How Google Search Console Can Help You Rank Higher on Google

SEO is not an easy game, mainly if you are trying to increase ranking your website on Google. From keyword research, to content optimization, there are plenty of ways. Yet, did you know there’s a free tool that can give you real time insights into how your website is performing on Google Search? Go into Google Search Console (GSC).

If you want to improve your website’s SEO, you will need to rely on Google Search Console. This makes available valuable Google data directly from Google, making it easy to monitor, keep, and fix your site’s job in search results. Read on in this blog post where we cover what Google Search Console is, how it works and most importantly, how it can help you boost your Google rankings.

What Is Google Search Console?

If you already own a website, there is a free Google Search Console tool that helps webmasters, SEO professionals, and website owners alike: Google Search Console. It is a treasure pot of information regarding your site’s impressions, performance and indexing glitches, and cannot be overlooked for your site to rank higher in the search engines.

Google Search Console doesn’t directly affect how it ranks, you (no pun intended) can’t just plug it in and boom your rankings go up (which I probably shouldn’t have said), but the data they provide can absolutely help you make the changes that need to be made to improve your website’s SEO. It’s a diagnostic tool that basically helps to find improvement areas and fix them before they start taking a toll over your rankings.

Key Feature of Google Search Console

To understand how Google Search Console can help improve your rankings, let’s take a closer look at some of the most important features of the tool:

1. Performance Report

GSC’s Performance Report is the heart of the tool. Sitemaps provides you with insights about your website’s performance in Google Search, as well as about clicks, impressions, click-through rate (CTR), and average position.

Here’s what you can track:

Total Clicks: This is the number of radiuses your pages got clicked on in Google Search results.
Total Impressions: This tells you how often your pages appeared on search results.
Average CTR: It is the percentage that produced click through to your site.
Average Position: From this we can see how average your website’s position in the search results for certain keywords.

Using these metrics, you state to be able to determine what pages and queries are giving you the most traffic, what you could be missing, and how you are going to optimize your SEO.

2. Index Coverage Report

Index coverage report will give you a total overview of which pages on your website has been indexed by google and the ones that have faced obstacles. Even if the content on a page is brilliant, if Google can’t index it, that page will never show up in search results. The report will help you identify:

Pages that could not be indexed because of errors (e.g. 404 errors, soft 404 errors, redirects).
Pages that the robot has blocked due to having robots.txt tags or noindex tags.
Pages where using structured data simply does not work out.

Preparing your website for indexing in Google Search involves these three areas: rearranging your site, making use of robots.txt, and using rel= canonical to create the potential for a better index coverage.

3. URL Inspection Tool

We have a tool that lets you check a specific URL of your website to find if they are indexed or not, what their status is, and if there are any blockages that shouldn’t allow their content to be crawled properly. The URL Inspection Tool provides a wealth of information, such as:

The search has returned and whether or not Google has indexed the page.
If the page was recently crawled by Googlebot.
Errors caused by the page prevent it from being indexed (i.e. crawl errors, noindex, etc).

This tool lets you request Google to revisit a page if you’ve made changes and want to see whether those changes have been seen by Google.

4. Mobile Usability Report

However, since Google’s transition to mobile-first indexing where they predominantly index and rank the mobile version of your site, it is nearly always essential to directly serve a mobile version of your site. The rankings of your site will be affected if it is not optimized for mobile devices. The Mobile Usability Report shows any issues with your site’s mobile usability, such as:

Text that can not be read.
Too close together links.
Content larger than the screen, and therefore horizontal scrolling.

By fixing these things, you are more likely to trade for a much better mobile user experience, which can also boost your rankings with the mobile first indexing pivot.

5. Core Web Vitals Report

Google’s Core Web Vitals is a set of user experience metrics that measure loading performance, interactivity and visual stability. Then GSC gives a report about how your website performs in these areas. Your core web vitals matter, and not in a good way, as Google is placing increasing emphasis on user experience. The three main metrics are:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures loading performance.
First Input Delay (FID): Measures interactivity.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures visual stability.

Once you address performance issues flagged by the Core Web Vitals report, you can enhance your site user experience, and your SEO efforts will also benefit.

6. Links Report

Backlinks (links from other sites to your site) are by far the most important ranking factor. The Links Report in GSC shows you:

External links: How is your site linked from everywhere else and where are the most backlinks coming from.
Internal links: From these pages, how many additional internal links are they generating.

This data can help you determine where you can also get more backlinks from highly reputable sites, improve on internal linking strategy and make sure your backlink profile is organic.

How Google Search Console Can Help With Your Rankings

With GSC basics out of the way, let’s dig into how you can leverage the tool to rank your site better.

1. Find Crawling and Indexing problems.

If your site can’t be crawled or indexed properly by Google, your pages won’t show up in search results. Monitoring Index Coverage reports on a regular basis will help you find and fix crawling and indexing issues so Google can index all of the important pages. These issues can be fixed right away and immediately boost your site’s visibility in search results.

2. Optimise Your Content to Keywords

GSC’s Performance Report will outline those keywords that are functioning well and those that aren’t. You can understand which search queries drive people to your content, how the landing pages are doing, and what pages could do better. However, you can increase your CTR for these queries by making small changes to your content — optimizing it for the right queries, and improving your meta titles and descriptions.

3. Fix Mobile Usability Issues

With Google’s mobile first indexing it’s essential your website is mobile friendly. Mobile Usability Report helps you measure the issues with your site’s mobile version and then fix it in just minutes. Not only that, but having a smooth mobile experience will improve your rankings, decrease bounce rates, and increase engagement.

4. Core Web Vitals will help you improve Page Experience

With emphasis on user experience, Google takes poor performing pages and downgrades them. You can use the Core Web Vitals report in GSC to put actionable data on how your site performs as experienced by the user. In doing so, you can just improve loading times, interactivity, visual stability, and immensely improve the user experience, and in turn, your chances of ranking higher.

5. Strong Backlink Profile

One of the top ranking factors for Google is backlinks but Google provides you with the ability to monitor your backlinks by using the Links Report in GSC. If you can find high quality backlinks and get more links from trustworthy websites, you can improve your site authority and thus its ranking. The keyword here is checking this report regularly; it will keep you in the loop on whether your backlink profile remains strong and stay natural.

Conclusion

It is always with great pleasure that we mention Google Search Console because it is an essential tool for any budding SEO. It doesn’t directly influence rankings, however the data and the insights it provides are a must have for looking into how your website is doing in search results, and where can you enhance it to enhance your rankings. The best chance for your website to rank high on Google is to monitor your performance regularly, fix crawling and indexing issues, improve mobile usability and core web vitals, and build a solid backlink profile.

Simply put, Google Search Console is the road map for a properly optimised website. Some of your insights will be up to you to use to make those changes that will get your site to the top of the search results.

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How Google Search Console Can Help You Rank Higher on Google

What Is Google Search Console?