the new google search console that I really love is that you can see up to I believe 12 months of data potentially. A little bit longer and you could compare different time frames so you could see how things have fluctuated. Something I love doing is going into the filter and restricting it to just the last seven days because I like to look at this data on a weekly basis. So, if I change this timeframe I'm only seeing a seven-day window. So, I can see how that's trended over the past few days.
But if I want to get a week over week view. I can go back into the state area switch this over to compare. I'm gonna select compare the last seven days to the previous period you can see you can really do any custom time frame that you want. But I really like this seven-day stretch because I can see how things are fluctuating on a pretty granular level and now I can see that it looks like we saw slightly more clicks to the website over the last seven days. But almost two thousand about two thousand fewer impressions so potentially.
There is fewer search volume but we still were able to capture a little bit more traffic than usual and our click-through rate improved somewhat. So, that's a good sign and it looks like our rank is improved as well so a lot of great data here.
Another thing you could do is change this from queries to pages and then drill down into the specific keywords. That an individual page on your website might be ranking for this is really cool for discovering new keywords that you might want to target with a new blog post or a new piece of content. Your site that might search serves that query a little bit better so that's the performance report.
Index Coverage
The next main section is index coverage and this is really the goldmine of information that you're gonna want to get to this is the checklist of things that you should try to resolve. So, that Google can more easily access content on your website index it and hopefully you'd see improved rankings and traffic as a result.
404 error means Google thinks the page is broken and there are many other issues. That you'll see here this is where a lot of people will get stuck. A lot of this is the technical stuff that you might not be familiar with. These reports are breaking down issues pretty much by their severity. So, you usually want to start with an error.
The error section then moves over to valid with warnings. Valid means everything's good here so you usually don't have to spend a lot of time in that section but if you go it excluded you might find some content that Google thinks you don't want it to the index that you actually do. So that's still a great area to check out as well.
Enhancements
The last section in the Google search console is called enhancements now you can see on this site there. There's no information listed this is really meant to show you any times that Google is really adding some special features to your listings in search results. You may be doing a search and see this big box at the top of search results. It's like an instant answer that's an example of advancement or you might see a carousel of cards below a search result that's another example. At the moment Google does not include all enhancements that they offer in this section but they are adding some overtime.
Conclusion
If you want to see a list of what all those might potentially be checking out the search gallery in Google's developer guides. There are things like corporate contacts, job listings, carousels site links you know the list goes on and on, and there they're adding a new all the time so eventually, you should see some great data here. That might be useful so make sure you go through the list of issues in the Google search console. Pay attention to it be aggressive with it fixing these things could have a huge impact. we've seen traffic sky wreck skyrocket to websites after they've resolved a lot of the major issues that are listed in there and this is usually a great starting point for any SEO project so we definitely recommend that you check it out
