How to Use Google Search Console to Improve SEO

Google Search Console can be used to:

• Monitor keyword ranking, organic traffic, average position, impressions, and click through rates (CTRs)
• Identify if Google crawlers are crawling and indexing your web pages properly
• Submit XML sitemaps, disavow backlinks
• Identify page experience, mobile usability, and core web vital issues
• Ensure Google sees schema markup on your web pages to improve ranking in rich results
• Analyse your backlink profile

Targeted Keywords

• Select targeted keyword you want your web page to rank for 
• Optimise your content 
• Publish content
• After a few days confirm whether Google understands the relevance of your content and is it showing in search results 

Crawling and Indexing

In order for your web pages to rank in results, it needs to be crawled and indexed by the search engine bots.

Ensures Google only crawls important pages with robots.txt files, including “noindex, nofollow” rules for low pages to maximise your crawl budget
Submit your XML sitemap to communicate with Google, advising which pages are important and should be crawled and indexed

Identify Technical and Page Performance Issues

In order to improve your ranking, you know you need to create high quality and valuable content, but the technical performance of your website also influences your ranking potential, along with website visitors perception. Google Search Console enables you to troubleshoot any technical issues, helping you fix these issues to improve user experience and search engine crawlability:

• Core Web Vitals – page speed, load times, interactivity, visual stability
• Mobile friendliness – responsive, fast loading, high performance on mobile devices
• Security – web pages should be secure with HTTPS protocols

A/B Tests

You can use Google Search Console for A/B testing on specific optimisations you try, identifying the average position across your keywords:

• Identify the page to test, along with variation
• Optimise the page, maybe you optimising internal links, meta descriptions, or title tags
• Wait up to ten days to determine if your page has improved, focus on impressions, average ranking position, and click through rate

Conclusion

Google Search Console is an excellent free tool provided by search engine giant, Google, helping you understand whether your SEO strategy is achieving results. You cannot match the data provided by this excellent tool. Google is not very forthcoming when it comes to its algorithms, but where they do shine is that through Google Search Console, they communicate what is working and what needs improvement in your SEO strategy to succeed. Do you need help analysing your SEO performance with Google Search Console? Contact Genie Crawl now to find out how.