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Google Search Console (formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools) is a free suite of tools that anyone can use to enhance their website and potentially improve SEO. If you are creating your first website or looking to push forward to the next level this is a fantastic starting point.
We get that it can be daunting to know where to start when looking at SEO and without the help of an SEO consultant you may feel overwhelmed. By using a tool like Google Search Console you can ease yourself into the world of SEO and make small but important changes to your website without too much effort.
But what exactly can you expect from this Google product and why is it important? To help, we share our experiences and show seven vital things that Google Search Console does.
It’s the simple things that are often overlooked with web design and SEO but these typically have a huge impact! Something as basic as missing a META description tag could completely derail your SEO strategy for a particular keyword for example.
With Google Search Console you don’t have to worry about this anymore as it highlights simple HTML errors so you can make quick changes.
It shows important SEO features like META title and description tags, image ALT tags, and the correct labeling of headings. By perfecting basic SEO like this you can then push on to more complex and rewarding processes.
Creating a link portfolio and internal link strategy helps greatly with SEO but it can be tricky knowing where to start. How do you know which pages are linked? What about external websites that link back to you?
These are all things you can monitor with the Google Search Console link reports. Want to know if you have any high-quality website backlinks? Of course – just jump onto the link reports and Google shows you this data!
Using this info you can then look to find new link opportunities, remove outdated ones, and asses the internal structure of your website.
We get that running a business and maintaining a website is tough and this can result in things being overlooked.
Google Search Console aims to give you a helping hand and make your job easier via its handy error messages and notifications.
You can configure the console to email you notifications of critical site problems like security threats and crawling issues. When these notifications pop up in your inbox you can then take immediate action and keep your website running optimally.
A simple aspect of Google Search Console is its traffic monitoring. As a business it’s important that you understand how, where, and when people are accessing your website and the console lets you see this.
There is a complete section for traffic monitoring and you can get some fantastic insight from the reports generated.
You might want to know which are the most popular search queries people use to find your site for example. This is just one of the many statistics you can find together with things like top-ranked pages and user demographics.
Did you know that approximately 50% of web browsing is done via smartphones? While desktops and laptops are still used, it’s clear that smartphones are the way forward and your website has to reflect this.
Indeed Google previously had a mobile-friendly update that gave more weight in rankings to mobile-optimized sites.
By using Google Search Console you can see any mobile display issues that could affect usability. These include things like incorrect font sizes, overlapping touchscreen elements, and resizing issues. With this data in mind you can then look at improving the mobile responsiveness of your website.
Search engines index your web pages via crawlers – I like to think of these as little virtual spiders that scuttle along the “webs” of your website hierarchy to find information and links.
Sometimes those little crawlers might reach a dead end in your link structure or notice a page that cannot be accessed.
These instances are logged as crawl errors and you can monitor and fix them using the Google Search Console to make sure all of your website is crawler-friendly. This is an important process as you always want to make the crawler’s job easier so your site can be indexed quicker and more effectively.
After you have made all these changes and improvements you need some way of monitoring the progress to see if there is any difference.
You can do this using Google Search Console as it gives you an ample amount of index data. Want to see how many of your web pages have been indexed by Google? No problem – just access the relative dashboard and you can see everything in an easy-to-understand format.
Perhaps you need to check that “no follow” pages have not been indexed as desired? Simple! The Google Index report also shows important data like this.
Out of all the available SEO tools Google Search Console is one of the first we recommend. Its integration with other Google tools and its insight into how Google crawls and ranks pages is invaluable.
We get that it may seem overwhelming initially, but don’t panic – take it one step at a time and look at the different tools within the console. You can then pick out the most important ones for your business and spend time improving your website accordingly.
Joshua George is the founder of ClickSlice, an SEO Agency based in London, UK.
He has eight years of experience as an SEO Consultant and was recently hired by the UK government for SEO training. Joshua also owns the best-selling SEO course on Udemy, and has taught SEO to over 100,000 students.
His work has been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, AgencyAnalytics, Wix and lots more other reputable publications.
We have seen time and time again where a business creates a website and expects it to perform without any aftercare and maintenance. Sadly this doesn’t usually work and there is a lot more work to do once your carpet cleaning website is up and running.
For it to truly make an impact and attract new clients for your business you have to be proactive and monitor its performance. Luckily there is a wave of amazing tools available that allow you to do this and one of the best-known is Google Analytics.
In this article we give you an intro to Google Analytics and describe five of the most important metrics that you can monitor to boost the performance of your carpet cleaning website.
We could spend hours talking about the different metrics Google Analytics has and it is one of the most in-depth tools available for carpet cleaner SEO.
To give you a head start, however, and allow you to make an immediate improvement to your carpet cleaning website we have chosen five particular metrics that we know will help the most.
A high bounce rate is when a person visits just one page on your website and immediately leaves. You do not want this and instead, you want visitors to check out all your content and spend a decent amount of time on your site.
The longer they stay the more chance you have of getting a new client! Google Analytics provides bounce rate data so you can see which pages are performing poorly and need improvement.
Loading speeds can have an impact on your carpet cleaner SEO and visitor experience. Google generally factors page loading speeds when ranking websites. But you don’t want to annoy your customers by having a website that takes forever to load either!
Google Analytics has a section dedicated to loading speeds so you can see which pages and content are slowing you down.
One of the most basic metrics Google Analytics offers is page views and this is a great starting point. Are visitors checking out your services pages? Or are they simply looking at your homepage?
Maybe a high percentage of people are using the contact page to get in touch with you. This might seem like simple data but it helps show which pages are the most successful and you can then try to replicate what made them successful for your other content.
Your carpet cleaning business most likely covers a specific region within the UK such as a county or city. You, therefore, need to know if you are attracting visitors from that region or if people are coming from parts of the country that you simply wouldn’t service.
Google Analytics has a range of demographic metrics so you can see where people are accessing your website from. This is incredibly useful and can help see if your localized keywords and SEO are working.
It’s also vital to know where your customers are coming from if you are running things like paid adverts and social media campaigns. Google Analytics can show this and allows you to see how many people are visiting your website from SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), and adverts.
The more you can understand your website and visitors, the more efficient you can make it and Google Analytics is a primary way to do this. As you can see from the above it provides a wealth of useful metrics that you can use to tailor your web content and attract more customers.
Joshua George is the founder of ClickSlice, an SEO Agency based in London, UK.
He has eight years of experience as an SEO Consultant and was recently hired by the UK government for SEO training. Joshua also owns the best-selling SEO course on Udemy, and has taught SEO to over 100,000 students.
His work has been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, AgencyAnalytics, Wix and lots more other reputable publications.
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