LEARN SEO VIA GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE

Google Search Console is a free tool that shows business owners how their website is performing on Google’s search engine results pages. There are some great paid SEO tools like Moz and SEMrush, but Search Console is free and gives you a lot of free content. GSC used to be called Google Webmaster Tools. It wasn’t until 2018 when Google updated the platform. The metrics share give so much insight. Business owners don’t have to be so in the dark when it comes to their website performance. Search Console gives you the trends over the lifetime of your site and it will allow you to compare two different time periods. 

WHY USE GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE?

It gives you peace of mind. You can check any “new” page instantly to see if it’s being crawled or if it has any errors. This tool is one of Google’s best tools besides Google Analytics. It helps you measure your site traffic, highlights issues with your site and gives you information on how to fix them. It gives you the basic topline traffic info you need to know, but also has information about AMP, Mobile Usability and Rich Results.

• Inspect urls
• Check to see if queries are relevant to your site
• Check sitemap (be sure all your pages are showing up)
• Review page experience (use Google’s testing tools)
• Check page speed insights 
• Check core web vitals  

FIX WEBSITE ERRORS

Google Search Console checks your search traffic in the performance report. It shows you which queries are driving most of the traffic to your website. You should also check to be sure all your pages are being indexed. Search Console shows you which pages it crawls — if you see one missing, then you know you have a problem.

HOW TO ACCESS GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE

You can sign up for free. You’ll then need to verify ownership of your website (your web person can help you easily do this in seconds).  Once you have access, you’ll want to learn all of the insights available.  

Google recommends you build content for humans, not search engines. Never try to deceive end users–Google will catch this and your site won’t be shown. These are some examples of what NOT to do:

• Automatically generate content
• Participate in link schemes
• Creating pages with no content
• Cloaking
• Sneaky redirects
• Scraped content
• Learn more here

WEBSITE HEALTH

Your website should be built with clean code. No page should be more than 3 pages deep. Your page titles and meta should all be customized to represent your brand. 

OPTIMIZE WEBSITE CONTENT

The content on your website should be well-planned out. Find relevant topics your customers will want to know about and share that information. OpGo can help you explore topics and research them to see what is trending in your area. We’ll also help you design your web pages to make them easy for users to navigate and for them to find additional information about certain topics.

HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE FOR SEO TO WORK?

You can use Google Search Console to monitor the amount of traffic you are getting to each page as well as the click-through-rate (CTR). Once you have that set up and can confirm your site is healthy, then you need a plan. You should see  a change within 30 days.

• Build a content plan. (Plan to share new content you put on your site and link pages to each other when they are relevant.)
• Make sure your social sites link back to your website. Need a new website? OpGo can help with that, too. Learn more here.
• Be proactive in getting Google Reviews.
• Update your Google My Business page.
• Be sure your business NAP (name, address, phone number) are all consistent on any sites that list your business (Chamber, memberships, directories, social channels)
• Schedule weekly reviews of traffic in the beginning. Then you can change to monthly once you start to see traffic role in.
• Use other campaigns (paid) to bring eyeballs to your updated content. (Make sure it’s someone interested in your services or products.)