The Best Ways to Use Google Search Console for SEO. If you don’t regularly log in to your dashboard of Google Search Console to view your entire impressions and clicks, you won’t be able to harness its metrics and tools according to their full potential.
When it comes to using Google Search Console in the right way, you should follow the below steps to maximize the value of the platform and turn that data into strategic optimization decisions.
1. It quickly confirms that Google can understand the keywords you’re targeting
When it comes to improving the total number of keyword phrases present on your website to rank for, the best strategy is to publish high-quality content on a regular basis that shows your brand’s knowledge and efficiency in your industry niche.
Instead of waiting for 30 days, you have the option to use Google Search Console to rapidly confirm that your content is generating its weight and also ranking for your targeted search terms.
Here are the processes to use Google Search Console in this manner for every piece of content you publish:
- Choose proper keywords to target or cluster that you seek the web page to rank for.
- Optimize your high-quality content for that relevant target keyword.
- Upload your content on your website.
- After a few more days, check to confirm if Google understands the relevancy of your content and is showing it in the search engine result pages for relevant keyword phrases.
If you discover that your content has not got a high rank for the target keywords you primarily aimed for (or it’s not ranking at all), there is a high chance that Google doesn’t perceive your content as topical to the targeted keyword or as high-quality content. Here is the way to tackle it:
- Check the metadata: Make sure your page title, meta description, and other meta tags are SEO-friendly, and add your target keywords.
- Edit the content: Make sure your headings and subheadings have keywords and improve the content with more topical depth and semantically high.
- Use a content writing tool: A content writing tool will help your writing process by suggesting powerful phrases and terms to add to your content. Here are the names of the few tools that you can try for free- LinkGraph, CognitiveSEO, or LSIGraph.
- Build your authority of the site: Your site might not possess enough authority to rank in the search engine result pages. You may have to take a few times to build your site authority with the help of backlinking.
If you need the time and effort that you’ve spent on creating high-quality content to be worth it, it requires pulling its weight. It suggests ranking in relevant search queries and getting impressions and earning organic traffic for your website. Google Search Console is the fastest and quickest way to confirm that your pages are doing their part.
2. Check Whether Google Is Properly Crawling and Indexing the Web Pages
Before your web pages get a rank for the relevant search queries, they need to be properly crawled and indexed by the search engine spiders.
Google Search Console is the ideal way to view which of your web pages have been indexed when they were crawled lastly and if Google checked any additions—such as breadcrumbs or site links that will influence how your search engine result page’s result appears.
3. Troubleshoot issues related to technical and page performance
You should know that relevant and high-quality content is not the only criteria for ranking on Google. The technical performance of your website strongly makes an impact on Google’s level of trust in your business.
Google’s crawlers want to view that your pages are responsive, load fast, and offer a quality page experience for users who find them via search.
Troubleshooting technical problems present on your website can be a bit hard, especially if you don’t possess the most profound knowledge to work on the backend of your website. However, Google Search Console simplifies the process so that the site owners can locate and talk about any technical or page performance issues that can make an impact on their keyword rankings and positions.
Google’s ranking algorithm verifies the below-mentioned signals to understand the quality of your website’s overall experience:
- Core Web Vitals: This includes the speed of the site, page loading time, interactivity, and stability of the visuals of your web pages.
- Mobile Usability: Because of mobile-first indexing, Google prefers web pages that are responsive, load fast, and perform well on mobile devices.
- Security: Web pages should offer safe browsing and remain secure for users.
- HTTPS: HTTPS is known for being more secure than HTTP. Too many URLs with HTTP protocols can give bad SEO performance because of the absence of encryption.
If your web pages are suffering from any of the above areas, Google will inform you in the Experience feature of your Google Search Console account of yours. They will inform you about what problems they’ve found and on which web pages.
4. Run SEO A/B Tests with the Assistance of GSC’s Daily Rank tracking
Once you get to know that your web pages are ranking for proper keywords and that your page performance, mobile usability, and security are meeting Google’s standards, then you can use Google Search Console to perform A/B test in order to specific optimizations to try and better your average positions across all of your keywords.
With the help of daily keyword tracking in Google Search Console, you have the option to confirm quite quickly to check whether those optimizations were successful.
To run a split A/B test in Google Search Console, follow the below-mentioned steps:
- Select what type of page you want to test and the right variant you would prefer to test. You shouldn’t test more than one variant, or it will become difficult to ascertain which resulted in bettered rankings, impressions, or organic traffic.
- You should do optimization to your page (it can be a page title, web design, internal links, meta description, etc.)
- Wait for 7-10 days
- Log in to your Google Search Console account to view whether the page has an improved impression, clicks, average position, or click-through rate.
Though GSC makes it simple to quickly analyze the results of your A/B tests, there isn’t any path to track the deviations you make in your website present within the platform.
In order to track your optimizations and the Google metrics present in the same tool, you should try keyword rank tracking tools that have got SEO A/B testing features such as GSC Insights or Rank Science. Contact Us!
GSC is the ideal way to narrow down which optimizations in your SEO testing that actually result in bettered rankings and impressions. Then, you can reinstall those optimizations on other pages present on your website.
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