How to use Google Search Console: 5 tricks to get more traffic (2023)

Google Search Console is a powerful tool that business owners, marketers, and SEO professionals can use to increase their websites' digital presence and organic traffic.

But despite its growing popularity, Google Search Console's interface isn't exactly the most premium or intuitive to use. Hence the growing volume of "Use Google Search Console" requests over the years.

2017-2021 search volume trends for "How to use google search console".

Know how to use Google Search Consoleis the right waythe key to turning all that valuable data into actionable insights for your SEO strategy.

In this post, we cover four ways you can use this free platform to rank higher, drive traffic, and produce quality content. You will learn how:

1. Confirm that Google understands the relevance of your content.
2. Make sure Google is crawling and indexing your web pages correctly.
3. Fix technical issues and page performance issues.
4. Run SEO A/B tests using GSC's daily ranking tracking.

What is the Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a free platform that helps marketers and SEO professionals track and traceAnalyze your SEO performance. Users can also identify and fix technical and page performance issues to make your site more search engine friendly.

Search performance metrics in Google Search Console

Not only is the platform completely free, but it also has the most comprehensive real-time SEO dataset available anywhere.

Using the Google Search Console (overview)

There are several reasons why regular use of the GSC is an essential part of everyonedigital marketing strategy. Google has continuously evolved its Search Console platform to improve dashboard capabilities while providing comprehensive data on search engine performance.

So, while various features have been added and tweaked over the years, the goal of the platform has remained the same: to provide direct guidance to business owners, marketers, and SEO professionalshow to increase your SEO performance– both technically and in terms of content.

At a high level, learn how to use Google Search ConsoleSEO:

• Track keyword rankings, impressions,organic traffic, average position and click-through rate (CTR).
• Find out about index coverage and confirm that Google's crawlers are indexing web pages correctly.
• Submit sitemaps, reject files and deactivations.
• Identify and fixsite experience, Key Elements of the Web, or problems with mobile usability.
• Confirm that Google sees the schema.org markup so that webpages can be displayed in rich search results.
• View security issues or manual actions identified by Google.
• Analyze essential backlink data like total number of external links, internal links, top linked pages,Top-Link-Sitesand anchor text distribution

These measures are important not only to understand your SEO performance, but also to improve it. And good SEO is critical to a variety of marketing goals, such as: B. increasing traffic and conversions, improving your reputation, understanding your audience andIncrease your online presence.

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Google Search Console compared to other keyword tracking platforms

Many digital marketers rely on popular SEO platforms like Ahrefs and SEMrush to gather vital information about their keyword rankings. These tools are useful for understanding your performance relative to competitors, but as they scour the SERPs to gather keyword ranking data, the information may be incomplete and out of date.

These tools only see about 30-40% of your site's overall keyword rankings because they crawl a limited number of SERPs and not on a daily basis. For example, compare the total number ofKeyword-RankingsAhrefs sees compared to LinkGraph's GSC Insights (which is built on top of the Google API) for the same website.

This is a pretty big gap in keyword ranking data. When it comes to finding the truth about SEO, no other platform compares to Google's data set.

But why is it so important to understandatthe keywords your websites rank for?

Because everyone is relevantkeywordQuery represents a new way for your business to acquire customers and real customers.

How to use Google Search Console to drive more traffic to your website

If you only occasionally log into the Google Search Console dashboard to see your overall impressions and clicks, you're unlikely to be getting the most out of your metrics and tools.

When it comes to using Google Search Console correctly, here's how to maximize the value of the platform and turn that data into strategic optimization decisions.

1. Quickly confirm that Google understands the keywords you are targeting

When it comes to increasing the total number of keywords your site ranks for, the best strategy is to post regularly.quality contentthat highlights your brand's knowledge and expertise in your niche market.

Instead of waiting 30 days, Google Search Console lets you quickly confirm that your content is gaining weight and ranking for your targeted search terms.

To use Google Search Console for any content you publish:

1. Choose a relevant keywordTarget or cluster for which to classify the web page.
2. Optimize your contentfor the relevant target keyword.
3. Publish your content on your website.
4. After a few days, confirm that Google understands the relevance of your content and shows it in the SERPs for relevant key phrases.

For example, we recently published a blog article comparing the accuracy and capabilities of different keyword tracking software. The blog has been optimized for the keyword "accurate SEO rank tracking".

A few days after publication, we went to Google Search Console to confirm that Google understands the relevance of our content. We noticed that the blog got over a thousand impressions for our target keyword phrase “accurate SEO ranking tracking” as well as hundreds of additional impressions for around 256 short andLong-Tail-Keywordswith similar searchIntention.

Because Google Search Console updates keyword rankings daily, we were able to confirm within a few days that we had effectively optimized this content.

Once we know that the content is actually ranking for the relevant keywords, we can focus on other SEO factors to improve your position in those many searches.

If you find that your content isn't ranking highly (or not ranking at all) for the original target keywords you were targeting, it's likely that Google isn't perceiving the content as relevant to the target keyword or as not being of high quality. Here's what you can try:

• Check your metadata: Make sure your page title, meta description and other meta tags are SEO friendly and contain your target keywords.
• check the content: Focus on your titles and subtitles for keyword inclusion and enhance the content with more thematic depth and semantic richness
• Use a content tool: A content tool can guide your writing process by suggesting meaningful terms to include in your content. Here are some tools you can try for free.LinkGraph,Kognitives SEO, orLSIGraph
• Build your website authority: Your website may not have enough authority to rank in the SERPs. You may need some time to build your site's authorityBacklinking.

If you want the time and effort to create quality content to be worthwhile, it has to carry weight. That means you rank for relevant searches and earn impressions and organic traffic to your website. Google Search Console is the quickest and quickest way to confirm that your pages are really doing their part.

2. Make sure Google is crawling and indexing your web pages correctly

Before your web pages can rank for relevant searches, they need to be properly crawled and indexedSearch Engine Spider.

Google Search Console is the best way to see which of your pages have been indexed, when they were last crawled, and if Google has identified improvements like breadcrumbs or sitelinks that affect the look of the SERP result.

Why is this information so valuable for marketers and SEOs who want itIncrease your overall SEOPerfomance? A few reasons:

1. If you doOnpage Optimizationsto a websiteGoogle algorithmonly evaluates these improvements during the next page crawl.Don't try to confirm the effectiveness of your optimizations until they are actually seen by Google!
2. For sites with hundreds to thousands of lgoing pages, you could maximize your tracking budget.Make sure Google only crawls your most important pages by including robots tags"noindex, nofollow" directivesfor each low value page!
3. Enhancements make your webpages more clickable on SERPs. When you add schema.org markup to your site to appear in certain expanded results,Confirm that your code is correct and that they actually appear in the SERPs!

If you want more control over which pages of your site Google promotes to searchers, you can also use Google Search Console to submit a sitemap. A sitemap tells Google which pages on your site are most important and therefore should be crawled and promoted the most.

3. Fix technical and page performance issues

Relevant, quality content is not the only requirement forRanking on Google. Ötechnical performance of your websitestrongly influences Google's trust in your company and the perception of your visitors towards your company.

Google crawlers want to see if your pages are responsive,fast chargingand provide a quality site experience to users who discover them through search.

Troubleshooting technical issues on your website can be a little daunting, especially if you don't have the most extensive knowledge of how to handle your website's backend. But Google Search Console simplifies this process, allowing site owners to identify and resolve any technical or page performance issues that might be affecting their rankings and keyword positions.

Google ranking algorithmweights the following signals to understand the quality of the overall website experience:

• Key Elements of the Web: This includes website speed,loading time, interactivity and visual stability of your web pages.
• mobile usability: WeilMobile-first indexing, Google likes responsive, fast-loading and high-performing websites on mobile devices.
• Security: Websites must provide safe navigation and be secure for users.
• HTTPS: HTTPS is more secure than HTTP. Many URLs with HTTP protocols can result in poorer SEO performance due to lack of encryption

If your web pages suffer in any of the above areas, Google will let you know in the Experience feature of your Google Search Console account. They tell you what problems they found on which websites.

For example, this site has over 109 landing pages that Google considers to be a low-quality page experience. If that site doesn't fix these technical issues, it's unlikely that their overall SEO performance - and therefore their organic traffic - will improve.

If you're seeing similar Page Experience metrics in your own Google Search Console account, consider taking the following steps:

• Identify the specific web page that was flagged and the type of error reported.
• Please send this information to your web developer or someone else who will try to solve the problem in the back end of your website.
• Once the issue is resolved, confirm that the issue is resolved by using the "Validate Fix" feature in your Google Search Console account.

  

• You must obtain confirmation of your validation submission. It will take approximately 28 days for Google to confirm that the issue is resolved.

It is important to identify and resolve technical and page performance issues as quickly as possible. While other tools are available to troubleshoot on-page experience issues, Google Search Console offers the most direct guidance on where to focus your efforts.

make sure you walkSEO-Auditsregularly to make sure everything is looking good under the hood of your website.

4. Run SEO A/B tests using Google Search Console's daily ranking tracking

Once you know that your web pages are ranking for relevant keywords and that your site's performance, security and usability meet Google standards, you can use Google Search Console to do thisA/B-Testsspecific tweaks to try and improve your average positions for all your keywords.

With daily keyword tracking in Google Search Console, you can quickly confirm that these optimizations have been successful.

Follow these steps to run an A/B test in Google Search Console:

1. Choose the page you want to test and the specific variant you want to test.Do not test more than one variant, or it's difficult to pinpoint what drove better rankings, impressions, or organic traffic
2. Do your optimization for your page (be it page title, internal links, web design, meta description, etc.)
3. wait 7-10 days
4. Log into Google Search Console to see if the page has improved in terms of impressions, average position, clicks or CTR

For example, my content team was trying to improve overall keyword rankings for a piecelong-form contenton our website, increasing the word count and depth of content. Our writers have improved the page's word count from around 1,500 to over 4,000.

The content was updated on the website on December 29, 2020. Here are the Google Search Console landing page metrics for the last six months.

It's clear that Google has reacted to our content changes. In seven days, our impressions improved by 420% and our average position increased by more than 20 positions. As a result, we changed the same variant (content size) on other pages of our site and saw similar results.

While Google Search Console makes it easy to quickly review the results of your A/B tests, there's no way to track changes to your site within the platform. To track your optimizations and Google metrics in the same tool, try keyword rank tracking tools that have SEO A/B testing features such as:GSC informationorScientific classification.

SEO A/B-Test-Tracking in Google Search Console Insights

Google Search Console is the best way to narrow down the optimizations in yoursSEO-Testactually lead to improved rankings and impressions. You can then redeploy these tweaks to other pages on your site.

How to Use Google Search Console to Improve SEO [Recap]

As mentioned above, every relevant keyword query represents a new opportunity for your business to acquire real customers and customers. And when it comes to iterating on your own site and understanding if your SEO strategy is on track, the accuracy and breadth of Google Search Console data is unmatched by any other tool.

While Google maintains tight control over their ranking algorithms, they communicate very clearly through Google Search Console on where to focus your efforts in order to increase your overall search performance. Analyzing this data and using it as a roadmap is one of the best strategies you can employImproving your online visibility.

If you're not actively using your Google Search Console account, you won't have a complete picture of where your site currently stands.

So here is the summary of how to use Google Search Consolethe right wayTo take advantage of its benefits:

1. Confirm within days that Google is associating your content with the keyword you are targeting so you can implement tactics to increase your position in even more searches.
2. Prioritize the most important pages that Google should crawl so your landing pages can rank faster and display rich results.
3. Troubleshoot and resolve on-page experience issues with direct guidance from Google Search Console.
4. Run SEO tests and quickly find out which optimizations were successful so you can roll them out to other pages.

About the author

Manick Bhan is Founder and CTO ofLinkGraph, an award-winning SEO and digital marketing agency. Through his agency work, thought leadership andRode, he helps brands of all sizes grow their digital presence. you can follow him@crazy.