This video introduces you to Google Search Console (GSC), a free tool by Google that assists in analyzing and optimizing a website’s presence in Google search results.
I cover the importance of GSC for anyone curious about their website’s search terms, rankings, and overall performance in search.
Six key GSC functionalities are highlighted: submitting sitemaps, managing visible pages through indexing, understanding average page position, tracking URL clicks from organic search, counting the number of impressions to measure visibility, and evaluating click-through rates to assess title and description effectiveness.
The presenter emphasizes GSC’s ease of use, its cost-effectiveness (free), and how it stands out compared to other SEO tools, encouraging viewers who manage their own SEO to check the show notes for additional resources.
Key Takeaways
- Information on the 6 GSC metrics that will help you the most in your day-to-day SEO management.
Resources
Google Search Console metrics blog post.
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Raw Transcript
Hello, and welcome to the small business sweet spot. I’m your host Barb Davids, and this show is dedicated to helping small business owners like you get more organic website traffic and also to help create and distribute content and analyzing the numbers so that we can make better informed marketing decisions. It is action oriented, direct, and conversational.
And if you’ve been looking for SEO or content marketing help, please stick around to the very end where I share about the group coaching program, small business sweet spot. I’m so glad you’re here. Let’s go.
Hello, and welcome to the sweet spot. I bet occasionally you’re wondering things like, what words are my website visitors searching to find me? Or maybe where does my website rank on Google? Google Search Console or GSC for short, is great for answering these questions. In this week’s episode, I’m going to walk you through the six GSC insights that I lean on.
But first, let me tell you briefly what GSC is. GSC is a free service from Google that lets you see how your website is performing in Google search results. By using this information, you can make changes to your site so that it becomes more Google and user friendly and perform better in search.
What I’m about to cover are the six GSC functions I use most often when analyzing my client sites and optimizing their performance. One, submitting sitemaps. A sitemap shows the Google bots how your site is structured.
You don’t need to keep uploading your sitemap every time you add a page or post. Google is very advanced and most sites can perform well in search even if they don’t have a sitemap. But it can speed up how quickly Google reads and understands your site, which can help with the rankings.
Two, visible pages. These are the pages that the search bots can see and that will appear in search results. On most web building platforms and certainly in WordPress, you can choose whether you want a particular page, image, or video on your site to be found by the bots.
This is called page indexing. You index the pages you want found so that Google can easily rank them. But you wouldn’t want to index pages you don’t want found, such as a 404 error message page.
A good way to determine whether you should index a page or not is to think about the user journey. So if this was the first page someone saw from your site and they knew nothing else about your business, would it give them the right impression? Will they find it helpful or confusing? If it’s the latter, make sure the page isn’t indexed. Three, average page position.
Organic search isn’t static. A page ranking on page one or two of Google one day can drop to page three or four the next. GSC’s average page position metric tells you roughly which page of Google you can expect to find your website pages.
Four, clicks. Clicks are exactly what they sound like. It’s the number of times a URL is clicked from organic Google search results.
This metric tells you what URL and therefore which keywords are driving the most organic traffic to your website. Five, number of impressions. An impression is when a URL appears organically instead of from like a paid ad in the page of search results.
I call this being seen. But ironically, the person doesn’t need to scroll down and actually see the URL on the search results page for it to register as an impression. Seeing a high number of impressions for a URL is a good sign.
It means Google likes what you’ve got on the page and wants to include it in the results. But that’s only useful if you can turn those impressions into clicks. Six, click-through rate.
It’s a good idea to look at URLs impression and click-through rate data simultaneously. Showing up in the search engine results pages is like half the battle. Getting people to click the URL is the other half, which is why these metrics work so well together.
Click-through rate is a calculation. It is the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions times 100, and that will give you your click-through rate. You can use click-through rate to judge how effective your page titles and descriptions are.
The key takeaway from this week’s episode, while other SEO tools can give you the same information you’ll find in GSE, I find this is by far the easiest to use. It’s also free. All you need is a Google account, and once you’ve signed up, you can register your site in just a few minutes.
And if you’re doing your own SEO, head to the show notes for a link for more resources. Cheers. Thank you for sticking around.
I hope you enjoyed the episode. If you’re looking for SEO and content marketing help, consider joining the Small Business Sweet Spot. It’s a group coaching program where you can get answers to your questions about your business directly and clarity around the marketing strategies that you would like to implement in your business.
You can find all kinds of information at compassdigitalstrategies.com. And if you liked the episode, please tell a friend. Cheers.
