Category: SEO Management
If you only use one free tool to keep an eye on your website, make it Google Search Console. It’s made by Google, it costs nothing, and it shows you something no other tool can: how your website actually performs in Google’s own search results, using Google’s own data.
Plenty of small business owners have never heard of it. Others set it up years ago, or had their web designer set it up, and have never logged in since. Either way, it’s worth half an hour of your time, because it answers questions that would otherwise be guesswork.
What Search Console is, and what it isn’t
Search Console tells you how Google sees your website. Which searches you appear for, how often people see you in the results, how often they click, and whether Google is having any trouble reading your pages.
It isn’t the same as Google Analytics. Analytics tells you what people do once they’re on your website: which pages they visit, how long they stay, whether they get in touch. Search Console tells you what happens before they arrive, in the search results themselves. The two work well together, but they answer different questions.
Getting set up
If you don’t already have it, setting up Search Console is free and usually takes a few minutes. You sign in with a Google account, add your website, and prove that you own it. There are a few ways to do that, and whoever looks after your website or domain can help if you get stuck.
If you think it might already be set up, ask your web designer or whoever manages your site. It’s common for an account to exist that the business owner has never been given access to. You can be added as a user without anything else changing.
The performance report
This is where most of the useful information is, and it’s the part worth looking at regularly.
The performance report shows four numbers for your website over whatever time period you choose. Clicks are the number of times someone clicked through to your website from Google. Impressions are the number of times your website appeared in someone’s results, whether they clicked or not. Click-through rate is the share of impressions that turned into clicks. And average position is roughly where you appeared in the results.
Below those numbers are tabs that let you break the figures down. The queries tab is the most interesting. It shows the actual searches people made when your website appeared. For a local business, this can be a real eye-opener. You might find you’re appearing for searches you’d never thought about, or that the searches you assumed were most important hardly bring in any visits at all.
The pages tab shows which pages on your website get the most attention from Google. If your most important service page is barely there, that’s worth knowing.
It’s worth looking at changes over time rather than single numbers. Compare the last three months with the same period last year, which takes account of seasonal ups and downs. If clicks are going up, things are heading in the right direction. If they’ve dropped sharply, the date they started falling is a useful clue.
Spotting easy wins
Search Console is good at pointing out opportunities. Look in the queries tab for searches where you have lots of impressions but few clicks. That usually means you’re appearing, but people aren’t choosing you. Sometimes that’s because you’re too far down the page. Sometimes it’s because the title and description Google shows for your page aren’t very appealing, which is often something you can improve.
Also look for searches where your average position is just off the first page. A bit of work on the relevant page can sometimes move it up enough to make a real difference.
The page indexing report
The page indexing report tells you which pages on your website Google has included in its search results and which it hasn’t, with a reason for each.
Don’t panic if you see a long list of pages that aren’t indexed. That’s completely normal, and many of the reasons are fine. What matters is whether your important pages, your homepage, your main services, your contact page, are included. If one of them isn’t, the reason given will usually point you towards the problem.
Other things to keep an eye on
Search Console will email you if it spots something serious, such as a security problem or a manual action, which is when someone at Google has found your website breaking its rules. These are rare for ordinary local businesses, but if you get one of those emails, act on it straight away.
There’s also a section on page experience and how quickly your pages load, particularly on phones. If it flags lots of slow pages, that’s worth raising with whoever built your website.
You can largely ignore the more technical reports unless something specific has gone wrong. They’re useful for diagnosing problems, but you don’t need to check them every week.
How often to look
Once a month is plenty for most small businesses. Have a look at clicks and impressions compared with the previous month and the same time last year, glance at the top searches and pages, and check there are no warnings. It takes ten minutes.
If you’ve just launched a new website, made big changes or noticed enquiries drop, look more closely and more often.
We’ve written before about the free tools worth using in our post on getting the most from your SEO. Search Console is the one we’d put at the top of the list.
If you’d like help making sense of what Search Console is telling you, the friendly, experienced team at Spire Digital help businesses in Salisbury and the surrounding area with search engine optimisation (SEO). Give us a call on 01722 320 500.