Any website owner who is serious about improving their digital platform's quality should understand the importance of collecting data with the ultimate goal of improving overall performance. That said, most website owners that we work with are still not using free tools like the Google Search Console to accurately measure Search Engine performance.
Google Search Console (or GSC) is a free tool that provides a variety of information to help you measure and improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Any website can be used wit GSC, but it will need to be set up correctly to ensure that you get the most out of it.
In short, GSC is a reporting tool that helps you to keep up with the technical issues of your site, the overall health of your site, and how your site is performing on Google. It helps you to understand how “Google-friendly” your website is. After all, the more compliant you are with Google standards, the better your website will perform on Google Search.
Google Search Console is easy to set up, however there are so many features available it can be a bit overwhelming to figure out where to start. Here’s a guide to help you make the most of some critical GSC tools for your website.
Performance Report
Google Search Console’s Performance report is likely the most widely used feature for businesses (it is definitely for me and my clients)! The performance report gives you a quick overview of how your website performs within Google Search results. It provides you with clicks, impressions, click-through rate (CTR), the average position (how high your website shows up in Google search results [anything position 1-10 is page 1 results]) of your site, the locations in which your site is showing up in Search results, and the amount of traffic coming to your site from types of devices.
The performance report can be filtered in several ways so that you can really dive into your website performance.
- You can look at a specific date range or compare dates to look at year over year, quarter over quarter, or month over month performance.
- You can look at specific pages within your site
- You can look at specific keywords that your website is ranking for to see which URL’s are ranking, how many clicks, and in what avg. position.
- You can look at keywords that contain a certain word. For example, any keywords containing the word “marketing”
There are more detailed versions of each of the above reports once you click around a bit.
The performance report on its own can provide extremely useful data to help you improve your SEO. However, GSC gives you much more to work with! Stay tuned for part 2 of the blog post next week for a deeper dive into some of our recommended tools and reporting features within Google Search Console.
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