Google Search Console is a powerful resource that helps business owners, marketers, and SEO professionals improve their site’s visibility and attract more organic traffic. Despite its popularity, the platform’s interface can be challenging to navigate, leading to a surge in “how to use google search console” searches.

Search volume trends from 2017-2021 for ‘how to use google search console.’” Understanding how to use Google Search Console effectively the right way is crucial for extracting actionable insights from its data and enhancing your SEO approach. This article outlines four methods to leverage this free tool to boost rankings, attract traffic, and create high-quality content. You’ll discover how to:

1. Ensure Google comprehends the relevance of your content.
2. Verify Google’s efficient crawling and indexing of your web pages.
3. Resolve technical and page performance issues.
4. Conduct SEO A/B tests using GSC’s daily rank tracking.

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a free service that empowers marketers and SEO experts to monitor and analyze their SEO progress. Users can identify and address technical and performance issues, making their websites more search-engine friendly.

Search performance metrics in Google Search Console Apart from being free, it offers the most detailed and real-time SEO data available.

How to use Google Search Console (overview)

Regular use of GSC is crucial for any digital marketing plan. Google continuously refines Search Console, improving its dashboard and providing in-depth search engine performance data. While features have evolved, the platform’s objective remains: guiding businesses, marketers, and SEO experts on enhancing SEO, both technically and content-wise. Here’s a high-level overview of using Google Search Console for SEO:

• Monitor keyword rankings, impressions, organic traffic, average position, and click-through rate (CTR).
• Comprehend index coverage and ensure proper indexing by Google’s crawlers.
• Submit sitemaps, disavow files, and removals.
• Detect and address page experience, Core Web Vitals, or mobile usability problems.
• Confirm Google’s recognition of schema.org markup for rich results.
• View security issues or manual actions identified by Google.
• Examine backlink data: total external links, internal links, top linked pages, top linking sites, and anchor text distribution. These actions are crucial for understanding and boosting your SEO performance. Effective SEO is vital for various marketing goals, including increasing traffic and conversions, building brand reputation, understanding your audience, and expanding your online footprint. Are you missing SEO opportunities? Find out fast with the free LOCALiQ website grader!

Google Search Console vs. other keyword tracking platforms

Many marketers use platforms like Ahrefs and SEMrush for keyword ranking information. These tools are helpful for competitive analysis, but their data, obtained by scraping SERPs, can be incomplete and outdated. These tools only capture a fraction (30-40%) of your total keyword rankings because they crawl a limited number of SERPs infrequently. For instance, compare the keyword rankings identified by Ahrefs with LinkGraph’s GSC Insights (using Google’s API) for the same site.

This highlights a substantial difference in keyword ranking data. When seeking SEO truth, Google’s dataset reigns supreme. Why is understanding all keyword rankings crucial? Every relevant keyword query is a chance to acquire new customers and clients.

How to use Google Search Console to drive more traffic to your site

Occasional check-ins to your Google Search Console dashboard to view impressions and clicks won’t unlock its full potential. Here’s how to leverage Google Search Console effectively and translate its data into strategic optimization decisions.

1. Quickly verify Google’s understanding of your targeted keywords

Regularly publishing high-quality content showcasing your brand’s expertise in your niche is the optimal strategy to expand your website’s keyword rankings.

Instead of a month-long wait, Google Search Console offers a faster way to confirm your content’s effectiveness and its ranking for target search terms. Follow these steps for each published content piece:

1. Select a relevant keyword target or cluster for the page to rank for.
2. Optimize your content for that target keyword.
3. Publish the content on your website.
4. After a few days, check if Google understands your content’s relevance and displays it in SERPs for relevant keywords. For example, we published a blog comparing keyword tracking software accuracy and features. We optimized it for the phrase “accurate SEO rank tracking.” A few days later, Google Search Console revealed over a thousand impressions for “accurate SEO rank tracking” and hundreds for 256 other related keywords.

With daily keyword ranking updates in Google Search Console, we quickly confirmed our content optimization’s success. Knowing it ranked for relevant keywords, we could focus on other SEO factors to boost its position for those queries. If your content isn’t ranking well (or at all) for your target keywords, Google might not find it relevant or high-quality. Here’s what to do:

• Review your metadata: Ensure SEO-friendly page titles, meta descriptions, and tags, incorporating your target keywords.
• Revise content: Optimize headings and subheadings for keywords, enhance topical depth, and enrich it with semantically related terms.
• Use a content tool: Leverage tools like the free offerings from LinkGraph, CognitiveSEO, or LSIGraph to enhance your writing with powerful terms.
• Build site authority: If your site lacks authority for SERP rankings, focus on backlinking to improve it. Your content efforts deserve to pay off. Ensure it ranks for relevant queries, generating impressions and organic traffic. Google Search Console offers the quickest way to verify your pages’ performance.

2. Ensure Google properly crawls and indexes your web pages

For your pages to rank for relevant search queries, search engine spiders must crawl and index them.

Google Search Console helps you track which pages are indexed, their last crawl date, and any identified enhancements (breadcrumbs, sitelinks) influencing SERP appearance. Here’s why this is important for marketers and SEOs aiming to boost elevate their overall SEO performance:

1. Google considers on-page optimizations only after recrawling the page. Confirm the impact of your changes after Google acknowledges them!
2. For websites with numerous landing pages, you might exhaust your crawl budget. Guide Google to crawl crucial pages by using robots tags with “noindex, nofollow” directives on low-value pages!
3. Enhancements improve your pages’ SERP clickability. When adding schema.org markup for rich results, ensure its correct implementation and SERP visibility! For greater control over Google’s promotion of your pages, submit a sitemap via Google Search Console. This indicates the most important pages for frequent crawling and promotion.

3. Resolve technical and page performance issues

Relevant, high-quality content isn’t enough for optimal ranking in Google. Your website’s technical aspects significantly influence Google’s trust and visitor perception. Google favors responsive, fast-loading pages offering a positive experience to users arriving from search results.

Troubleshooting technical issues can be daunting, especially without extensive backend knowledge. Google Search Console simplifies this, helping site owners identify and address problems affecting keyword rankings and positions. Google’s algorithm considers these signals for gauging webpage experience:

• Core Web Vitals: This encompasses site speed, load times, interactivity, and visual stability.
• Mobile Usability: With mobile-first indexing, Google prioritizes responsive, fast-loading, high-performing mobile pages.
• Security: Safe browsing and a secure environment are crucial for web pages.
• HTTPS: HTTPS, being more secure than HTTP, is preferred. Excessive HTTP URLs can hinder SEO performance due to lack of encryption. The Experience section in Google Search Console highlights any shortcomings in these areas, specifying the problems and affected pages. For instance, this site has 109+ pages flagged for poor page experience. Resolving these technical issues is crucial for improving SEO and organic traffic.

If you encounter similar page experience metrics in your Google Search Console, take these steps:

• Pinpoint the flagged page and the specific error.

• Relay this information to your web developer or whoever manages your website’s backend.

• After resolving the issue, use the “Validate Fix” feature in Google Search Console to confirm.

  

• You’ll receive confirmation of your submission. Google takes approximately 28 days to confirm issue resolution.

Addressing technical and page performance issues promptly is essential. While other tools exist, Google Search Console provides the most direct guidance. Regular SEO audits are crucial for maintaining a healthy website “under the hood.”

4. Run SEO A/B tests using Google Search Console’s daily rank tracking

Once your pages are ranking for relevant keywords and meet Google’s standards for performance, security, and usability, leverage Google Search Console to A/B test optimizations for improving average keyword positions. With daily keyword tracking, you can quickly gauge the effectiveness of your optimizations. To conduct a split test in Google Search Console:

1. Choose a page and a single variant to test. Testing multiple variants simultaneously makes it difficult to isolate the successful change.
2. Implement your optimization (page title, internal links, web design, meta description, etc.).
3. Wait 7-10 days.
4. Analyze Google Search Console data for improvements in impressions, average position, clicks, or CTR. For example, our content team aimed to improve rankings for a long-form article by increasing word count and topical depth (from 1500 to 4000+ words). The update was made on December 29th, 2020. Here are the page’s Google Search Console metrics for the following six months.

Google’s positive response to our changes was evident. Within a week, impressions surged by 420% and the average position improved by 20+ places. We replicated this content length change on other pages with similar success. While Google Search Console simplifies split test analysis, it lacks optimization tracking. Consider tools like GSC Insights or Rank Science, which offer both keyword tracking and SEO A/B testing features.

SEO A/B Test Tracking in Google Search Console Insights Google Search Console is invaluable for identifying optimizations that yield tangible ranking and impression improvements. Replicate these successful changes across your site.

How to use Google Search Console for better SEO [recap]

Each relevant keyword query is a potential customer touchpoint. For website optimization and SEO strategy evaluation, Google Search Console’s data accuracy and scope are unparalleled. While Google keeps its algorithms closely guarded, Search Console provides clear guidance on areas for improvement. Analyzing and acting on this data is crucial for boosting online visibility. Neglecting your Google Search Console account means missing out on a comprehensive understanding of your website’s performance. Here’s how to maximize Google Search Console’s benefits:

1. Quickly confirm Google’s understanding of your content’s keyword relevance, enabling further optimization for broader search queries.
2. Prioritize crucial pages for Google’s crawlers to boost their ranking potential and enable rich results.
3. Utilize Google Search Console’s direct guidance to troubleshoot and resolve page experience issues.
4. Conduct SEO split tests to identify and replicate successful optimizations across multiple pages.