Google Search Console is a powerful, free tool from Google that helps you monitor and optimize your website’s performance in search results. From tracking indexing and crawling issues to analyzing search rankings, schema markup, backlinks, and page experience, it offers essential insights for improving your site’s SEO. In this blog, you’ll learn 4 ways to use Google Search Console to improve your SEO rankings.
1. Performance Report
The Performance report in GSC gives you valuable insights into how your site performs in Google Search. It shows metrics like total clicks, impressions, average click-through rate (CTR), and average position. This report helps you evaluate how users find your site, which queries drive traffic, and which pages are getting the most views. From this, you can identify which pages or keywords are underperforming and may benefit from updates. For example, if a page is receiving a high number of impressions but a low CTR, you can optimize the meta title or description.
2. Keyword Research
One of the most strategic uses of GSC is finding high-opportunity keywords, those that your site already ranks for but are not yet on the first page of search results. Typically, these are search queries where your content ranks between positions 8 and 20. These keywords are a great opportunity to improve rankings with minimal effort. You can optimize for these keywords by editing your on-page content, updating headers, incorporating the target keywords more naturally within the content, improving meta tags, adding relevant sections to the page, or using internal links.
3. Indexing Issues
If your pages aren’t being indexed, they won’t appear in search results. That’s why it’s crucial to monitor and fix indexing issues; you can do this in the ‘Pages’ tab in GSC. This section shows which pages have been indexed and which have not. Common issues include crawl errors, pages blocked by robots.txt, server errors, or incorrect use of the noindex tag. Once you understand why a page isn’t indexed, you can take the necessary steps to resolve the issue. This improves your site’s visibility and ensures that all valuable content is included in search results.
4. Submit Sitemaps
Sitemaps are an effective way to help Google discover the content and various pages on your website. This can speed up the process of Google’s web crawler software discovering new pages faster by submitting them for crawling and indexing right after being published. To submit a sitemap in GSC, go to the ‘Sitemap’ under ‘Indexing’. Next, under the ‘Add a new sitemap’, copy your sitemap’s URL, like “/sitemap.xml”. Hit ‘Submit”, then after it loads, you will see a pop-up that says “Sitemap Submitted Successfully”. With the Sitemaps report in GSC, you can view your submitted sitemaps, plus add a new sitemap for Google to crawl.
Contact Boston Web Marketing For SEO Help
If you have any questions or need support using Google Search Console to improve your site’s organic search performance, please contact our team at Boston Web Marketing. Let our team help find ways to improve your website’s overall performance and SEO! Contact us today at (857) 349-5062.