Registering your website with Google Search Console is almost like a rite of passage for every company looking to sell more on the Internet!
Since this tool is essential in executing an SEO strategy — ensuring that brands are found in search engine results — there is no way to profit even more in the digital landscape without adding it to your process!
Popularly known as GSC, Google’s search console not only officially presents your website to the search giant’s indexing system, but also ensures that your new content will be cataloged faster and faster by the algorithms — in addition to:
- Generate and keep your business’s sitemap updated on the Internet;
- Ensure hassle-free usability for your visitors;
- Evaluate the performance of your brand’s website in search results;
- And receive valuable tips on what to do to reach the top of the searches!
My name is Gaurav Rajput and here you will learn what each of the features available in Google Search Console is for — all added to my more than 10 years as CEO of the Best Digital Marketing agency in India: Enjoy Minder!
The best part is that you won’t have to pay anything to implement your SEO strategy once you’ve finished reading, as both this content and GSC itself are free!
Below, I explain why.
What is Google Search Console and what is it for?
Google Search Console is a platform offered free of charge by Google so that entrepreneurs, website owners and developers can:
- Speed up the indexing of content and pages;
- Keep the positioning catalog updated;
- And ensure that all the elements that make up SEO are working correctly.
SEO, as you may have heard right here on the Enjoy Minder blog, is the acronym in English for Search Engine Optimization: a series of visible practices (within On Page SEO and Off Page SEO) or invisible (within Technical SEO) that help position a website at the top of the organic results of searches made on the Internet!
Organic results are those that are well positioned, and without having to pay for ads to gain this prominence, by the sum:
- The quality of the published content;
- To the authority built on the Internet over time;
- And the correct configuration of page elements in Technical SEO (usually applied directly to the site architecture)!
The profitability system of a megacorporation like Alphabet (which is Google’s parent company) relies heavily on the display of paid ads among organic search results.
The more satisfactory and relevant the results are to resolve users’ queries, the more likely Google will be to keep these users on its own platform instead of losing them to a competitor — be it Bing or Yahoo!
But managing the quality of billions of pieces of content, or even making sure they are updated periodically to meet quality guidelines (which rank one site above another in search engine results ), requires a massive amount of automated work that is not error-free!
Because issues that affect a site’s performance in search results can vary greatly from one case to another, Alphabet has launched Google Search Console to ensure that:
- Errors that affect your website’s performance on the Internet will be seen and corrected before they impact your company’s ranking;
- In addition to facilitating monitoring (by algorithms) of new products published by your brand;
- And offer a complete view of your business’s performance on Google, from the number of times a page was viewed in searches, to the number of people who preferred to access it instead of choosing your competitors!
Since Google’s profit depends on search results that satisfy users’ curiosities (because the more satisfied they are, the more they will use Google for further searches), it is essential that the giant avoids:
- Indexing questionable or controversial content for the wrong reasons;
- Promote brands or themes involved with sensitive areas of society ;
- And distribute illegally copied or low-quality content to users searching for answers on the Internet!
So Google Search Console is used to:
- Expand a company’s reach by telling it what needs to be done to qualify it as a quality result and well positioned in searches;
- Discover which content and pages need to be optimized to improve the performance of views, clicks and retention time by visitors who will become potential customers (called leads );
- And which materials are already bringing a decent amount of people to your business, allowing you to develop strategies around key themes that are most popular within your niche!
The GSC functions listed above go beyond the rates and tracking you can see in another fantastic tool from Alphabet: Google Analytics!
Google Analytics X Search Console
Both Google Search Console and Google Analytics are essential for analyzing the status of an SEO strategy executed with the intention of making future results increasingly predictable and profitable!
However, as similar as these tools may be (in the way they facilitate data visualization), the information displayed in each of them is different.
Side by side, they differ (and complement each other) because:
- Google Analytics displays data from within your website, such as metrics about user behavior across different contexts and segments of your target audience (including demographic profiles, describing the genders or ages of different groups, for example);
- While Google Search Console displays organic search data and Google’s own view of your website, such as position in results, impressions and click-through rate (CTR), as well as other indicators of the health of your business in indexing and positioning on Google!
What types of data are in Google Search Console?
Some of the most useful data you can collect using Google Search Console for SEO involves:
- Search performance, showing which keywords are driving traffic, how it has changed over time, which pages are most visited, as well as the top devices, countries, etc.;
- Index coverage, which indicates the number of pages on your website that have been catalogued by Google robots, to compete for the top of the search results ;
- Sitemaps, allowing you to view and edit a file containing all the links on your pages and the connections between them, which speeds up the indexing and positioning process of each new content published on your website;
- Internal and external links, which analyze the origin of backlinks, including top linking sites and keywords;
- The user experience on the pages, to check if they are meeting criteria such as loading time and interactivity;
- And several other metrics about the organic performance of your content spread across Google!
Google Search Console in your SEO strategy
The information collected by Google Search Console is invaluable when deciding which path to take in your active SEO strategy, or knowing which priorities to pursue in the next rounds of planning.
Since GSC was created to ensure that your business meets the qualification guidelines that place your company at the top of the results (and that benefit Google itself because of this), the data obtained by this platform can be used to:
- Reinforce organic traffic source points by analyzing search performance as a whole, including external links;
- Cut out the waste of content with themes similar to those that have poor performance on the console;
- Direct your team’s attention to your site’s architecture or troubleshooting hidden errors after evaluating index coverage, sitemap, and page experience.
I’ve explained in detail each of the practical uses of Google Search Console in the following paragraphs, starting with the initial setup!
Ownership and verification
Before taking advantage of all the benefits offered by GSC, it is important that you set up your digital property (your business website) and carry out the correct checks to confirm that your platform has:
- One owner;
- A responsibility;
- And some authority to be found on the Internet through the content published by it.
Only after verifying your property and becoming ethically responsible for it through Google Search Console will you have access to all the features available to use within this platform — in addition to receiving personalized notifications about which aspects to improve on your website to go further!
Fixing indexing issues
Right after verifying your property, I recommend that you immediately start correcting your current indexing problems, precisely to find out:
- What your website needs to appear in search results, with some suggestions to get it off to a good start;
- Whether the loading speed of your content is helping or hindering your reach to new audiences;
- And which settings are getting in the way of performance that could be better — and how to fix them!
This ensures that all of your relevant content is found by users, increasing your chances of attracting more organic traffic.
Keyword identification and content optimization
With the gaps filled and your property taking control and responsibility for the content published, the next step to taking advantage of Google Search Console is to optimize your business’s publications!
Keywords are the terms or phrases that are searched for, and when a potential customer searches on Google using the ones you’ve chosen, the chances of your content appearing in front of that lead increase dramatically.
The Google Search Console performance report is a goldmine for this!
You can use it to get a practical idea of which keywords have a high number of impressions but a low click-through rate, for example.
With the insights extracted from it, you can then adjust and optimize your content for the most efficient keywords, further improving your positioning in search results!
Sitemap submission and monitoring
If your pages are properly linked, Google will be able to detect most of your site. However, if your site has many pages or a more complex structure, using sitemap files is essential!
A sitemap is an XML file that literally serves as a map of your website. Not only does it make it easier for Google to crawl your site, but it also allows you to see if all of your pages are being indexed correctly!
Using the sitemap as an x-ray of your materials, you can notify Google Search Console when your brand publishes new content or when you update materials already available on the Internet.
In other words: keeping your sitemap updated and monitored is a recommended practice to improve your visibility in search results, ensuring your reign over every positive position you achieve over time!
Link and referral tracking
As if monitoring the health of each page within your site wasn’t enough, in Google Search Console, you can also keep an eye on all references and links from other sites pointing to yours !
This way, you will have a deep perspective on which topics work best when it comes to finding organic ambassadors for your brand: those influencers, content creators and even other companies that publish content on the Internet citing your business as a source!
In other words, influencing the creation of quality references and backlinks that showcase your expertise in a natural way (as a consequence of your brand’s expertise and originality on Google) becomes much easier when you know:
- Which themes seem perennial to explore;
- Which content tends to get the most attention;
- What content doesn’t perform so well with your ideal audience (which is the one that buys);
- And which keywords to avoid so as not to waste resources competing for positions that do not translate into sales!
Testing and experimentation
It’s no surprise that having so much clarity about how your website is indexed and positioned by Google’s algorithms brings an advantage that I bet your competitors don’t have: your brand can test increasingly effective strategies at continually lower costs!
What makes Digital Marketing so powerful when it comes to creating a constant flow of attraction, engagement, conversion and sales is the flexibility to be able to make decisions:
- Informed about the next steps;
- Optimized for generating results ;
- And that bring the maximum return for the smallest investment!
Because every industry, business, and audience is different, a strategy that works for one business may not work for another — which is why testing plays an inevitable role in the journey to more sales!
As the use of technology makes data collection immediate on whatever platform your ideal audience visits on the Internet, each post on social media, each text on your blog or video on your YouTube channel tells you what to do to:
- Reach the segments that are most prepared to receive a purchase proposal without wasting time with uninterested people;
- Discover audiences with profiles similar to your target audience in search or engagement trends that you didn’t expect to find in your market;
- And nurture audiences that still have doubts, while testing the use of narratives, keywords and other SEO strategies, aiming to automate this process based on practical results!
Boost your SEO!
It is by using Google Search Console that you will be able to get rid of many of the guesswork and identify once and for all:
- What mistakes are reducing your brand’s reach on the Internet;
- What types of searches, websites and pages are your business being discovered through;
- And what to do to step on your competitors and take the top position on Google from them!
Best of all, you can get started now for free, as GSC is a free tool.
And if your business currently does not appear in search results, or if it is not dominating at least the first 3 positions, it means that something within your SEO strategy is very wrong!
To find out what the error is (and what to do to resolve it), start by exploring Google Search Console, but don’t stop there.
The most important step you have already taken: you have discovered that you can earn much more than you have earned from your sales up until now.
The next step is to update your strategy based on all the insights we will offer you in our Content Marketing and SEO Diagnosis — which, in addition to being customized for your company, is also free!
Apply now!
