How to Use Google Search Console to Get Insights That Grow Your Business
Most business owners know they need a website for their business. They work to design, strategize, and launch a website that showcases their brand. The problem is that this is where many business owners stop. They go live and put their website on their list of completed projects.
A website is not complete when it goes live. It is a constant work in progress if you want to use it to grow your business.
If you want your website to attract as many new customers as possible, you need to work to maintain and optimize it.
One way you can do that is through Google Search Console.
What Is Google Search Console?
Google Search Console is a website reporting tool that helps you gain insights into how your business website is performing in search.
The tool is free and available to any website owner who wants to improve their ability to monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot their site’s presence in search results.
I Have Google Analytics. Do I Need Google Search Console?
Many business owners are familiar with Google Analytics. Google Analytics is another free tool provided by Google, and many website owners use it to get insights about how people use their site.
Google Analytics is not the same as Google Search Console, and you shouldn’t use one or the other.
You should use both.
- Google Analytics helps you gain insights into how people use your site. You can learn about your audience and their behavior on your site.
- Google Console helps you gain insights into how people find your site through search. You can learn about how your site appears (or fails) to appear in search results.
Both Google Analytics and Google Search Console provide insights you need to develop a website strategy that will attract more customers and grow your business.
Related: My New Website Doesn't Show Up in Search. Why?
What Should I Do with Google Search Console?
Let’s look at a few things you can do with Google Search Console once you create an account and link it to your site.
Review your site’s search queries, traffic, and performance. Get a good look at which search terms send users to your website and how your results perform in search. Review data related to:
- Queries: The search terms that your website ranks for
- Impressions: The number of times users see your site in search results
- Clicks: The number of times users clicked search results to go to your website
- Click-through-rate (CTR): The percentage of impressions in search results that led a user to click through to your website
- Average Position: The average position of where your website appears on search results pages
Identify and fix usability and SEO issues. When you have Google Search Console, you will receive notifications about usability and SEO issues on your site. Google identifies the issue and the exact URL where the issue exists and provides directions for fixing it. You don’t have to wonder if the issue was properly managed as Google notifies you once the issue has been resolved.
Optimize your site for improved SEO. Strengthen your SEO strategy by submitting sitemaps and URLs through Search Console so Google can crawl them and efficiently add them to their database. You can also review existing index coverage to ensure that Google sees the most recent version of your site.
Optimize individual URLs for improved SEO. The URL inspection tool within Google Search Console shares detailed information about every page on your site. Use it to understand how Google sees your page. Review the backend information Google uses to understand and rank your page to find ways to improve it and help it rank better in search.
Test mobile usability. With more and more people using mobile devices to access websites, you want to be sure that your site works well on smaller devices. Using the Mobile Usability report, you can identify and fix potential issues that could disrupt the mobile experience of your website. Google Search Console points out issues and provides directions on how to fix them.
See how your search results look on SERPs. Identify if your site is showing rich search results, and if so, what they look like. The Rich Results Reports provides information about how your search results look and what information they show.
See what websites link to your site. Links, both internal (that link from your site to your site) and external (that link from another site to your site), are important elements of SEO. Google Search Console gives you a look at your link portfolio, identifying the top external and internal links and top linking sites.
See what pages on your website are linked to the most. Using Google Search Console, you can also see what pages on your site are linked to the most and what anchor text is used to link to the pages.
Related: Local SEO: How to Get Your Business To Show Up In Local Searches
How To Take Action Based On Google Search Console Data
The power of Google Search Console isn’t just looking at information about how your site performs in search. It’s about finding insights that help you improve the performance of your site in search.
Use the information to optimize your site, attract more users, and convert more customers.
- Look for search results with low CTRs and create better snippets to make them more appealing to searchers.
- If you aren’t driving traffic for search queries that are important to your business, consider how you can create more content based on the queries you’d like to rank for.
- Review your branded search queries to see what terms people search for along with your brand name to generate ideas for content and messaging.
- See which pages drive the most traffic to your website and ensure that those pages are properly optimized to convert website traffic.
- If pages on your website aren’t showing in your list, check to ensure that they are properly indexed so Google can find them.
- Look to see if search results perform better on mobile or desktop and consider if you need to improve snippets to make them more appealing.
- Review your average search positions to monitor if your organic SEO strategies are working.
Related: Using Website Audits to Find Opportunity (and Errors) On Your Site
Use Data to Improve Your Marketing and Grow Your Business
Google Search Console is powerful because you can use its data to identify ways to improve your search performance -- which will help you get in front of new audiences and attract more customers.
Collecting, analyzing, and creating plans based on data is one the most powerful ways to improve your marketing strategies, grow your visibility, and reach more customers.
If you aren’t using business data to drive your marketing strategies, get started today. Create your free mySuite account to use our free platform to centralize your website analytics and launch strategic marketing campaigns based on what you learn.
