Introduction:
Website SEO strategies take time to deploy. According to Content King it may take 3 to 4 weeks for websites with under 500 pages to rank in Google, and about 2.5 times longer if you have more than 500 pages.
Don’t have months to wait to gain traffic on your new pages? Google Search Console is a must. Google Search Console will automatically improve your SEO, and offer further recommendations to land your page higher in search results.
This article will teach you why Google Search Console is important with 5 things that will immediately improve your website’s SEO.
Agenda:
Let Google Read Your Website:
Help Google Rank All Your Pages:
Improve Google Page Rank:
Rank Higher with Future Pages:
Manually Put New Pages Into Search Results:
Let Google Read Your Website:
Google can read your website using bots that “crawl” all active pages. Defined by Cloudfare, a crawler “downloads and indexes content from all over the Internet”.
Indexing is the process search engines take to rank pages based on what a user would search. The most relevant pages are selected based on how Google can read your website.
Just by connecting your website through Google Search Console, you are telling Google that you want to be on their radar. Search engines can crawl over all active websites, but you can expedite this process and ensure accuracy by linking to Search Console.
Help Google Rank All Your Pages:
While connecting to Google Search Console is the best way to let bots crawl and analyze your pages, there is one limitation. Each crawling bot has a “crawl budget”. This is the amount of time and resources available for those bots to read and interpret web pages.
Certain pages can be left unread and unavailable in search results if you do not take this next step.
Submitting a sitemap will help conserve the crawl budget for your website. This gives bots directions to each page, and can read elements like photos and videos. If your website hosts pictures, videos, or time-relevant news, a sitemap is the quickest way to serve them in Google results.
Many plugins are available to create these sitemaps automatically. Just copy and paste that URL into Google Search Console and you are good to go.
Improve Google Page Rank:
After bots crawl your pages, use Google Search Console to see where they are ranking within the “Performance” section. Search Console also shows what the user typed into Google that allowed your website to appear, if the user saw or clicked on your result, and the average success rate of users clicking.
Improve your Google rank for existing pages using the Core Web Vitals reports. These reports will individually critique each web page and ensure they work properly for any device. Google confirmed that these metrics were a major ranking factor after full implementation in August 2021. Find these reports under the “Experience” section in Google Search Console.
For more tips to improve your existing page rank, learn more with our 5 step SEO guide.
Rank Higher with Future Pages:
You can use the data from existing pages to make judgements considering what pages should be created down the road.
Let’s use a small plumbing business as an example. The service page for this business focuses around the keyword “plumbing”, the main service they provide. While this is accurate, it is not very descriptive. There are already too many web pages fighting for the keyword “plumbing”, a small business cannot compete and will suffer a low rank in Google.
If your Google rank is not high enough, using a longer keyword can help diminish the amount of competition.
In this example, we can replace the keyword of “plumbing” with “residential plumbing in the Fox Valley of Wisconsin”. This offers a location and a specific audience for these services. This keyword is irrelevant outside of their scope of business, but very useful to limit your competition to other residential plumbers in the Fox Valley.
Another way to rank higher with future pages is to supplement the content that is already created.
Using the previous example, create pages with case studies and testimonials that use the keywords “plumbing” and “Fox Valley, Wisconsin” within them. By creating more pages relevant to the keywords that your pages are already appearing for, you can signal to Google that you have lots of content about that subject. This will raise your credibility, along with linking to other relevant sources within that subject.
Manually Put New Pages Into Search Results:
If you create new web pages daily, weekly or even monthly, you should use the URL inspection tool in Google Search Console.
Using the URL inspection tool, you can enter any web page URL to inspect and test using Google Search Console. If you find that your page is not in Google search results, you can request indexing. This will put those requests into a queue for bots to crawl over and properly rank within Google based on the relevant keywords used.
This gives you the best opportunity to gain traffic from Google because your page will appear in search engines quicker.
Conclusion:
These 5 steps for improving SEO with Google Search Console are sure to set yourself on the right path. This tool provides the means to analyze lots of data for digital marketers and web developers alike.
If you are looking to discuss your SEO or need assistance with a Google Search Console account, reach out to our team below.