How Google Search Console helps your online business

Vase with flower Clipboard with pink colour swatches, laptop with Google Search Console open

Google Search Console is a fabulous tool to help your online business. It gives you the ability to monitor the health and operation of your website and so much more.

What is Google Search Console?

Google defines its Google Search Console tool as a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results.

What does it do?

Google Search Console will email you alerts when there are problems with your website and can help improve your positioning on search engine results pages.

It does that by

confirming that Google can crawl your site.
fixing indexing problems and requesting re-indexing of new or updated content.
sending you emails to alert you to indexing, spam or other issues with your site.
showing you which sites are linking back to your website.
troubleshooting issues with mobile usability, AMP, and other search features.
offering tools that help to optimize keywords in your content.

How Google Search Console helps to optimize keywords

Google Search Console allows you to see which search queries were shown your site. This can help you in a variety of ways.

You can see the keywords that people are using to find you and make sure that you have the best content for those words. Take some time to make sure that you are effectively using those keywords in the right places on your page. This can increase your click-through rate and help increase your sales.

Finally, Google Search Console can show if you are appearing in search results for words that don’t reflect what your business is offering.

It helps to find underperforming content

Just as you can see which words are doing well, you can also see which keywords are not performing as they should. This is your under-performing content. Content that you have created that isn’t delivering the traffic or the click through rate that you were aiming for.

To find under-performing keywords, click on the “Search Results” reports and toggle the average CTR and position data. Next scroll to the queries report and set an average ranking position filter. Ahrefs suggests that you use a ranking of below 8.1. You then sort the results by average position in descending order. Finally, you can identify the page that the keyword appears on by clicking on the keyword and going to the “pages” tab to see if the page is about the same topic.

Use Google Search Console in your content audit.

As you have seen, Google Search Console can show you which pages and which keywords are performing well and which ones aren’t. You are then tasked with deciding if you optimize the page for that keyword or delete the page and input a 301 redirect. Before deciding to delete or keep, you must consider if optimizing this keyword increases your click through rate or not.

It is important to remember that pages that are not being viewed will negatively impact your Google ranking. During a content audit, you review your website and establish which pages you need to update to increase your click through rate and search engine results page ranking, and which pages you should remove from your website.

content audit >>

The Benefits of Google Search Console

Keyword research is all about finding the right words to attract potential clients to your website. If your content isn’t using the same words that your potential clients are using when looking for you, you won’t be found on search engines.

Google Search Console shows you how often you appear in Google searches and how often searchers click on your website when they make a query. This data is vital in deciding if your content is still relevant and should stay on your current website.