If your current SEO supplier doesn’t use Google Search Console, you should part ways immediately.
Why?
Well, Google Search Console is your direct link to Google. It’s where you gain insight right from the horse’s mouth about your website and how it’s performing in their results.
Analysing this data and using it to improve performance is an essential part of any SEO campaign.
If you’re not doing it, you’re not credible.
Yes, you can use tools like SEO Moz or SEMRush but they should supplement the information you get from Google, not replace it completely.
What data does Search Console provide?
The most valuable report in the Search Console is the ‘Performance’ report. This shows the specific keywords your website is ranking for, how many times your listings have been viewed and how many clicks it’s received from those keywords.
The above is just a sample and you can view up to a thousand different keywords for any given report.
This data should form the basis of SEO strategy. With it, you can:
- Find quick wins by seeing which keywords are currently driving the most traffic to your site and get more by focusing your effort.
- Identify new targets by seeing which relevant keywords the site is showing for in the results but aren’t generating traffic.
- Analyse the overall composition of your traffic to see if it’s made up of the type of searches you require to generate business.
- Assess short and long term performance of the website on Google (data can go back as far as 16 months).
- Check that Google Analytics is reporting your organic search engine traffic accurately.
All of the above is incredibly important.
Aside from the Performance report, Google Search Console will also tell you:
- Which other websites are linking to your website (incredibly important for search engine success).
- Which of your pages are being used in Google’s results and which are being ignored or not found.
- Any penalties (called ‘Manual Actions’) or security issues the site is experiencing that may hamper search engine performance.
- How each page performs on mobile devices (very important for SEO as mobile search now accounts for more than desktop).
- How fast each page is loading (very important to provide a good user experience and in turn improve rankings).
When you add all this information together and consider Google Search Console is completely free, there really is no excuse for not using it.
If you’d like me to install Search Console on your website and provide some of the insights listed here completely free, get in touch.
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