Publisher growth tactics for election season | WEBINAR
Publisher growth tactics for election season | WEBINAR
Reading this guide will help manoeuvre the features offered by Search Console, thus allowing them to improve website performance and traffic.
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Google Search Console (GSC) is a free service offered by Google for website owners and webmasters to monitor and maintain their website’s presence in search results.
It provides valuable information about a website’s performance in search engine results, allowing webmasters to measure and analyze their website’s traffic and track important SEO metrics.
Google Search Console also provides tools to help users identify and resolve potential issues with their websites, such as crawl errors, broken links, and malicious content. Additionally, it offers advice on improving visibility in search engine results, tools to submit sitemaps, creating robots.txt files, and much more.
Let us now explore how GSC can help publishers to enhance their website(s).
Publishers make data-backed decisions to improve website. GSC offer insights for publishers by analyzing the website’s performance in organic search results, tracking keyword rankings, and diagnosing any potential website issues.
It can provide detailed data on the number of clicks, impressions, average position of your website on search engine result pages (SERPs), and more. This includes (but is not limited to) —
To set up Google Search Console, you first need to create a Google account.
Then, sign into the GSC website with your account and click on the “Add a property” button.
Enter your website URL and follow the verification steps.
For this —
Submit your website to GSC: Submitting your website to Google Search Console is an important step to ensure that Google (and other search engines) finds and reads your website. This will allow you to monitor and fix any potential indexing issues.
Create a sitemap: A sitemap is a file that lists all the URLs of your website along with other metadata about those URLs, such as how often they are updated, how important they are, and how they relate to other pages on your website.
Creating a sitemap and submitting it to Google Search Console ensures that Google finds and reads your pages. In turn, this help them populate results when the user runs a search query on search engines.
Leveraging Google News sitemap: A Google News sitemap ensures that Google’s search engine is aware of your news content (that website publishes) and can display it in their search results.
To submit your sitemap to Google News —
Explore Google Search Console by familiarizing yourself with the tool’s features and understanding how to access and interpret the data.
Leverage various reports available in the tool to better understand the website’s performance in the SERPs. It offers a range of features that help track and monitor a website’s performance over time and identify potential problems hindering its growth.
Let’s explore some.
The Overview section of Google Search Console includes information about your website’s clicks, impressions, click-through rate (CTR), and average position in Google Search results.
It also includes links to other sections of the Search Console, such as the Performance report, Coverage report, and Enhancements report. You can avail information on any recent manual actions, crawl errors, and security issues, allowing webmasters to quickly address issues affecting the site’s performance.
URL inspection
The URL Inspection tool provides detailed insights into how Google sees a URL on your website. It helps one understand how their website is indexed and crawled by Google, enabling webmasters to test how Google renders the page.
The tool will display an overview of the URL, including its indexing status, potential errors, and information about how the page is structured and linked. This is invaluable information since it helps identify issues impacting the website’s search engine visibility.
The URL inspection tool also allows webmasters to submit a URL for indexing. It is useful if any new content is added to a website and needs to be included in Google’s search results. Also, you can quickly submit the URL and get an immediate response about its indexing status.
Below are some of the common URL statuses found in GSC—
“It can appear in Google Search results (if not subject to a manual action or removal request) with all relevant enhancements.”
Status interpretation—
Your URL has no issues.
“It can appear in Google Search results (if not subject to a manual action or removal request) with all relevant enhancements. However, some issues prevent it from being eligible for all enhancements.”
Status interpretation —
Google scanned and indexed your URL but detected some enhancement concerns. They may appear completely, partly, or do not appear at all depending on enhancement difficulties.
“This page is not in the index, but not because of an error. See the details below to learn why it wasn’t indexed.”
Status Interpretation—
Google crawled your URL but found that indexing it was certainly not your objective. It may assume so because it was forbidden in robots.txt, behind HTTP auth, or had a no-index directive.
“It cannot appear in Google Search results until it’s indexed.”
Status Interpretation—
Indexing issues prevented Google from indexing your URL. If the URL returned 4xx or 5xx, it would have this status. Google won’t index this URL.
Request Indexing
Getting Google to index your site is a great option. Simply find the URL in question using the URL inspector, and then choose “Request Indexing” from the drop-down menu.
Performance in Google Search Console is a powerful option for website owners and SEO professionals to monitor and improve a website’s visibility. It provides valuable insights into how your website performs in organic search and which queries drive traffic through key
It shows the total clicks, impressions, and click-through rate (CTR) for your website’s organic search results over a specified period.
Let’s explore what it includes.
Google Search Console’s Search Results feature monitors a website’s search engine performance. It lets users measure impressions, clicks, and average position to evaluate their organic search results.
Search Results lets users see improvement potential by monitoring the top performing pages, identifying the same based on good and poor click-through rates, and analyzing manual website punishments.
Dimensions: Dimensions are attributes of your data. They describe the characteristics of the data collected in your reports. For example, in Google Search Console, dimensions may include device, browser, query, date, and device.
Metrics: Metrics are units of measurement. They measure the numerical value of the data collected in your reports. For example, in Google Search Console, metrics may include clicks, impressions, and click-through rates.
Key metrics in search results —
Clicks: Clicks are an important metric for assessing the performance of your website in the search engine, as they indicate whether or not users are engaging with the search results.
Impressions: Impressions provide insight into the visibility of your website within the search engine. Understanding these metrics is essential for optimizing your website for search engine rankings.
Average CTR: The average click-through rate (CTR) is the ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view a page, email, or advertisement. It is commonly used to measure the success of an online advertising campaign for a particular website and the effectiveness of email campaigns.
The average CTR can vary greatly depending on the advertisement’s industry, placement, and targeting but generally ranges from 0.35-0.5% for display ads and 4-6% for search ads.
Average Position: Average Position in Google Search Console is a metric that indicates the average ranking of a website in Google’s search results for a particular query. This metric can measure a website’s performance and compare it to other websites in the same niche.
It is also an essential metric for SEO professionals and webmasters since it helps them identify areas of improvement and develop strategies to increase rankings.
Discover is a Google Search feature that helps users stay informed on topics they care about without needing a query. Available in the Google app, on the Google.com mobile homepage, and Pixel phones (swipe right from the home screen), Discover has grown since launching in 2017.
It now has over 800M monthly active users exploring new content, such as articles, videos, recipes, human interest stories, and more. Users can follow topics directly or let Google know if they’d like more/less of a specific topic.
Discover traffic with stats to answer questions like—
This report helps optimize your content strategy, making it easier for users to find engaging, evergreen, and new information.
The Google News Performance Report in Search Console provides helpful insights about your website’s performance in Google News.
The report will include impressions, clicks, and CTR to help publishers answer questions like how often their content appears in Google News, which articles perform best, and knowing user behavior by country.
This report can help understand how many clicks and impressions your articles have received, what types of searches are bringing users to your content, and how relevant and timely your content is to readers.
If the Google crawler [has visited a website, parsed its content and meaning, and added it to Google’s index, then we say that page has been “indexed” by Google. If Google indexes a page, it may appear in the search engine’s results (if the webmaster follows Google’s recommendations).
Here’s what it can index.
Sign into your Google Search Console account to see the Index Coverage (Page indexing) report. Then, go to the Index area and click “Pages” on the left.
Access the timeline to understand the patterns around changing numbers of indexed pages. The report shows up to 1,000 URLs and may or may not include new ones added after the last crawl.
To inspect a URL, choose it from the list and click Inspect URL on the right panel.
You can also check the not indexed pages section that displays the reason, source, and the number of affected pages for a given status, plus an option to validate the fix after addressing it. Click on the issue to view it.
Google has added a Video Indexing report to Search Console to help you understand how your videos perform in search results. It makes it easy to identify and fix issues preventing them from surfacing in Google Search and answers questions such as —
Use the Sitemaps report to submit new sitemaps, view submission history, and check for errors. It shows sitemaps submitted or the API, not reports discovered through robots.txt or other discovery methods.
Submitting a sitemap that Google has already discovered helps track success and error rates.
Key aspects to consider when fetching data for sitemap report —
1. Confirm sitemaps in the current property — HTTP/HTTPS, www or non-www.
2. If a sitemap cannot be read after several attempts, fix errors and resubmit.
3. Image, video, or news URLs may be submitted in sitemaps but are not currently displayed in a report.
4. There is a maximum size of 50MB (uncompressed) or 50,000 URLs for a single sitemap in all formats.
The Removals report in Search Console allows site owners to hide a page from Google Search results temporarily. It also provides info on pages reported via other Google public tools, such as temporary removals, outdated content, and SafeSearch filtering requests.
Temporary Removals: Submit a temporary removal request to hide URLs from Google Search results for up to six months. Two types are available — ‘Temporary remove URL’ and ‘Clear cache URL.’ The former hides the URL, while the latter clears the cached page and wipes out the page description snippet until re-crawled.
Page experience is a metric that evaluates the user’s perceptions when interacting with a web page. It covers mobile and desktop devices, taking into account the information found on the page and how users experience it.
The Page Experience report summarizes visitors’ user experience of your site, which Google will use as a ranking signal for URLs in Search results.
This report provides a comprehensive overview of your Core Web Vitals data. Click on it to see the performance of each type of URL, plus details on any issues found.
To review Core Web Vitals data, click the report. You will see a window with numbers for “good,” “needs improvement,” and “poor” URLs. The Details section shows the types of issues and how many URLs are affected by each. Click on any issue to view a sample of impacted URLs.
The Mobile Usability report reveals usability issues on pages of your website when viewed on mobile devices. It also provides advice on how to enhance the mobile user experience.
This report contains the following errors—
Incompatible plugins: The page includes plugins, like Flash, that are not supported by most mobile browsers.
Content wider than displayable area: Horizontal scrolling is required to see text and images on the page since their absolute values are in CSS declarations. These images are designed to look best at a specific browser width (such as 980px).
Text too small to read: A large portion of the text on the page is too small in comparison to the width of the page, making it hard for mobile users to read. Examine the test screenshot for your device to spot any problem areas.
Viewport not adjusted for different screen sizes: The page does not define a viewport property, so browsers need to adjust the page’s dimensions and scale to fit the screen size.
Clickable elements too close together: Touch elements, such as buttons and navigational links, are positioned so close together that it can be difficult for a user on a mobile device to accurately tap their desired element without pressing an adjacent one.
In Google Search Console, website owners can check the status of their site’s HTTPS implementation. This includes verifying whether or not the site is properly secured with an SSL certificate, checking if the certificate is up to date, and monitoring any potential vulnerabilities that malicious attackers could exploit.
You can also submit the website to be indexed through the “Fetch as Google” tool in Google Search Console. Through this tool, website owners can ensure that their site is properly indexed with HTTPS rather than just HTTP.
The Shopping tab in Google Search Console is a powerful tool for ecommerce businesses. It helps to track the performance of product listings on Google Shopping, monitor product visibility and exposure, manage product listing ads, and track the effectiveness of campaigns.
Marketers often use this to monitor ad your campaigns’ success by tracking campaign metrics such as budget spent, conversions generated, and cost-per-conversion. This makes it easy to understand campaigns’ effectiveness and make any necessary adjustments.
Product snippets provide an overview of the performance of a product listing to view details about each listing, such as item title, description, availability, and price. This information is useful for making changes and improving the visibility of a product listing in search results. Get provides valuable insights into the performance of product listings, that help your business to make more informed decisions for marketing and product offerings.
Merchants can create a Merchant Center account using a simple guided sign-up without re-verifying website ownership. This allows updating product-based structured data without submitting a product feed.
This streamlined process will get items on Google Shopping quicker and help companies reach shoppers. Connecting your Merchant Center account to Search Console lets you get detailed insights about how products appear for searches on Google Shopping.
Enhancements provide feedback on the performance of your AMP sites and structured data. The desired outcome is to get a message stating, “No Error Codes Found.”
The “Enhancements” option in the left menu bar has all the available tools and reports.
Quick and simple to deploy, Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) consolidate all the advantages of mobile search results into a single strategy. There will be a noticeable increase in website load speed, server efficiency, and mobile search engine rankings.
The GSC AMP report lets you track AMP pages and offer three crucial reports —
Google reports AMP difficulties to site owners, and the performance report may restrict AMP results.
Find and solve problems that are slowing down your search results with the help of the Enhancements reports. You may improve your chances of finding relevant search results by verifying patches, reviewing the support documentation, and checking the problems.
Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content. Search engines can use such data to understand the page better, and it can also help enhance how the page appears in search results. Structured data can be applied in a variety of ways, including—
Additionally, structured data can be used to help optimize a website for voice search by providing information that can be used by voice assistants to answer questions about the website.
Google has made the Security and Manual Action Reports available to you to deal with potential punishments or security problems.
GSC’s Security and Manual Actions options are accessible from the sidebar.
If human reviewers at Google determine that individual pages on your site do not meet its quality requirements, they will take manual action. You may find these reports under the not-very-detailed Security and Manual Actions menu.
Suppose Google takes manual action against your site, you may analyze the report, fix the problems, and look for a reconsideration.
By navigating to Security & Manual Actions > Security, you can check for any security issues with your site. If there are no issues, you’ll see a green check mark, letting you know that you don’t have any problems.
However, if there are any threats present on your website, then it’s likely that you’ll need help from an antivirus specialist to sort out the issue.
Links report provides web admins with a comprehensive overview of their website’s incoming links. It includes information about the total number of links, the domains linking to your website, the anchor texts used in the link, and more.
The information you can find within the report includes, but is not limited to, the following—
Google Search Console provides a variety of settings that can be used to customize how users access and interact with your website. These settings allow you to control how Google crawls and indexes your website and how it appears in search engine results pages (SERPs).
It includes—
We’ll discuss the Crawl function since it helps get data about how often Google has crawled your site in the Crawl Stats report. This analysis shows the number of URLs crawled within a specific period, the time spent downloading a page, and the amount of KBs downloaded (often used by the backend team). You need not worry about this report if your site has fewer than a thousand pages.
Google Search Console help you to manage your site’s crawl speed and frequency. The crawl speed is the rate at which Googlebot visits your site, and the frequency is how often it visits. To adjust the crawl speed and frequency, go to Google Search Console and click on the ‘Crawl’ tab. You’ll be taken to a page where you can set your desired crawl speed and frequency. You can also change the number of simultaneous requests Googlebot makes to your site.
Crawl rate refers to the number of times per second that Googlebot requests your site while it is crawling it. You have little control over the frequency with which Google crawls your site, but you may ask for a recrawl of your site if you’ve made significant changes.
You may slow down Google’s crawling of your site if it’s taking too long because the search engine is making too many queries per second to your server.
Root sites like www.abc.com and http://subdomain.abc.com have a crawl rate that may be capped. The maximum pace of crawling you provide is the rate at which Googlebot should crawl your site. You should know that this is not a promise that Googlebot will achieve this speed. Here’s a tool to get started.
Here are a few quick ways to limit crawling immediately—
Testing the robots.txt file helps check if it is preventing the crawler from accessing a certain URL on your site. Use this tool to see whether the Googlebot-Picture crawler can access the URL of an image you want to remove from Google Image Search, for instance.
Google Search Console offers a range of comprehensive reports on website issues. It also outlines which pages have technical or page-level SEO components that require your attention.
The following are just some of the reports that GSC generates to aid in this process—
When you ask Google to delete a link from its index, it will only do so temporarily. After six months, Google will delete it from its index entirely, including its snippet and cached versions, before recrawling the site if the URL reappears. This will block the page from indexing, and removing it from the site requires permanently removing URLs.
Once the URL is removed, it will no longer appear in search results. This is a great way to keep the site’s content fresh and relevant to ensure visitors only see the most relevant information when searching for topics or products related to the website.
By analyzing a single URL, you can gain valuable insights into how their content is performing, including any potential issues affecting its visibility in search engine results. This can help identify problems that need to be addressed, such as broken links, duplicate content, incorrect titles, and meta descriptions.
To do so, copy & paste the URL into the top bar or on the URL inspection dashboard. Allow Google time to render the data, then analyze how Google sees the URL. Possible issues could be the page not being indexed, mobile-friendly, having good page experience/structured data, or being valid for AMP. This function is useful when working with product/site teams to improve article pages.
Google Search Console is an invaluable tool for monitoring the health of your website and ensuring it is visible to users on the web. Website owners need to know how Search Console can help them improve their visibility and ranking in Google search results.
Use the available features that help your website, from monitoring indexing, analyzing links, testing structured data, and much more. Website owners can ensure that their website reaches the right audience and achieves its full potential.
Additionally, it is best to regularly monitor the website’s performance to identify any issues that need to be addressed. Taking these steps will enable website owners to maximize their visibility on Google and improve their overall search engine optimization
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