Using Google Search Console for your SEO
You work hard to be found by your customers online. Right now, you can see your performance pay off in several individual areas, whether it be managing your reviews, listings, social media, or advertising, which is of utmost importance. With Google Search Console reporting, you can also see how all these efforts come together to improve your overall Search Engine Optimization performance. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. For a business to appear in top organic search results, you need to have a strong SEO strategy. Many components make up your website’s SEO – the number of reviews you have and your star rating, how many listings are correct and consistent across the web, how active you are on social, website speed and security, mobile responsiveness, and more.
Google Search Console is a tool that Google provides at no charge to website owners, to measure a website’s search traffic and performance, fix issues, and make your site shine in Google Search results.
Among its many features, one is the ability to see detailed analytics about organic ‘SERP’ (Search engine rank position) of a website, what search queries (keywords) are being typed into Google, and what pages are appearing the most via organic search.
Visit the Google Search Console website for more info.
With the Google Search Console, you get metrics on your website’s SEO performance. This provides proof that all the work and resources you are putting towards being found by your customers is resulting in your business’s website appearing more often right where your customers are searching: On Google. Don’t forget Bing Webmaster tools. Bing is an important search engine for your visibility too. With Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console you’ll better understand what leads people to your site, what people are searching for and focus on increasing traffic to your site with our reports and tools and get personalized messages and alerts for your sites.
By signing up and installing Google Search Console you can see detailed automatic proof-of-performance analytics on searches happening on Google:
- how many queries their website appears on page one of Google
- how many clicks their website is getting
- how many impressions their website is getting
- which queries are getting the most clicks, and their avg. position in search results
- which website pages are getting the most clicks and impressions
- which keywords are performing well. This allows you to check the phrases and keywords that searchers are querying for and their corresponding search volumes.
With this powerful no-cost feature, you can see how all the hard work you do on your business’s marketing (website content, blog, listings, reviews, social media, etc) is resulting in real-world improvements in your SEO – and helping you get more customers!
Understanding the importance of Google Search Results
Google search results have three primary forms of results. The first is paid media, such as Google Ads. The advertiser is paying to be at or very near the top of Google search results. The searcher knows what results are paid ads, as seen in the screenshot below.
The second section in Google Search Engine results is the local pack. This comes from owned and earned media. It showcases local businesses close to your search location. SEO always plays into the local pack ranking factors.
The third and final result are organic search results. This is where 40% of website traffic comes from, so it’s extremely important your business’s website is ranking on the first page of search results so that customers can find you.
There’s actually 2 additional sections in the SERP. For industries and verticals like Lawyers, Home Improvement Professionals and a few others you can run paid ads using Google Local Services Ads. Yes, this is Google competing with their own advertisers. It’s their attempt to make more money and control search results. With this service Google serves as a Lead Generation company.
