1. Perform Competitive Research & Find Relevant Keywords

Look at your competition to see what their successes and mistakes are. See if any successful design elements or body copy tone that can be tailored to your unique company brand. By researching their negative reviews, you can avoid any obvious mistakes that have already been done by other companies your similar industry. Also use Google’s Keyword Planner to discover search engine friendly keywords you can use in your website’s headings and body copy. Incorporating relevant keywords will not only separate you from the competition but increase your value to Search Engines like Google and your potential clients searching from products or services like yours. 

2. Optimize Your Website’s Content for Mobile

Most searches come from users on their phone. Google also uses mobile-first indexing that prioritizing mobile-friendly design. If you want rank higher on SERPs, your website must be responsive and load fast. While most web templates come already responsive, it is still wise to check on your phone to see if any content or photos gets cut off or if your website loads slow. You may need help from a digital marketing agency if you can’t fix any cut off content on your own or if the template you chose is buggy and loads slowly. 

3. Set up Google Search Console

 Google Search Console is a tool that allows you to submit your website to be indexed, as well as view data about your website’s traffic and performance. This is useful for successful long-term SEO plans, digital marketing, and performance of your website. It allows you to view items such as user click-through rate and other performance elements. You can also keep track of any site errors that will help keep your website functioning optimally and prevent unsafe web practices. The data you gather will help you create comprehensive plans that don’t waste your money and maximize you ROI. 

4. Create a Sitemap and Submit It 

A sitemap contains a list of all the pages on your website in a single file. If you have a sitemap, this helps search engines index your website quicker and easier. Google has a tool that can help you create one or you can ask a digital marketing firm to help. It is also wise to include a link to your sitemap in your website’s footer. Once you submit your sitemap using web master tools, search engine crawlers will find your website and index for SERPs. The quicker this can be done more likely you will increase the rank of your website, thus gain more users and clients.

5. Add Structured Data Markup 

Structured data markup is a code that you can add to your website’s HTML code. It is used to help search engines understand the information on your website. This helps when trying to attract organic traffic. Structured data is a standardized format for classifying page content. For example, on a recipe page: what are the ingredients, the cooking time and temperature, the calories, etc. This will help your website become more engaging to your users leading to rich results. The more interaction users have with our website, the more value search engines register it as and keep it high on SERPs. 

Let us include a SEO plan with your new website. Call 248.528.3600

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1. Total Clicks.
2. Total Impressions.
3. Average CTR (click-through rate).
4. Average position.

Impressions

Impressions are the number of times a website appeared in the search results. If a user doesn’t have to click a link to see the URL, it counts as an impression. In addition, if a URL is ranked at the bottom of the page and the user doesn’t scroll to that section of the search results, it still counts as an impression. High impressions are great because it means that Google is showing the site in the search results. 

Clicks

The clicks metric shows how often users clicked from the search results to the website. A high number of clicks in addition to a high number of impressions is good. A low number of clicks and a high number of impressions is less good but not bad. It means that the site may need improvements to gain more traffic.

Average CTR

The average CTR is a percentage representing how often users clicked from the search results to the website. A low CTR means that something needs improvement to increase visits from the search results and a higher CTR means the site is performing well. 

Average Position

Average Position shows the average position in search results the website tends to appear in. An average in positions 1 to 10 is great. While an average position in the twenties (20 – 29) means that the site is appearing on page 2 or 3 of the search results. This isn’t too bad. It simply means that the site needs additional work to give it that extra boost into the top 10. Average positions lower than 30 could (in general) mean that the site may benefit from significant improvements. It could be that the site ranks for many keyword phrases that rank low and a few very good keywords that rank exceptionally high. It may be an indication of a content gap on the website, where the content that ranks for certain keywords isn’t strong enough and may need a dedicated page devoted to that keyword phrase to rank better.

Performance Report Dimensions

Scrolling down to the second part of the Performance page reveals several of what’s called Dimensions of a website’s performance data. There are 6 dimensions:

1. Queries

Shows the top search queries and the number of clicks and impressions associated with each keyword phrase.

2. Pages

Shows the top-performing web pages (plus clicks and impressions).

3. Countries

Top countries (plus clicks and impressions).

4. Devices

Shows the top devices, segmented into mobile, desktop, and tablet.

5. Search Appearance

This shows the different kinds of rich results that the site was displayed in. It also tells if Google displayed the site using Web Light results and video results, plus the associated clicks and impressions data. Web Light results are results that are optimized for very slow devices.

6. Dates

The dates tab organizes the clicks and impressions by date. The clicks and impressions can be sorted in descending or ascending order.

Keywords

The keywords are displayed in the Queries as one of the dimensions of the Performance Report. The queries report shows the top 1,000 search queries that resulted in traffic. Some of those queries display low quantities of traffic because they are rare, what is known as long-tail traffic. Others are search queries that result from webpages that could need improvement, perhaps it could need more internal links, or it could be a sign that the keyword phrase deserves its own webpage. It is always a good idea to review the low-performing keywords because some of them may be quick wins that, when the issue is addressed, can result in significantly increased traffic.

Links

Search Console offers a list of all links pointing to the website. However, it’s important to point out that the links report does not represent links that are helping the site rank. It simply reports all links pointing to the website. This means that the list includes links that are not helping the site rank. That explains why the report may show links that have a no follow link attribute on them. The Links report is accessible from the bottom of the left-hand menu. The Links report has two columns: External Links and Internal Links. External Links are the links from outside the website that points to the website and Internal Links are links that originate within the website and link to somewhere else within the website. The External links column has three reports:

1. Top linked pages.
2. Top linking sites.
3. Top linking text.

The Internal Links report lists the Top Linked Pages. Each report (top linked pages, top linking sites, etc.) has a link to more results that can be clicked to view and expand the report for each type. Clicking a URL will change the report to display all the external domains that link to that one page. The report shows the domain of the external site but not the exact page that links to the site.

Sitemaps

A sitemap is generally an XML file that is a list of URLs that helps search engines discover the webpages and other forms of content on a website. Sitemaps are especially helpful for large sites, sites that are difficult to crawl if the site has new content added on a frequent basis. Crawling and indexing are not guaranteed. Aspects like page quality, overall site quality, and links can have an impact on whether a site is crawled, and pages indexed. Sitemaps simply make it easy for search engines to discover those pages and that’s all. Creating a sitemap is easy because more are automatically generated by the CMS, plugins, or the website platform where the site is hosted. Some hosted website platforms generate a sitemap for every site hosted on its service and automatically update the sitemap when the website changes. Search Console offers a sitemap report and provides a way for publishers to upload a sitemap. To access this function, click on the link located on the left-side menu.

Search Console Page Experience Report

The page experience report offers data related to the user experience on the website relative to site speed. Search Console displays information on Core Web Vitals and Mobile Usability. This is a good starting place for getting an overall summary of site speed performance.

Rich Result Status Reports

Search Console offers feedback on rich results through the Performance Report. It’s one of the six dimensions listed below the graph that’s displayed at the top of the page, listed as Search Appearance. Selecting the Search Appearance tabs reveals clicks and impressions data for the different kinds of rich results shown in the search results. This report communicates how important rich results traffic is to the website and can help pinpoint the reason for specific website traffic trends. The Search Appearance report can help diagnose issues related to structured data. For example, a downturn in rich results traffic could be a signal that Google changed structured data requirements and that the structured data needs to be updated. It is a starting point for diagnosing a change in rich results traffic patterns.

We can help you use Google Search Console. Call 248.528.3600

The post Take Advantage of Google Search Console Features appeared first on Miller Media, Digital Marketing Agency, PPC, Industrial Web Design, WordPress.

More important features included are:

• Monitor indexing & crawling
• Identify and fix errors
• Overview of search performance
• Request indexing of updated pages
• Review internal and external links

Get Started Now!

The first step to using Search Console is to verify site ownership. Google provides several different ways to accomplish site verification, depending on if you’re verifying a website, a domain, a Google site, or a Blogger-hosted site. Domains registered with Google domains are automatically verified by adding them to Search Console. Most users will verify their sites using one of four methods:

1. HTML file upload
2. Meta tag
3. Google Analytics tracking code
4. Google Tag Manager

Some site hosting platforms limit what can be uploaded and require a specific way to verify site owners, but that’s becoming less of an issue as many hosted site services have an easy-to-follow verification process. 

How To Verify Site Ownership

There are two standard ways to verify site ownership with a regular website, like a standard WordPress site: HTML file upload and Meta tag. When verifying a site using either of these two methods, you’ll be choosing the URL-prefix properties process. Go to the Search Console and open the Property Selector dropdown that’s visible in the top left-hand corner on any Search Console page. In the pop-up labeled “Select Property Type”, enter the URL of the site then click the “Continue” button. Select the HTML file upload method and download the HTML file. Then, upload the HTML file to the root of your website. Finish the verification process by clicking “Verify” back in the Search Console.

Troubleshooting

Ranking in search results depends on Google’s ability to crawl and index webpages. The Search Console URL Inspection Tool warns of any issues with crawling and indexing before it becomes a major problem and pages start dropping from the search results.

Each submitted URL a user can:

• Request indexing for a recently updated webpage.
• View how Google discovered the webpage (sitemaps and referring internal pages).
• View the last crawl date for a URL.
• Check if Google is using a declared canonical URL or is using another one.
• Check mobile usability status.
• Check enhancements like breadcrumbs.

Fixing 404 Errors

The coverage report can also alert you to 404 and 500 series error responses, as well as communicate that everything is functioning properly. A 404-server response is called an error only because the browser or crawler’s request for a webpage was made in error because the page does not exist. If a guest site (or an internal link) links to a page that doesn’t exist, the coverage report will show a 404 response. By clicking on one of the affected URLs and selecting the Inspect URL tool will reveal what pages (or sitemaps) are referring to the non-existent page.

Still having trouble using Google Search Console? We can help! Call 248.528.3600

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