Whether you consider yourself pretty familiar with Google Search Console or are only learning about it today, this blog will help you navigate some of the most underused features of Google Search Console and help you come out on top with your website analysis.
What is Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a tool offered by Google that allows you to monitor Google search results for your website. Whereas Google Analytics tells you how users are interacting inside your website, Google Search Console tells you how users are interacting with your website before they enter.
In order to use Google Search Console, you need to prove that you own the website. The easiest way is to be the owner of the Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager property present on the website. If you’re not the owner or the tracking tag isn’t in the right place, you can also input a meta tag on your website, provided to you by Google.
Google Search Console has lots of cool features, but just as a great tool doesn’t make a great woodworker, simply having Google Search Console doesn’t mean you’re taking full advantage off all it has to offer. Below I’ve written about 3 unique ways to use Google Search Console
Use Google Search Console to Tell if Your Tracking is Wrong
Double tracking is the death of Google Analytics nerds everywhere. Whether it’s a url that redirects or double tracking due to Google Tag Manager, a plugin, and having Google Analytics hard coded on your website, sometimes it’s difficult to know where your point of truth lives.
Luckily, Google Search Console isn’t a tracking code you need to install – Google does all the tracking for you. Once you’ve got your property verified in Google Search Console, compare the number of clicks you receive in your Search Analytics report with the number of organic Google sessions in Google Analytics.
Note that for this trick you won’t have a one to one ratio. It’s possible that someone can click on your website and not have a session appear. This can occur most often if you have a slow loading website, where people leave before content loads. This can also occur if you have filters that exclude certain IP addresses. Once again, since Google Search Console isn’t a tracking code you can configure, you can’t filter out clicks from certain people like you can in Google Analytics.
Additionally, if you don’t force www or https on your website, you may have to collect your data from multiple Google Search Console properties to get the most accurate apples to apples comparison.
Use Google Search Console To Find Out Why You’re Ranking For Certain Terms
Every so often you can start ranking for, er, undesirable terms. Whether it’s an unfortunate phrase you’ve used on your website or a hacker decided to fill your website with spam, you want to make sure you stop ranking for these keywords before Google decides you’re a good fit for certain search terms.
Start off by going to the Performance Report in Google Search Console and search for the undesirable word. Once you’ve narrowed down searches by that particular query, go to the middle of your screen and select “Pages.” Now you know where your query lies!
If you’ve searched the page through and through and can’t find any mention of your undesirable culprit, or the undesirable terms is too high to drill down each one by search query, it’s time to go to the links section of Google Search Console.
From there, you can see three aspects – who is linking to you, what pages they’re linking to, and what terms they’re using when they link to you. (Hint: If there’s a word linking to you, there’s a good chance you’ll rank for that word.)
With these pieces of information, you can drill down to see where the culprit lies – and then off with its head!
Use Google Search Console to Determine How Mobile Friendly You Are
Mobile usability has become more and more important in the world of Google. If you’re not mobile friendly, you’re not going to rank. Most people use a third party tool to scan their website, or even use Google’s mobile-friendly testing tool. Here’s the catch through – it only judges how mobile friendly one page is!
This can be a big problem, as some of your other pages may not be mobile friendly. The mobile usability report isn’t hard to find or hard to use, but it still remains on my top tricks as most people don’t think to use it once they’ve run a scan of the website with a third party tool and gotten the green light.
To see if your whole website is mobile friendly, go to the left panel of Google Search Console. There you’ll find a category for Enhancements, and underneath that, you’ll see Mobile Usability. This will show any mobile usability errors over the past three months.
Summary
Whether you’ve got double tracking, erroneous organic search rankings, or are simply wondering how mobile friendly your whole website is, Google Search Console can be an excellent tool for getting a deeper dive into how Google sees your website and provide you with a more robust data set for any website analysis.