If you have your own business website or maintain the website for the company you work for, I’m guessing you have probably heard of Google Webmaster Tools or Google Search Console.
As a professional Cheshire Web Design, often we find website owners usually shy away from Google Search Console, mostly due to time constraints or being overwhelmed when on the dashboard.
In this post, our Cheshire web design team will take you through our Google Search Console tutorial, so you can see how this free Google product can help you maintain your website and provide very valuable insights into your website.
Ready? Let’s get started…
What is Google Search Console?
Previously known as Google Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google to help you monitor and maintain your websites’ presence in Google search results.
You DO NOT have to sign up to Search Console for your website to be included and ranked in Google search results but doing so can not only help you understand how Google views your website, but so you can address and instruct Google to optimise your website when you have made further technical changes.
How to sign your website up to Google Search Console
Visit Google Search Console, and sign in using a valid Google account that you would like to use to manage your website with. If your current account doesn’t work, you can quickly and easily create a free Google Account.
Once logged in, simply click ‘Add Property’ then enter your websites’ URL. Next you will be prompted to verify your website to confirm that the website you want to manage is owned and/or maintained by your user account.
There are a few different ways you can do this, some methods much similar than others but you will need to contact your local Cheshire Web Design Agency if you need to work with your developer to add a snippet of code.
Once verified, you will be presented with the dashboard of your website. In the next part of our post, our Cheshire Web Design Agency experts will run through some of the more essential items you should look to familiarise yourself with.
How to submit a sitemap
A Sitemap is a list of pages or a model of your website’s content which is designed and structured to help both users and search engines navigate around your website.
First you will need to find your sitemap, in order to do this simply add ‘sitemap.xml’ to the end of your business website URL and you will be presented with your sitemap(s).
To submit your sitemap, simply click on the ‘Add/Test Sitemap’ button as simply type in the Sitemap URL’s as shown in the screenshot then click Submit.
Crawl Errors
Once you have submitted your sitemaps, the next technical piece of information worth monitoring is Crawl Errors. Crawl Errors are a report generate by Google which provides details about the site URL’s that Google could not successfully crawl, usually returning a 404 error.
There are two types of crawl errors, URL errors which are internal and external links found within your website. The second is site errors, which display the main issues for the past 90 days that prevented Google from accessing your website, site errors that occur can be due to the website server being down when google tried to crawl through your website.
So now you have a better understanding of crawl errors, you can download the list of crawl errors and send the spreadsheet over to your Cheshire Web Agency who will be able to address these errors by creating 301 Redirects. Read more about 301 redirects…
Search Traffic
Search Analytics: With numerous different filters to play with, Search Analytics offers an insight into what you’re best performing keywords and pages are, which search queries led to which pages, and which keywords are more popular on various devices! You can set the filters to display data based on search, device, dates, queries, pages and even countries!
Links to your site: As it suggests in the title, you can monitor which websites are linking most to your website along with a list of your most linked page content.
Internal links: Internal links display the amount of links found within your website that link from one page to another but never leave your website, so for example you may have a link on your about page that sends users to the contact page.
Cheshire Web Design Tutorial Summery
Congratulations, you have successfully gotten through our Search Console tutorial! The one goal I hope you have taken from this is that Search Console isn’t that scary once you have taken a deeper look into the settings and the data. As a free tool, it’s a powerful resource to help assist with search rankings and marketing purposes.
If you currently have a website on our Cheshire WordPress subscription package, we can easily add your email as a verified user on your website. If you would like assistance on setting up Google Search Console, simply get in touch.
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