We’ll share the reasons why Google’s Search Console offers value for your business.

 

 

Your guide to Google Search Console

Are you looking to build awareness of your brand and boost the number of leads you receive? Perhaps you wish that your business website could rank higher on Google search engine results pages? Maybe you are looking to rebrand or redesign your current site.

Google Search Console is the answer you’ve been looking for. As a free tool for website owners, it rivals its paid competitors with the range of insights shown. Keen to shine a light on Search Console’s potential to move you up Google’s results pages, we’ve created a helpful introductory guide.

What is Google Search Console?

Google’s Search Console is the ‘employee’ you didn’t know your business needed –  minus the monthly employment costs. As the dominant search engine, Google offers this free suite of tools to website owners, across self-hosted and web-hosting platforms. This includes WordPress – our preferred website builder.

Once you have successfully verified your ownership, Search Console will then do several things:

• Track your website for its search engine performance
• Identify issues and what could be improved
• Improve your site’s SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

Used as a maintenance strategy, Search Console is an effective way to identify, anticipate and fix issues that will affect where you appear in Google SERPs. Issues such as missing sitemaps, broken backlinks and malware issues can be highlighted and then resolved.

Google wants to bring value to those using its search engine by suggesting relevant web pages that can help them solve their query or issue. Helping to secure its popularity and demonstrate its usefulness, this relevancy contributes to Google’s reputation as user-friendly.

How can Search Console benefit your website?

It is important to monitor and maintain your Google presence in search engine results pages. Ranking higher on Google means you increase the possibility of search users – i.e. customers and clients – finding your website after they have entered a search query such as ‘Creative design agency in Larbert’.

It will also help you identify areas which could be improved:

• Discovering which keywords or search phrases have found your site
• Boosting your website’s ranking on SERPs
• Increasing the number of times people view your site
• Raising crawling errors which reduce the likelihood of being found.

You would be right in thinking that this sounds amazing. You will even receive notifications delivered to your inbox when Search Console finds potential room for improvement. This means you can remove errors that may otherwise compromise your website’s performance and cause it to appear low down in Google’s SERPs.

What information can Search Console tell you?

Website owners often use Google Analytics to identify the clicks, impressions and bounce rates of their company’s site. This indicates how well your website is being received by potential customers as they navigate different web pages and blog articles.

However, Search Console addresses the infrastructure and performance of your website. It presents information about its:

• External and internal links
• Indexing
• URL inspection
• Performance
• Experience i.e. loading times
• Enhancements
• Security and Manual Actions
• Mobile-friendliness
• Shopping (where applicable).

All of this information shows how Google Search views your pages, including how relevant and authoritative they are. It’s all part of Google’s plan to be the best search engine for internet users.

The power of Search Engine Optimisation

People often ask “what is the difference between having an ‘okay’ site and a ‘great’ performing site?”.

Whilst there are several answers to this question, such as visual web design, branding and copy, a key factor is its ability to be seen by more people. SEO helps both you and those visiting your website meet their objectives by driving organic traffic your way.

Search Console can also increase the quantity and quality of Google users that choose to click each page link. Using popular search phrases – known as keywords – means that Google can be confident it is showing them high-quality content that meets their needs. On the other hand, Search Console maximises your SEO efforts by helping you maximise your content’s reach.

How does Google do this?

Google regularly crawls and indexes your website so it can suggest the closest related results for visitors’ search enquiries. Times have changed, with more and more businesses now having an online presence. Therefore, it’s no longer enough to simply click “publish” before sitting back and waiting for new visits, enquiries and sales to appear.

To truly drive traffic from Google’s search results to your website, you need to satisfy its search engine algorithm – as this determines where you’ll appear on their SERPs. Low-performing sites will be ranked lower and this means less chance of being recommended or shown to the user.

Optimise Your Website with thefingerprint

Offering leading web design services with continual website support and maintenance after your business site has gone live, we can remove the headache of optimising its performance. Contact us on 07740 348 521 or visit our services page for more information. It’d be great to have a no-obligation chat about your business’ website needs.

 

If you found this helpful then you should also have a read of Why use a premium theme and not a free one?, Using Data to Boost Your Digital Business, or thefingerprint wins Design Agency of the Year for a third year!