Webmaster Console Basics Website Owners Should Know.
As manager of a Digital marketing company in North West Sydney, I have lost count of the number of times I have had the following conversation with a client:
Client: I need my site to be number 1 on Google; I’m not getting any sales or enquiries.
Me: Great, first I need to see were you are at, so may I have access to your Google webmaster tools and analytics accounts?
Client: What’s that?
The aim of being number 1 on Google sounds great, but to achieve it you need to understand how Google sees your site and how people interact with it. Without such knowledge, you’re flying blind.
Google offers two free tools for website owners: Webmaster Console and Google Analytics. To put it simply, Webmaster Console gives you an insight as to how Google sees your site directly from the Google database, whereas Analytics shows how users are using your site through onsite client interaction.
Setting up webmaster tools is easy and free; just sign up for an account install a file to your website and verify and you’re good to go, but once you get it setup, how do you use it? While at first glance it can be baffling, below are a few quick tips to quickly examine the data and use it to help your site.
1/ Overview
The first thing you will see when bringing up a site is the overview which gives you a good insight as to how a site is performing.
It is broken up into 4 sections; all their headings can be clicked on to delve further into the information but a quick summary is.
A/ Performance – This shows how many clicks each day your site has received organically over the last month. You can click on Full report in top right corner to see other metrics like impressions CTR and Average Position.
B/ Indexing – Shows you how many of you sites pages are indexed by google. If a site is not in Google index it is being ignored by Google and will not be shown in any search result. Click on full report will; enable you to see what page are and not indexed and why.
C/ Experience – A quick over view of how Google see your site is performing. Mobile usability should be monitored as any page not mobile friendly will likely suffer in the ranks. Page experience and core web vitals for new or low traffic sites will likely have no data. You can manually check you site using Google Page Speed Checker.
D/ Enhancements – Tell you what pages are valid for snippets and google rich search results.
All four provide a quick general overview of your site. In future blogs we will delve deeper into each area and show you how to access and interpret what you’re seeing. Your first step though is to setup Webmaster Console for your site, as it’s free and an indispensible process to getting your site ranking. Information is power and when its provided for free from Google, you would be remiss not to use it.
SEOCycle is a digital marketing and web design company based in Cherrybrook. If you need advice or have any general queries about your, site feel free to contact us anytime.