5 tips to improve SEO with Google Search Console

In our 2-Minute Guide, 4 Valuable Data Points in Google Search Console, we briefly covered Google organic search tool, its metrics, and how you can put them to use for your marketing efforts. This quick guide covers 5 ways you can use features in Google Search Console to directly improve your website’s indexing in Google and SEO.

Sitemaps

This is a quick step that lets Google know all of the pages within your website. In the Sitemaps section of Google Search Console, you can submit the sitemap for your website and it will process the information provided on the page directly. A sitemap is housed in a URL on your website, i.e. www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.

If you don’t have a sitemap, there are several ways to create one. For example, in WordPress, there is a plugin that can help generate it. Either that or you can kindly ask your web developer to make one for your site. That’s why you pay them the big bucks.

URL Inspection

URL Inspection in Google Search Console is a feature that quickly checks a particular URL on your website and lets you know if there are any issues with it specifically. It tells you if the URL is on Google, and if it isn’t you can request to index it. It tells you if the URL has proper coverage, and it tells you if the URL has mobile usability, which is supremely important nowadays with Google’s organic traffic algorithms and website SEO.

Coverage

Coverage is similar to the URL Inspection section, except it shows if there are any issues with the pages being indexed on a more global view. If you have any errors on pages they are illustrated in this section, and you can address them page by page.

Experience

Google has rolled out a whole new algorithm, as they do a few times a year, but this one is a core update that takes into consideration page experience. In Google Search Console they now have a few sections dedicated to Experience.

-> Page Experience

Page experience gives several stats, particularly revolving around how many pages on your website have a “good page experience”. You can dive into sections they provide to correct the issues, such as Core Web Vitals.

-> Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals also provide a global view of your website; however, instead of showing coverage issues when it comes to pages being indexed properly (or not), they show if any of your web pages need fixing on a technical level. The details they provide are definitely more for developers to address, which again is why you pay them the big bucks.

-> Mobile Usability

Another key component of modern websites is for them to be mobile-friendly. Mobile Usability gives you specific points to address if / when you have issues with your website being mobile-friendly.

Performance

Even though we covered this section of Google Search Console in our last article, this time we are going to dive into some more crucial details.

-> Pages

Pages tell you what URLs the visitors landed on specifically after their search queries. You can dive more thoroughly into the metrics of a particular URL by clicking on it in the Google Search Console list.

-> Queries

Queries in Google Search Console tell you how visitors got to your website and through which keywords specifically. This is where things get interesting…

You can literally see what keywords led people to your website, and see them broken down into pages more specifically. The juiciest part of this information is seeing where you have impressions vs the ranking of the specific keyword according to Google. There are many possible solutions using this information, but two that we find particularly interesting are:

1) Seeing keywords that are ranking in the 20s - 30s, and seeing how you may implement them into your page to get a boost on those rankings.

2) Seeing that a particular keyword gets a lot of impressions, but not necessarily a lot of clicks. This is where you can adjust the Meta Description of the page that Google uses in the indexing to perhaps create more of a sense of urgency or value from someone who is searching for this type of information online.