How to Use Google Search Console to Improve SEO

How to Use Google Search Console to Improve SEO

How to Use Google Search Console to improve SEO – Google Search Console is a very advanced data analysis tool, able to capitalize on the contents of our site to the maximum. Obviously, in this valorisation process a lot depends on the strategies that we have decided to exploit, and on a series of basic requirements that must be met upstream.

1) Necessary requirements before proceeding

In order to actively exploit these techniques, it is essential that our site is created in a workmanlike manner and that there are no technical problems of any kind on it; moreover, the site must be crawlable, indexed and (preferably) positioned on Google for at least a couple of keywords (even trivial or obvious).

Going then to see the Research Analysis report , for example, it is advisable that there are at least fifty clicks, or that if nothing else (in the worst case scenario) there are at least a few keywords on the site. If this requirement is not met upstream, I suggest you use the site a bit – for example by publishing articles, FAQs or pages with some useful or unpublished content – ​​before proceeding.

How to Use Google Search Console to Improve SEO

Having clarified the fundamental requirements, let’s look at the techniques that you can use in practice to increase traffic to your site based on the data on your site’s Search Console.

Indexing status

In this report you should find an increasing graph over time, especially in the case of blogs, or non-decreasing or stable in the case of other websites; generally it is not necessary, of course, that indexing necessarily increases (because not all web pages are useful to Google in the same way, of course), but it is certainly a signal to evaluate well if your traffic does not increase.

Therefore, if the site is not well indexed, it is unlikely that it will receive traffic from Google. From here you will notice it easily, usually.

Enhance research with “unexploded” potential

Open the Search Analysis report and view the columns Clicks , Impressions and CTR ; if you now sort by decreasing Impressions (from largest to smallest), take a look at searches with many views that have few or no clicks: these are searches for which Google “recognizes” your potential authority, so much so that they are shown in the results, yet little or no clicks are made.

Example taken from one of my sites: the searches that are interesting from this point of view are in particular on the second, third, fifth and sixth lines (respectively o, 1, 3 and 0 clicks).

There are various strategies that can be exploited to improve the performance of the CTR of these searches which, I repeat:

  • have maximum impressions e
  • have few or no clicks (or equivalently less than 1% CTR).

One possible way, for example, may be to rewrite or update the article that should lead to that critical research (and here you will have to rule by the rules or with the site operator), another may be to internally link the article itself from other sections of the site, in order to increase its “visibility” in topological terms; possibly, moreover, you can think of doing some strategic 301 redirects or, again, adding the keyword in question within some title or anchor text to facilitate or clarify the user in the search.

In short, you can do everything and more by being inspired by the Search Console: the problem is understanding what makes sense and what instead is a stretch . In many cases, incidentally, making this distinction correctly makes the difference between an amateur consultant and a professional.

Optimize existing CTRs

Open the Search Analysis report and view the CTR column only ; if you sort by decreasing CTR (from largest to smallest), you will have identified pages (or searches, depending on which report you have opened) for which there are already good click rates. In short, these are pages (or searches) that tend to bring traffic from search engines: so try to experiment with a few things, depending on the type and use of the pages.

For example:

  • change the titles to understand if the CTR improves, in the long run;
  • change the meta-descriptions to understand if the CTR improves, in the long run;
  • add any rich snippets;
  • lengthen or shorten the body text of the article, evaluating the performance before or after;
  • insert affiliate links or thematic banners in a non-invasive way with the search that brings you traffic: conversions in the medium-long term should be guaranteed (or almost);
  • also consider that it is very often web pages, ordered with this criterion, for which it is quite easy to sell links.

Internal link building

In this case, the idea is to select a part of the pages from the Search Analysis report , Pages , and try to identify those that are better positioned; to do this, select the Impressions and Position columns .

Here’s an example taken from my site: try to find the pages that rank best (within the top 10 positions, for example), discard those with few impressions (on which there is little room for improvement, usually, unless they are not pages that convert or designed to convert, such as landing pages) and focus on pages with rankings between 1 and 10 and high impressions. The minimum impression threshold varies from site to site, there are no rules; 

it depends on how much traffic you make, and it can be 1000 as 5000 or 10000, hard to say. Rule yourself on the orders of magnitude (therefore for example from 100 or 1000 onwards), and find the pages with these requirements.

On these pages, which we will define as “authoritative” for your site, you will have a fair chance both of doing good internal link building (linking pages with little traffic from authoritative ones, for example), and of trying to sell some links, if you happen to . Generally remember what was written in the previous point: the problem is once again to understand what makes sense and what is a forcing to avoid. 

Many SEOs feel very intelligent in linking anything in any possible way, when in reality they are simply presumptuous and should review their strategies: everything you do, even a trivial link, must have a logic (editorial, marketing, etc. ., but must have it), must be designed for the end user, and SEO conventions in the abstract – such as: putting the keyword at the beginning of the title – can never trump common sense. Differently, they make really bad impressions, and the traffic that is procured “roughly” risks being of little use.

Make a list of keywords to reuse in the blog site

Open the Search Analysis report and view the CTR column only ; if you sort by descending CTRs (from largest to smallest), you will have identified the most frequent searches that lead to your site. Export them and create a few themed articles with keywords, so that by publishing them you can enhance and extend the long tail (eg variations of a main keyword) in the medium to long term.

Always select – general advice – 10-20% of keywords starting from the most viewed (high impressions), leave aside those that do not perform well in terms of impressions – unless, of course, they are not very competitive or you still want to aim for them .

Internal Links Section

Peering into the Internal Links section under Search Traffic, you will be able to see how balanced your internal link building is, how the links are distributed on the various pages and so on. If you find a very unbalanced profile, try not to overdo it with internal links, otherwise things will go well.

The analysis of this section also allows you to identify the most linked pages as having the greatest exploitable potential, and making changes to these could, at times, be useful for increasing traffic on the site.

Maintaining our site’s backlink profile

The Search traffic -> Links pointing to my site section can be very useful for verifying that our link building is working: usually backlinks are “absorbed” and shown by the tool within a couple of weeks of when they appear on the web. From here you can also check that you have no penalizing backlinks (which you can disavow  ) , you can check suspicious profiles, broken links and so on.

This section is also useful in terms of link classification and clustering: if sorted by Pages with increasing links (from smallest to largest) there is a fair chance of seeing and verifying the “best” backlinks – assuming they are the best ones. who report a single outgoing link to yours, versus those who repeat it on multiple pages of their site.

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