Harnessing the power of Google Search Console for SEO success
- Lucy
- Aug 27, 2024
- 8 min read
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) plays a pivotal role in enhancing your website's visibility, driving organic traffic, and ultimately boosting your bottom line. Web design and SEO come hand-in-hand, and by optimising your website design for search engines, you ensure that your services are easily discoverable by potential clients precisely when they need them. But how do you track your SEO performance?
One of the most effective and free tools available to monitor and improve your website's SEO performance is Google Search Console. This tool provides invaluable insights into how your website is performing in Google search results, helping you identify areas of improvement to your website design and track the impact of your website optimisation efforts over time. And it's free which is an added bonus for small businesses looking to improve their website design, opposed to some of the more costly options out there.
Improving your SEO not only enhances your website's ranking but also significantly improves user experience. A well-optimised and good website design loads faster, is easier to navigate, and delivers content that aligns closely with user intent. This leads to higher engagement rates, increased trust, and more conversions, making SEO a win-win for both your small business and your customers.
Ready to get started? Here's our five essential tips on how to leverage Google Search Console to elevate your website's SEO performance.
1. Analyse search performance reports
The Search Performance Report in Google Search Console provides detailed insights into how your website performs in Google Search results. It displays metrics such as clicks, impressions, click-through rate (CTR), and average position for your website's pages and keywords over a specified period.
Monitoring these metrics is crucial for understanding which search keywords and website pages are driving traffic to your site, and how users are interacting with your content. This data can then help you to identify successful strategies and areas needing improvement, enabling you to tailor your content and SEO efforts more effectively.
Typically, a 'good' performance can be interpreted as a click through rate (CTR) of 3% or more, and an average position of within the top 10 search results indicates a very good performance as this will place you on the top page. But note that this will be your average performance so we recommend focusing more on looking at where you are ranked for specific keywords, else there will inevitably some terms (that you may or may not be focusing your attention on) bringing that average score down.
An average position of over 35 will put your content at a very low chance of being seen, and if you have a click-through rate of less than 1% this can also suggest that your content isn't effectively attracting or engaging users that do see it.
To improve your search performance, we recommend:
Optimise meta titles and descriptions: Ensure that your page titles and descriptions are compelling and accurately reflect your content. These do have more of an impact into your search result click through rate than your search position, but you should still incorporate relevant keywords naturally.
Enhance content quality: Create high-quality, informative, and engaging content that meets user intent and encourages clicks.
Utilise structured data: Implement schema markup to provide search engines with more information about your content, which can improve visibility and CTR.
When tracking improvements, note that any changes you make may take up to 2 weeks to reflect in the Search Performance Report. Regularly monitor the report to track progress and adjust your strategies accordingly.
How to implement on Wix and Squarespace websites:
Wix: Navigate to your page settings, and under SEO settings, update your meta titles and descriptions. Use Wix's SEO Wiz tool for additional guidance.
Squarespace: Go to the page settings, select the SEO tab, and edit your meta titles and descriptions accordingly. Utilise Squarespace's built-in SEO features to enhance content further.
2. Monitor coverage reports and and indexing status
The Coverage Report shows how well Google is indexing your website's pages. It highlights any errors, warnings, and valid pages, indicating which pages are successfully indexed and which have issues preventing them from appearing in search results.
Ensuring all your important pages are properly indexed is fundamental for visibility in search results. Identifying and fixing indexing issues promptly helps maintain and improve your website's search performance and user accessibility.
Your goal is to have all critical pages indexed without errors or warnings. If you do see errors like "Submitted URL not found (404)" or "Server error (5xx)", then this indicates issues that need immediate attention.
How to fix any coverage report errors:
Fix Crawl Errors: Review and resolve errors by correcting broken links, fixing server issues, and ensuring proper redirects are in place. You can use tools like Siteliner to find any broken links on your website and point you in the direction of some things that may be causing this error.
Submit sitemaps: Regularly submit and update your sitemap to guide Google in indexing your pages effectively. Both Wix and Squarespace automatically generate a sitemap, but you can customise these in your SEO settings.
Utilise Robots.txt: Configure your robots.txt file to allow Google to crawl and index the appropriate pages. You can edit this file though your SEO settings in Wix and Squarespace.
After making these types of changes, it can take a few days to a week for Google to re-crawl and update the indexing status. You can use the "Validate Fix" feature in Search Console to speed up the process.
3. Evaluate mobile usability
The Mobile Usability Report identifies issues affecting your website's performance on mobile devices, such as text too small to read, clickable elements too close together, and content wider than the screen.
With over 54% of global web traffic coming from mobile devices, ensuring your website design is mobile-friendly is essential for providing a positive user experience and maintaining high search rankings, as Google uses mobile-first indexing.
You want to ensure your web design is mobile friendly. In your Mobile Usability Report, there should be no errors detected, and pages should ideally be loading in under 3 seconds.
Got multiple usability errors and slow loading times? Here's some things you can do to improve this:
Responsive design: Ensure your website design adapts seamlessly to different screen sizes and orientations. Squarespace templates are instantly responsive, and on both Wix and Squarespace you can view your website from a mobile view to ensure it's optimised for all devices.
Optimise font sizes and spacing: Use readable font sizes and adequate spacing between elements to enhance readability and navigation.
Compress images and resources: Optimise images and minify code to improve loading speeds.
Test regularly: Use Google's Mobile-Friendly Test tool (right click to inspect on Chrome, and open up Lighthouse), or website tools like this mobile friendly test, to assess and improve your site's mobile performance.
4. Utilise URL inspection tool
The URL Inspection Tool provides detailed information about how Google crawls and indexes a specific page on your website. It shows the last crawl date, indexing status, and any issues encountered during crawling.
This tool helps you diagnose and fix specific issues affecting individual pages, ensuring that your most important content is correctly indexed and visible in search results. It also allows you to request re-indexing after making significant changes to a page, which is helpful to prompt it to review the improvements you make.
Again, you want this report to show that the page is indexed successfully without errors, and for the live test to show no issues. Errors like "URL is not on Google" or issues with structured data and mobile usability indicate problems that need to be fixed.
Depending on what error you have, here's some tips to improve this performance:
Identify and fix errors: Use the detailed reports to understand and address issues like noindex tags, crawl blocks, or server errors.
Request indexing: After resolving issues or updating content, use the "Request Indexing" feature to prompt Google to re-crawl and update the page in search results.
Monitor structured data: Ensure that structured data is correctly implemented to enhance search result appearances with rich snippets.
Review on Wix and Squarespace: In Wix, edit page settings to adjust SEO parameters and structured data. Use Wix SEO tools to troubleshoot and optimize individual pages. And on Squarespace, you can access page settings to modify SEO options and add structured data through code injection or built-in features.
These changes should be quick to update in Google Search Console. Re-indexing requests are usually processed within a few hours to a couple of days, and you can check back to confirm successful indexing.
5. Examine core web vitals on Google Search Console
Core web vitals are a set of metrics that assess your website's loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability. The primary metrics include Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
Google uses these Core Web Vitals as ranking factors, emphasising the importance of your user experience on your Google rankings. Optimising these metrics can lead to an improved Google ranking, but also lead to faster, more responsive, and stable web pages, enhancing user satisfaction and engagement. Making them a no brainer.
Here are our rough performance benchmarks to check your website against:
Good performance:
LCP: Less than 2.5 seconds
FID: Less than 100 milliseconds
CLS: Less than 0.1
Poor performance:
LCP: More than 4 seconds
FID: More than 300 milliseconds
CLS: More than 0.25
Need to improve your scores? Have a look at these areas:
Optimise images and media: Compress and properly size images to improve loading times.
Minimise JavaScript and CSS: Reduce and defer unnecessary code to enhance interactivity and loading speed.
Implement lazy loading: Load content as needed to improve initial load times.
Use Reliable Hosting: Ensure your hosting provider offers fast and stable services.
These types of changes take the longest to pull through and update in your Google Search Console dashboard, as the data is collected from real-user interactions over time (not just a report ran by Google on the spot, or via a crawl of your website). If you have lots of site visitors this may be faster, but for small business websites we typically recommend waiting 28 days before reviewing how these appear.
Ready to boost your small business web design and SEO?
Mastering Google Search Console empowers you to make informed decisions that significantly enhance your website's SEO performance and user experience. By regularly analysing its reports into key areas like search performance and indexing status, whilst also ensuring mobile usability and optimised core web vitals, you can position your small business website for greater online visibility and success.
At Elevating Ecom, I am dedicated to helping you navigate the complexities of SEO and unlock your website's full potential. Whether you need assistance with optimising your current website design, or building a new, SEO-friendly website on Wix or Squarespace, we're here to help every step of the way.
Ready to elevate your online presence? We offer dedicated services to improve your SEO strategy, looking at both your website design and SEO for your small business. Contact us today and let's start transforming your website into a powerful tool for growth and success.
Need more help with Google Search Console?
Google Search Console does have dedicated training videos which can help give you even more insight into how to get the most out of this tool. Head to their about page, and you can find a variety of tips and advice from the team themselves.
Happy optimising, and let us know what you think if you try out Google Search Console!
