Looking for a tool to help understand your website’s performance? Try Google Search Console.
While there are many tools out there to help you analyze your search traffic and optimize your content, Google Search Console provides insights into search traffic, indexing status, and many other aspects crucial for optimizing a site’s visibility online. The best part, in our opinion? It’s free.
However, just like any tool, getting the most helpful data requires some expertise. Below, we'll discuss tips and techniques to help you get better data from your Google Search Console account.
For more about Google Search Console, check out our guide to what you can learn from the tool
A free tool that helps optimize your website… don’t you mean Google Analytics? Not exactly. While both Google Analytics (GA) and Google Search Console (GSC) are great tools for understanding and improving your website's performance, they serve different purposes overall.
Google Analytics focuses on user behavior and provides insights into how visitors interact with your site, such as page views, session duration, and bounce rates. Google Search Console, on the other hand, focuses on how your site appears in Google Search results, offering data on search queries, indexing status, and SEO performance.
Why is SEO important to your overall marketing strategy? Learn more in our guide to the benefits of investing in SEO
The team at Monte Verde are big fans of using the two tools in tandem to provide a high-level view of your website's health and effectiveness.
From our team to yours, here are 5 tips to get the best data possible from Google Search Console:
Submitting a sitemap helps Google understand your site structure and index your pages more efficiently. Think of it as a roadmap for search engines. You can generate a sitemap using tools like Yoast SEO for WordPress or XML-Sitemaps.com.
Combining GSC data with Google Analytics offers a more holistic view of your website's performance. You can analyze GSC metrics alongside user behavior data from Google Analytics to gain deeper insights and make informed decisions.
In addition to verifying all versions of your site, it's helpful to add and verify a Domain Property in GSC. A domain property is a way to track your entire website under one property. For example, you could track example.com, blog.example.com, and shop.example.com all together, rather than as separate entities. This setup makes sure that you’re getting an accurate representation of your data, rather than needing to track subdomains separately.
Robots.txt is a file used to manage and control web crawlers' access to your website. Ensure your robots.txt file is correctly configured to allow Googlebot to crawl important parts of your site while blocking sensitive or irrelevant sections. Use the robots.txt tester in GSC to validate your file and make adjustments as needed.
With questions about any of the tips above or the importance of Google Search Console, be sure to reach out to our team.
