Google Search Console | Guide to Ranking Higher And Gaining More Traffic

Google Search Console Guide Tips to Ranking Higher And Gaining More Traffic For your blog website

you can watch the video also in down blow

Google Search Console going to be  diving deep into the google  search console 

so if you're brand new to  google search console or  you've set it up but you really just  don't know what to do with it  today we're going to look at not only  how to set it up but we're also going to  take a look at some advanced strategies  to help you maximize google search  console  to actually help you rank higher in  google 

so if that sounds good to stay tuned the very first thing we're  going to need to do  in order to make use of google search  console is, of course, to add our website and get it set up so  that is what we're going to do now  google search console refers to a  website as a property  as you'll see so what you're going to  want to do is log into google  search console using the google account  that you want to be associated with your website or property 

 

so if you already have another account  like google analytics for example set up  you can use that same google account now  the first step  in setting up your website is once you  log in you're going to see  this screen and this is where you're  going to add your property  if you have other websites associated  with  your google search console account when  you log in you're going to see  a dashboard that looks like this and in  the upper left-hand corner you can  select from the property list and at the  bottom  select add property and as you can see  it takes you to the same options we had  just a moment ago 

 

so what we're going to do is we can  select between a domain  or URL prefix so if you select the  domain  you are going to need to verify  your domain and this is for either a  domain or URL  prefix however when you select the  domain option you're going to  need to verify your domain using DNS  verification so what we'll do is we'll  pop in the domain name  we will strip out HTTPS or HTTP  and just have the plain old domain name  there click  continue 

so as you can see it's going to  check to see if your domain has been  verified  and it gives you the option to verify  your domain using  a DNS record so what I want you to do is  to log into wherever you have registered  your domain  go daddy name cheap site ground in  motion hosting  wherever you've registered your domain  then you need to copy this TXT record  into your DNS configuration there if you  are not sure about that or if you want  to try it out  

and you just need help going through  that if you click on the little link  here for  full details it will take you to the  Google search console help page and it  gives you a little video and walks through instructions there  but if it sounds like I'm speaking a  foreign language to you when I start  talking about all of this  you can also try a URL prefix  property so what we're going to do is we  want to paste in our domain there  and we will need to put in the HTTP or  HTTP on this site and click  continue when we do this we're going to  have a number  of ways that we can go about verifying  the site  

so the first option that Google is going  to give us is an Html  file now as you can see that's the first  option here and all we have to do is  click  to download the file and then upload it  to  the website and then we'll come back  here to verify  that Google can see the file they're  happy with it and that we've proved we  own the domain or at least have access  to it through  the website owner once the website has  been verified you do have to leave the  file there you can't go back and delete  it needs to stay there 

so what you would do is  simply log into your CPanel  that you'll have access to through your  web host find out where  your website is housed simply click on  upload the file it will upload  there  and then you'll be able to come back  here and click verify  now there are some other ways here and I want to go through a couple of these  just so you can pick the one that seems  the easiest to you  the next one is an HTML tag  

and as you'll see where they're going to  give you the tag and what they want you  to do is copy this tag  and then they want you to paste it in  the heads section before the body  section  in the code now if you're like I don't  know how to code I don't know  where that is what that means if you are  using a page builder if you're using  you know Divi or one of the themes from  elegant a theme so you're using the  Divi page a builder you're using thrive  themes any of those good ones out there  you'll be able to go into the settings  you can add code to the head  section there so I can just go ahead and  add that in  and save the changes so once that's  saved I can go-ahead 

and  click verify I'll do that in just a  minute but you also have the option here  if you sign in using the same google  analytics account  again if you've added in the code you  can go ahead and verify it that way same  thing  with google tag manager I'll leave  some links that may be helpful in the  description below including the login  link here and other information you may  want to check out a little bit later as  well  so since i added this in I'm going to go  ahead and  click verify so just go ahead and choose  the option  that is easiest for you if you feel  overwhelmed by any of this if you need  to get someone else to do it for you  

it literally will take them a minute to  log in and do it so you can get this  done very inexpensively  so now as you can see ownership has been  verified using the HTML tag  and we also just like with the HTML file  we need to keep this tag  added so we don't lose our verification  status which we don't want so now we can  go ahead and go  to the property all right you are  officially in and you have  set up your property in google search  console but we want to go ahead and give  google as much information as we  possibly can about the website  now don't get me wrong Google is very  smart 

and they can figure out a lot of  information but  why leave them to guess when we can just  simply provide them the information  now if you log into google search  console and it looks a little different  than this  don't panic a lot of this same  information is  still there or the options are still  there  sometimes they just move menu items  around or make the console here or the dashboard look a  little bit different  for some reason google likes to switch  it up all the time but  you can still follow along here so the  first thing we're going to want to do is going down to  International targeting 

and this is  going to allow us to tell  google which country the website is  based in so we'll go ahead and select  the target users and check the box here  and if it's the united states as they're  guessing great otherwise, you can select the correct country and  click  save and that's it now you're done now 

 

if you don't do this  of course google is going to be able to  go to your website they'll look at what  address do you have  listed there they'll see where are you  getting most backlinks from are you  getting most of your backlinks from  Australia or Germany or the united  states  and that will help clue them into where  your website may be targeted where it's located they can  look at where you're hosting your  website if you're  writing content in English or Spanish or  german 

and there are other ways that they can really  target this but it this obviously only  takes five seconds to do  and you are done now as you can see on  the dashboard there is no data  and that is perfectly normal you're  going to want to come back in a day or  two and check just to make sure  that google search console is, in fact, tracking your information here  now if you use google analytics which  hopefully you are  you know that years ago they stopped  telling everyone what keywords people  were using to  find your website so if you go into  google analytics and you look at the  keywords there  most of them are bundled in this section  called  not provided which is very very  frustrating  

but the good news is that you can  actually, use google search console to  start to uncover what some of those  keywords actually are so in order to do  this we're going to want to connect  google search console  to our google analytics account in order  to do that  we need to pop over to google analytics  in the bottom left-hand corner click  admin now you're going to see a few  columns here  we're going to go over to the middle  column which is the property  and select property settings now here  we're going to scroll pretty much all  the way to the bottom  and we will see this section search  console and we'll click  adjust search console  now there's nothing listed here no  properties or anything 

so what we want  to do is click  on the add button and this is going to  pull in any of  the accounts that are associated with  your google search console account  so go ahead and select that and click  save it says you are about to save a new  association  any existing search console association  for this web property will be  removed but that doesn't exist so we'll  go ahead and click save there  now once you're done with that it  automatically brings you back to the search  console and you have now linked the two  accounts which is great  now when you go into your analytics  account now you're going to be able to  go  over here to the acquisition section 

and  you'll see  search console listed under there so nowhere you'll see all of the information  that you're going to get you'll get  landing pages which are here is giving us  the number of impressions and number of  clicks  so this can help you improve your titles  and your descriptions there that appear  in search results so if you're seeing a  high number of impressions but a very  low  number of clicks simply updating your  title  making it more compelling can help drive  more traffic  from web pages that are already ranked  so that's a great way to quickly get  some additional traffic

  

now you also get countries and this is  going to give you impressions  click-through rate all of these  positions based on the different  countries  so that's gonna be really helpful if you  have a website that is targeting  different countries or it doesn't really  matter where the traffic is coming from  this website in particular really only  targets us  and even within us a very small  area so this isn't really going to be  helpful to  them in particular but if your website  targets people  all over the globe then that can be  really helpful now you'll get some more  information on devices that are being  used here

 

but the most  important really here is queries now the  information here  is where you're going to start to find  keywords  so if you want to see what is already  working for your website  come over here to analytics go to the  search console account and  check on queries and now you've  uncovered some additional  keywords a great benefit to using google  search console is that  Google will actually let you know if  your website has any security issues  now they're detecting these things very  quickly and they don't want to rank  any websites or web pages that have any  security issues  or that has malware being added or a  site that has been hacked  and they want webmasters to be taking  care of these types of issues  very quickly

 

so one thing that you can  do inside the console is going over here to security and manual  actions  and select security issues now it's  going to tell you  if they found any security issues on  your website but  there is no issues detected now one of  the good things about having google  search console  is that if there are any security issues  that pop  up later or your site has been hacked or  they notice anything out of the ordinary  that needs to be addressed  before they have to take any action  they'll send you  an email so it never hurts to come  through here as you're checking your  other information  and double-check but you can also keep  an eye out for any emails so that you  can take care of any of those  issues quickly all right the next thing  we want to do is to help  google index our pages so what we're  going to do is we are going to create  

and submit a sitemap so we're going to  head over to the index section  and click on site maps so as you'll see  here  there are no submitted sitemaps so what  we want to do  is submit one now the first thing to do  is to check  do you even have one so what you can do  is pop over to your browser  type in your URL forward-slash  sitemap.xml that is usually the format  so you'll see here has the  URL and then we can type in sitemap.xml  and we would be able to submit that  assuming the file actually exists  so i know that this file does not exist  here  if you are using any SEO plugins like if  you're using yoast for example  that one, in particular, does create a  sitemap 

for you  so you want to check to make sure that  it doesn't already  exist there if you're using something  like that otherwise  you can go ahead and create one which is  what we'll do  now if you have a very small website  to be honest you probably don't even  need a site map  however it absolutely can cause no harm  at all whatsoever so why not submit it  

if you have a larger website like the  one we do here for instance which I know has over 1100 blog posts there  are different pages for events that I know the site is actually currently  cleaning up they're going to be getting  rid of some of those but it is a very  large site same if you have an eCommerce  store that has lots of products, for example, this you really want to make sure that  you have a site map to help Google index  all those pages  

so if you have up to 500 pages so 500  pages or less  you can use a free tool like the SEO  spider tool from screaming frog  and they will create that for you  there's also  a site called XML sitemaps and they will  create it for you as well  now if you have more than 500 pages well  you're gonna need to either create this  manually which would be  pretty awful or you can just pay for one  of these tools and they will create it  for you  

so what we would do here is XML sitemaps  we'll just pop in  the URL and click start now it's going  to start adding different pages to the  queue as you'll see here in a second  it's going to tell you based on that  queue how much time is left  typically it starts adding a small number of pages to the queue as it  starts going through the site  itself and pulling in pages so you'll  see where it has  about four minutes remaining and it has  42 pages queued now  because the site is so much longer I know it's still going to be queuing more  and more pages  and this time is going to go up so  depending on the site  size is really how long this is going to  take it could take anywhere from  a minute to a few minutes 

if you have a  smaller site up to maybe 15 or 20  minutes for  a larger site which is probably what  this one is going to take  now once this is done it's going to take  you to a page like this  that says download your XML sitemap file  you'll simply click that to download it  and what you're going to have is a file  that looks like this  now I highly encourage you to  look  through this XML sitemap even if it  doesn't seem fun  and the reason is that you want to  make sure that Google is not indexing or  at least you're not asking Google to  index  pages but you don't want it to index so  if there are any admin pages if there are any member pages anything that wouldn't  necessarily be a landing page  you would put into google search results  you want to go ahead and take that out  here 

 

so just looking at these real quick  these are probably all places that they  want  but or pages rather than they want but  going through  they have a lot of events and these  events are over these are in the past  and these really just don't need index  it doesn't do anything for them and it's  really just going to slow down  the site I know they're working on  taking a lot of these old old events out  so that's something that we would want  to go and clean up  

so what you can do is open this in any  text editor  and let's say we didn't want this URL  right here we want to highlight  everything from the opening  URL to the end URL right here  and delete that section and that will  delete that URL  from your XML sitemap and that's all you  need to do you'll save that  and now if you are in your dashboard  here you'll notice  as we were doing before you simply enter  the URL  and submit it that means you have to  actually, upload the file so yep we gotta go back  over to our web host  into our Cpanel into the file manager  find where your website files are  located and then we gotta upload  that file 

so that's what we'll do now  we'll go in here and  get that site map and upload it  now I've already uploaded this file but  that will upload that file there and  then we can come back here and we can  click on submit  just make sure this matches your file  name here  okay and then we're going to click on  submit  now what it's going to say is google  will periodically process it look for  changes  and you'll be notified if anything goes  wrong in the future that's a good thing  about google search console is  you will be notified if anything is  wrong if there are any errors if there are any issues anything google doesn't like  so this is why we're going through this  process here 

but when we add a site map  this is also going to allow us to come  back to our dashboard once google has  time to go through it and index pages  to see how many pages they actually  index what  pages they don't index and any problems  that they're having in  indexing some pages so this is why we  want to check for this so we'll be able  to come back  and make sure that they have been able  to crawl our site map  all right you have now successfully  completed the steps  to set up your google search console  account so so far you have added your  property 

you have set the target country  connected your google analytics account  to the google search console account  checked for security issues and added  your site map  so now I've waited a day or two which if  you're not seeing all of the data as you  click through some of these reports in  here  well then you want to make sure you wait  a couple of days at least and that way  you can come back and take a look at  what google  is telling you what they found out so  far now this is not just a  one-time account setup and you never  look at it again  otherwise you're not going to be getting  the most benefit out of it which is  going to help you  rank your website even higher 

so what we  want to do now is we want to look at  some of the areas that are going to help  you  improve SEO so the first thing we want  to do is we want to head over to  our coverage report this is under the  index section and you  click on coverage now the coverage  report is going to tell you  basically which URLs Google has indexed  

and  which they have not so you're gonna be  able to make sure that everything  looks good so there are four sections that  go across the top here  the first one is the error section this  one is going to tell you  how many pages were not indexed because  there was an  error so then you can go fix those the second one is  valid with a warning and this one is going  to tell you which pages have been  indexed  but there's an issue and Google wants  you to know about it

so you can have  those addresses so you definitely want to  make sure  if there's anything appearing here that  you take care of those  next up you have valid this simply means  the pages were indexed  and no issues there and then you have  the excluded which are the pages that  were not  indexed but it's probably because that's  the way you have set it up 

so what you want to look for are these  four numbers here and you don't want to  just look but make sure they're actually  correct so even if something is  appearing for instance in the valid  section  we want to make sure that that's meant  to be so knowing this particular site  this is probably very very high and it's  likely as I mentioned earlier there was  a lot of event pages that they had 

and it would be best if we had fewer event pages that were added in there  because  those are in the past it's not going to  be useful to anybody  to see those in search results so  there's no point in google indexing  those  now in the excluded section what we want  to do is we want to go  into this excluded section here and we  want to make sure  are all of the pages that are excluded intentionally do we really want them to be  excluded are  there any important pages that should be  included there  same with valid are there any pages that  we do  not want to have an index and we want to  have them excluded  so as you see each one of these numbers  is going to tell us something very  important  

so let's start off looking at just the first one here so whichever one we  highlight it's going to give us the  information for that  you obviously saw that here on the  impressions but going down here  this is going to give us the detail so  we have one page  that is giving us an error now there's  all types of errors that we can have  we can have 404 errors that are page not  found  those are pretty easy to figure out if  the page is really not there  this could be a crawl issue which could  be a number of issues so  when google went to look at the page  they were unable to crawl it for some  reason and then we have this one here  which is a server error  

so what we can do is we can figure out  did google go to this particular page  and the server have an issue and it just  timed out at that particular moment and  there's actually nothing wrong  or is there something else going on with  the server that we need to figure out  so what we'll do here is we can simply  click on the error  and what will happen is, in this case, it's only given us one error which is  good  but you could have 50 errors 100 errors  200 errors  if you have a lot of errors don't be  highly alarmed  it could be one fix that is really going  to address all of those errors that are  there  so it really just depends on what it is 

so if we scroll down here  it's going to give us the URL of the  page as having the problem so now we're  gonna be able to check it out  and then once we take a look at it we  figure it out we make sure it's fixed  then we can scroll up here and click on  the validate fix  option this tells google hey we've  looked at it we've addressed it  please go back and try again so that way  they will go ahead and  index the page assuming that you do want  it to be indexed so what we'll do here  is we'll go back down to this URL now  you can see there's a couple of options  here  we can copy this URL if we just want to  go out to  our browser check the page see what's  going on this one will open  it and this will inspect the url for us  so  that's something that's very helpful if  we Click on the URL it's always going to  pop  up a box over here on the right-hand side 

and google is going to give you any  of the google search console tools  that are going to help you in figuring  out what in the world is going on  and why are you experiencing this error  so it is recommending that what we do is  we go ahead and we take a look at our  robots.txt file  now this is a file that's simply telling  google which pages or directories on our  website we want them to  index and which ones we do not so what  we can do is simply click  on that it's going to open up a new  window here  with a robots.txt file, this is going to  tell us what  is currently on the website 

and  really what we're blocking here is the  admin file so  there's nothing that's going to block  this particular  URL here and you can see that that it's  allowed so that's not causing the issue  as you can see it's going to help you go  through the process of elimination  to weed out what is not the issue so  that way  if you can fix it you do want to try to  fix it'll help you figure out what the issue  is so you can go in and fix it yourself  or if you want to bring someone else on  to try to fix an issue for you, you want  to connect with the web developer, at least you can tell them this specific  issue 

now if you have a  404 error for instance google's still  going to tell you to test your  robots.txt file  to have you look at the search result to  make sure the page is actually coming up  you could resubmit it to to the index  you can fetch as google so there are some  different options that they're going to  give you  again just to try to figure out what is  wrong if you have a 404 error quickest  one is try to view it  and make sure that the page does  actually come up

so another thing that  you can do is come over here to the URL  inspection and as you see it highlights  the box here at the top  it says inspect any URL so you can go  ahead and pop in the URL that's given  you any trouble  that's giving you an error and this is  going to help you again figure out what  is the issue so  this is what's really neat about google  search console it's not only telling you  what issues are there and it's  Google is the one that's telling you  so that's why it's very important to  listen to this but it's also  going to help you figure out what the  error is because google doesn't want you  to have errors they want you to get this  resolved 

so let's go back here for a second we're  going to go back and look  at The next section here which is valid  without warning now I don't have any  specific errors here for valid without  warning  however this is going to be the very  same process it's going to tell you  what the errors are you're going to be  able to click through it may tell you  that there are two or three different  types of warnings  but for each one, you can click through  see the specific URLs that are having  trouble so let's say that a page was  indexed but there's something going on  there's an error that it's getting that  it doesn't like and so it wants you to  look at it  

so if you see any URLs as you're going  through these different reports  that you don't want to have index what  you can do  is you can go in you can add-in the no-index tag into that particular page what  you can also do  is come over here to removals and then  as you're over here on the removal  section you can go ahead and submit a  request  for them to remove a specific URL  from the search results now this will  work for about six months

so in that  time, you need to address  what you want to have happened you want to  make sure that you are no  indexing the page you are blocking the  page redirecting the page  whatever it is that you want to have happened with that particular URL  now heading back over here to the  coverage port what we want to do now is  we want to take a look at  the valid URL so one of the reasons why  we want to look at this  is because this is going to tell us a  lot of information right now as the page  is just set up  it's going to tell us a couple of things  one that 250 pages have been submitted  and indexed but these almost  11 000 pages were not included in the  sitemap  which means there needs to be a change  directly on the website to  keep Google from indexing those pages 

if  we do not want those pages indexed so  again we're going to be able to click  through and we're going to be able to  see a list of these particular pages  so as I suspected we have event event  event event these are a lot of events pages and I bet you if I keep going  let's see if we can show a lot more here  it is going to be a lot of events  now some of them they don't say an event or  they have page  places so these might be a little bit  different but this is telling us to google's seeing these and there's a lot  of events  that we don't need them to index 

so this  is something that we need to make sure  that we're taking care of  now if you are coming back which you  should be  if you're coming back to take a look at  what's going on in your coverage report  you're going to want to look for a  couple of things one  you can look for do the numbers still  look good have i seen a big drop off  in pages or have I seen a big increase  in pages  if you're not removing any pages or you  haven't changed anything and you see a  big drop off well something's wrong you  need to go in and look at  why suddenly are these pages being  blocked or why are they not being  indexed  it could be that something was going on  with the website something  or a web developer went in and he  accidentally blocked some of those pages  you know messing around with  the robots.txt file or maybe a no-index  tag was accidentally added  

so you want to double-check the same thing  with a big increase if you've seen a big  increase but you haven't been adding any  content  well that's definitely a red flag that  something's going on  so this could be that pages that were  previously  blocked or were suddenly unblocked  unintentionally  there's a lot of different reasons why  this could happen but we definitely want  to check  now lastly we want to go back to the  coverage report and we want to look at  the excluded  URLs so now here you can see that there  are a number of them for a number of  different reasons  they were crawled we have over 5000 that  were crawled 

but not  indexed some that were duplicate some  didn't have a no-index tag so this is  what we were talking about  we want to make sure that these pages  actually are meant to have the no index  tags so as you can see  there's some that were not found here  and these are the specific reasons  why they were not indexed so we'll take  a look here just as an example  as the pages having the no-index tag  so this way we can see okay well these  are the events so we wanted the events  to be excluded so this is good we want  them to keep that no index tag and all  looks good there  so it's likely in this section as we're  looking through that we can just leave  this one

so as long as it looks good to you there's  nothing to worry about with that  there because it's not reporting an  error google's not telling you  that you need to do anything with this  it's just telling you what's happening  so if you  decide you need to correct it then you  can do so so as you can see the coverage  report is  extremely important you want to double-check this as soon as you get it set up  one to two days after you get it set up  make sure all the information is there  but then you should be coming back on a  pretty regular basis come back every  month or so  and double-check that nothing has  changed so you can stay on top of any  issues and it doesn't cause any harm  with your rankings 

let's go ahead and  get into what is probably  the most exciting part of the google search  console  and this is the performance part that  we'll see right here towards the top  as the name suggests this tool is going  to tell you  exactly how your pages are performing  in google and who doesn't want to know  that so this is going to give you  all the information that you really need  to figure out where to start to get  higher rankings

and to get more traffic  from where your site is already starting  so  this is really really helpful  information so what I'll walk through  a couple examples here of how you can  actually play around with this  so at the top here just like the last  report you're gonna see four boxes  you have the total clicks the number of  people who actually have seen  your web page pop up in search results  and then clicked on it  the total number of impressions this is  the number of times that people have  actually  seen your web page listed in search  results  

and the average click-through rate which  you can see here is not good  but what's exciting about that is that  means that there's a lot of opportunities here  and that's what we're going to look for  and the average position for the  keywords is  29.4 for this particular site so as you  can see  you already have a lot of information  here so  there's a couple of things that we can  do here as we go down here  you'll see that we have the number of  clicks the number of impressions we can  see that this one for instance  was shown in search results 545 times  

but only six people clicked on it so we  want to figure out  what's going on with that because if  it's already being shown a lot  that means can we just make some tweaks  so that more people click on this and  then that means  instant traffic you can work on this  today  and start seeing new traffic in right  away  so what we're going to look for here is  we're going to unclick  clicks and we're going to highlight here  the click-through rate which is ctr  and the average position so now as we  scroll down here  you're going to see those columns so  what we want to do here  is we want to look for really two  sections we want to look for  those pages that are ranking in the top  five  

and then those that are ranking five and  below  so we can start seeing if there is a  page ranking in the top five was there  anything that we could do to boost a  little bit higher  is the click-through rate really good  and if it is  can we go ahead like this one if this is  11.3  now that's a brand name so that's not  really the best example here

but this is  getting a 50  click-through rate but you know it's not  going to drive a lot of traffic because  it's only getting six impressions so  that's not a big search term there  but we want to look at the ones that  have the high conversion rate that  we can maybe add some additional content  to that page we can pick up an extra  backlink to that page we can do  something  to help it improve and go up a little  bit higher  for all the ones below we can still do  the same thing but we're also looking  for some of that low hanging fruit  which are the keywords that are ranking  

but they're just not getting the clicks  and that's how we're going to get our  fast  traffic so what we want to do here is we  want to click on  this little filter bar now I'll show you  an example here but this is one you'll  want to go play with and you can  search by different things here and this  is going to give you all kinds of  different data so you can figure out  where to start  so what I like to look for is the  position so we'll start with five and  below 

so once we click on position up here we  can select  greater than from the drop-down menu and  we're going we want 5 and above so we  have to put 4.9  here and done now we can see there's one  filter so we want to add  one more and you'll see all the  positions down here have changed  so that nothing is below five now we're  going to look for  the click-through rate and if we look at  this chart here we can see  that position five is expected to get  about  7.4 percent click-through rate

so this  is how if your question is  what is a good click-through rate well  that depends on your position  so if you have the first position you're  expected to get around 34 percent  and again these are averages here number  three would be 11.5 you want to drop  down to six  then you're at 5.1 percent if you're in  the 10th position you're looking at 2.6  so that will give you an idea of what to  expect  

so if we're looking at five and below we  should be  at least at 7.4 percent  so we're going to look for any number  that is smaller  than 7.4 now as you can  see we have all of the positions below  five  and we have low click-through rates so  now there's a couple of things we can do  one we can go ahead and  look at what the queries are and we can  go out and find the pages that are  ranking for that particular keyword  and see how can we where it is  positioned  right now just start getting more  traffic as you can see here there are  nearly 150 impressions  for this page and search results

but  we're getting less than one percent  click-through  so if this is the eighth position  thereabout  we should be getting about 3.3 so we'd  be getting a lot more traffic at least  if we did nothing to increase the pages  ranking  other than just tweak it in search  results so this is things like going in  and changing  the title and the description to make it  more  engaging make people curious make sure  that they feel like they're going to get  the exact answer they need  about the particular query so what we  want to do is  we can go out to google we can put in  that search term 

and we can see  what else is coming up and this is going  to give us a good idea of what we're up  against and be able to make tweaks to be  the best one  there but it's also going to help us  look at just the titles just the  descriptions  so we can make sure that those are going  to outperform  the other ones then later we can go back  and say okay now how can we  also increase the ranking so then you're  getting  even a lot more traffic but again we're  trying to look for results we can get  right now if you click on any  particular  query here

so we'll try this one you  notice it's going to add it to the  filter bar up here at the top we can see  again  the total impressions clicks average  click-through rate  and average position so this is what you know  we'll say about nine so we should be  getting  roughly about three percent click-through so we're a little low there and  that can be improved  now if we go down to queries we see the  same query we can go over to pages

and this is going to tell us which  specific page  is ranking so now we can just copy that  page go look at it on our website and  start looking at how we can improve this  now another thing that we can do here is to go ahead and copy this URL  this is just an example you can do this  for any page  but let's say you want to know what a  page  ranks for what keywords does that page  actually rank for so up here in the top, we're going to get rid of this query  here for a second

and we're going to hit new because we  want to add a new  filter and we're going to search for a  particular page  we're going to pop in the URL here  and click apply so now what we're going  to want to do is come down to this  particular page and  we will go to queries so now you can see  all of the keywords and it looks like  there are 22 different keywords that  this  one page ranks for so by us improving  this page we can get a lot more traffic  we can see what position  we are ranking for in a lot of these  different keywords they're all very  similar  but as you can see for all of these  the click-through rate is zero so  we really could do a lot to improve that  

but some of these aren't getting that much traffic so that's not necessarily ones that we would want to start with we'd definitely be more interested in improving this one that has nearly 550  impressions this one almost 100 this one's 16. so we  want to go with some of the higher  numbers over  one that only has five impressions that are not going to get us a substantial  amount of traffic really quickly  now just a couple quick more things that I want to show you about the performance  report and then you can go in here and  play around all you want with this  one thing you want to notice is that  there are  16 months of data google wasn't always

so generous but  they give us 16 months of data to go  back  to look at to compare which is really  great so what I recommend that you do  is look at where you're at now of course  and  prioritize what is going to help you get  the most traffic  based on the number of impressions and  the low click-through rate that you  could easily  improve that's going to be your starting  point then  go ahead and make a change and then let  it go the google's going to need a few days  just to  re-index that get that appearing in  search results  once those few days have passed you want  to start  about a week or two countdowns because  you need to have enough data  to really test to see are the changes  that you made  going to make an impact 

now if you have  a low impression  keyword well you might need more time  but if you have one  like this one here that had 500  something impressions well you might  only need a week or two to really see if  that's going to make a difference here  so  what we want to do here is uh once we  have done  that change and we've waited a week or  two we can come back to  compare okay so now we're going to be  able to put in  the last let's say seven days 14 days  versus what you're looking at now so we  can say okay in the last two weeks I want to compare that to the two weeks  prior  and then you're going to go into the  particular URL  so you remember we left that up here

and  then see what is the data telling you  are you getting more click-throughs  is your traffic improving from that are  you getting more impressions  and again as you make some more  substantial changes and you start to see your pages rank a little bit higher well  you can track all of that in here too so  this is  really really amazing and if you want  quick wins for SEO  well there you go this is it now that  you have looked at  the pages you're going to start tweaking  to start getting some instant traffic in  

let's go to the next thing you can do  which is down here under the legacy  tools this is one of the older tools  available  you click on links here now this is  another great section of the search  console you're going to get a lot of  good information about the links  going in and out of your website here so  what you're going to be able to look at  are the external links here  these are the third-party websites that  are pointing to your website, they're  linking to you  and these are the internal links  so what pages that are on your website  are linking to  other pages on your website that's  really good for SEO so we definitely  want to use this information  we can see where some of the backlinks  are coming from  we're going to be able to see the anchor  text that's being used

so this is going to be really really  helpful information here  so if there is a particular page that  you want to rank  you want to make sure that other pages  on your website are linking to that page  and if they're not  well you got to set up some of those  pages so a good thing to do is come over  here to your top link pages  and this is going to show you how many  pages are actually linked so if it's a  low  number then you can go ahead and add in  some internal links  so we can see here some of these have  very high numbers so that's also  something we can take a look at  

but let's just pick one of these here  let's try this one  so now this is going to give us a list  of all of the pages  that are linking to this page right here  so that way if we want to change any of  that we can  if we see that there are not enough pages  we're going to be able to go in and add  those of course too  so now with the internal links we can  shift over to  the external links so we can look here  at  which pages are receiving a lot of links  and we want to make sure that it's  balanced out we want to make sure that  we're getting links to the pages that  are most important to us  that we most want to link here so we see  that there is a very big difference  especially between the home page  and just a venue so that's something we  want to look at 

and make sure  that that page is actually supposed to  have that many links because  well it's probably not supposed to have  4 000 links so that's something we're  going to want to go in  and definitely take a look at so this is  going to help make sure that our  backlink profile stays clean as well we  can look at the different  websites that are linking to the website  this can help us  go out and find other places maybe to  promote content  this can help us find ways to partner  possibly with some of them  and also just again to make sure that we  have a clean backlink profile

and we're also diversifying across a  large number of  domains as well now we can also look at  the anchor text this is the text that  people highlight  and link to from their website to  ours so we definitely want to make sure  that this is also  diversified that it also looks natural  so in just a couple of minutes here you  can figure out where you need to add in  more internal links  and you can get a very good look at your  backlink profile  and see what needs some work all right  moving right along  as we've known for many years now Google  has a mobile-first  index 

which means if your website is not  a hundred percent optimized for google  well  you gotta get that in order right away  now one of the great things that we can  do  over in google search console is can  see if google thinks that we have any  mobile usability  issues and we can do that by going over  here to the enhancement section  and clicking on mobile usability now  we're gonna see here the pages that have  an  error when it comes to mobile usability  and we've got to get that fixed  and we will see the number of pages that  either have no errors or  just have very few errors here

so we can  see for this particular site that we  are good to go but what we can look at  down here are a couple of the errors  so if you do have pages that have errors  for instance it will tell you down here  the text is too small to read  and just as with other sections of the  console you're gonna be able to click  through and it will give you a list of  the specific pages  where they want you to increase the text  size  same thing here if there are clickable  elements too close together 

and it can  be confusing for mobile users  then they're going to want you to adjust  that and again they're going to be the  list of all of the pages here so  what's really helpful about mobile  usability is you're going to get a list  by clicking through on any of the errors  of the pages that have this particular  type of issue  and you're going to find out how to  actually go about fixing those

so  you have a more mobile user-friendly  site now there are a couple of other  interesting things you can do here  if you head on over to the URL  inspection which is again  this top bar here and you pop in one of  the pages on your website google is  going to go out and  pull this webpage from its index this is  going to tell you if this  specific URL is mobile-friendly 

and you'll see we can click through here  and you can view  the crawled page so this is going to  pull up the information here  you'll get the HTML version here you can  get a screenshot  of this and it's also going to tell you  some interesting information  like page resources so we don't want to  have two too many page resources here  but it's also going to tell us, in this case, there are 94-page resources but 17 of  those couldn't be  loaded so we may not want to have all of  those blocked especially if Google is  looking at the mobile version  

so that's something we need to take a  look at here if we want to get a  screenshot we can use  the test live URL here as you can see  and what will happen is google is going  to go out and  actually, take a screenshot of the mobile  version of your site that way you can  make sure google sees it  the same way you do now we're going to  take a look  here real quick also at the performance  section  now I know we've covered this before 

but  i want to take a look at  the versions here of the website so we  talked earlier on  about improving your click-through rate  improving the titles and the  descriptions and how your pages are  actually displaying in search results  so what we can also do is say well is  there a difference  between the click-through rate for those  clicking on desktop  and mobile that way we can take a look  at how we can improve them for both  if those numbers are very off 

so let's  say for instance what we want to do here  so we want to have the average  click-through rate  and the total impressions here and what  we'll do here  is we're going to create a new filter  we'll select a device  and we want to compare mobile versus  desktop we'll click apply there and now  as you can see it compares all of our  numbers  we have more impressions on desktop than  we do mobile but  our average position is almost twice as  high  as it is on desktop

and we also have a  higher click-through rate on mobile  so as we go down here we're also going  to be able to take a look at those  queries that we looked at before  and then again compare the numbers for  each particular query  so here if we're looking at billy trail  kid friendly we have  six impressions on mobile but we only  get one on desktop  and then we can see what the conversion  rate is there but let's look at  something a bit higher here we have  crooked run orchard  mobile impression 633 where the desktop is  only getting 267  

but we might be getting the same amount  of traffic from those  queries because on desktop we're getting  a 2.2 percent click-through rate  we're on mobile we're only getting 0.3  so again  we want to see how much title and  description actually appears on the  mobile search result  versus the desktop to see if we need to  reword that a little bit  or make it more engaging on mobile so we  can benefit from more of that traffic  for  seeing if our web page is getting 633  impressions we could get a lot more  traffic  especially if we're only getting 0.3  click-through rate  so this is a great way to make sure that  your click-through rate is working  and especially as you look at how much  traffic you're getting from desktop  versus mobile  you can figure out what 

you need to  really prioritize here let's take a look at one last quick  piece about  mobile usability here we'll go over here  to core web  vitals now this is coming from a  chrome user experience report here and  it is reporting 143 poor  URLs on the mobile version here so let's  take a look at that report  and again we have these helpful boxes at  the top tell us we have 143  issues all the same issue here we have a  need improvement section  and the URLs that are good 

so we can  scroll down here and  see the issues here so it's saying that  143 pages have  the issue of a load time longer than  four seconds which is a problem so the  longer it takes to load  well that's gonna cause problems with  user experience but that's also not good  for ranking in google as well it's also  going to affect  your crawl budget as we'll talk about  here in a second as well  so this is where you want to click  through and you want to see which pages  are really loading slow  and be able to figure out what is going  on there 

now you can use  google's free page speed insights tool  and that will give you more insight into  exactly how long it takes for different  pages to load  and what specifically on those pages is  causing  a slow load time now we've just about  covered most of google search console so  congrats on sticking with this is  really going to help you  rank your website higher and get the  most out of this i want to show you just  a couple  more really cool things 

and one of those  is  in the URL inspection tool so what I want to do here is I'm going to pop in  just as an example  a URL of a webpage that I don't actually  have up yet  but let's say you have just created a  new web page  but google has not yet indexed that page  right its brand new 

so what you want to do is if you want  Google to index it really quickly  you're going to pop over here to the URL  inspection do what i just did  pop it into the URL bar there and you're  gonna see  this here URL is not on google the page  is not in  the index but not because of an error 

so  now it's going to  show you what they see when they go out  and they look for this particular page  you know it's new they haven't had an  opportunity to crawl it and you want  them to index it quickly  

so if you've ever wondered hey I have a  new web page how am I going to get it  indexed quickly well here you go  we're going to go over here to this  section request indexing  now normally this is a button and it's  highlighted here but  right now google has this feature  suspended just for  a couple of weeks while they are doing  some technical updates in the back end  but otherwise what I can do is simply  click on request  indexing and it is going to tell Google  to crawl that page

and it's going to get that page indexed  quickly so that is a really good  tool to know about now the last thing  we're going to take a look at  is called the google crawl budget and  this is important so you're going to  scroll down here  to the legacy tools and you'll see crawl  stats that's what we're going to head  over  so it's going to pop up a new window for  us and  this is going to tell us how many of our  site pages  google crawls every day 

and you'll see  it's going to give us a range from the  highest to the lowest number of pages  but on average google crawls over 300  pages on this particular site  now we know from the index there that there are about 12 000 plus pages but  they're only going through 13 1400 pages  here a day  so what that means is if you are  continually adding new content  or you're updating any of your content  and you have a big discrepancy  between the number of average crawled  pages and the number of actual pages on  your website  well it's going to take google a really  long time to find those pages  index them or crawl those pages that  they have previously  

and see that there have been any updates so  they can adjust their search results  accordingly  so that's something we want to keep an  eye out for  so if you are seeing that your crawl  budget is relatively  similar to the number of pages well then  you really don't have too much to worry  about here  now another thing that we can look at  here is the time spent  downloading a page if they're spending a  lot of time  crawling the pages well they're going to  be able to  crawl fewer pages so one of the ways to  increase your crawl budget here is to  speed up your website that's going to  help Google crawl it faster, of course, it's better for users and it's  better for SEO it's going to  increase that crawl budget 

so more of  those pages are getting indexed  now another way that you can increase  this crawl budget that you have  up here is to increase the number of  backlinks that you have as well  so google takes a look at the authority  of your website and based on that  they allot a certain amount of crawl  budget so that is why it is important to  also continue to work on the authority  of your overall site as well  but of course, that does take a little  bit of time but backlinks are going to  help you  get that bigger crawl budget of course  assuming you are looking at those high-quality backlinks

and not just any old  backlink you can get  now the last thing that you can do  really to  improve this crawl rate is to make sure  that you  are not asking Google to crawl any pages  that they don't need to  now this is typically more of a problem  for the larger websites that are out  there if you have a smaller website  you're probably not going to run into  this  issue but if you think about websites  that have  a search function where that's something  very common that users go through if  there  are a lot of products like let's say you  have a big e-commerce store  then that's something that you really  want to look at and you want to make  sure that you are  asking google not to crawl particular  pages 

so let's say that you have an e-commerce  store and  when someone goes to select a product  they can select  the color can they get it in red and  blue and white  can they select size small medium  large  and how else are they able to filter by types of products  any of that's not something that is  particularly useful to search results or  search engines  but it's it is useful to the visitors  who are on the website so of course, you  want that there

so what we can do is back over in our  search console here  we want to go back to legacy tools again  one of the older tools  and we want to go to URL parameters now  we have the inspection tool, not the same  thing we want to go to  URL parameters here again this is going  to open up  a new window for us and we want to add  the parameter now they are  noting here which i want to make sure  that you were reading that if  you don't understand this and you don't  feel confident in doing this  you may want to get some help because  this can definitely 

if you get this  wrong this could  mean your pages are going to disappear  from search so as not to make you panic  but I don't want you to get this wrong  either so what we can do is let's say we  are filtering by  size okay so we would have size  as the parameter this could be size this  could be color this could type whatever it is that is let's say the  filters for your different products  assuming that's the type of website that  you have  does this parameter change page content  scene by the user  yes it does and then you can say no  URLs here 

so you want this to hide this  content so any URLs  that include size there that content  will not  show to the Googlebot okay that way  they're not going to  go through any of the URLs and that  leaves  all of the crawl budgets that you have  for the actual product pages and the  more important pages that you have  on your website so you just want to make  sure you are using your crawl budget  efficiently  so believe it or not you have  successfully walked through  google search console now you know how  to not only just set it up  but now you know what to look for and  how to use this  to actually increase your rankings and  start getting more traffic 

and better  results from  your website if you haven't already make  sure to click the link below in the  description  to grab a free copy of the google search  console checklist, this is just a checklist to help you  know specifically what you should be  looking for  when you come back and do your regular  checks so you make sure that your  website stays in good standings and that  you're using it to continuously  improve your rankings as we've covered a  lot of information here there are  time stamps in the description below as  well 

so if you ever need to come back to  this video as a reference  go ahead and check the description so  you can get the time stamps and jump  straight to  the point you need if you like this  tutorial please give it a thumbs up  subscribe to the channel so you don't  miss the next tutorial and I'll see you  next time  thanks for watching 

Google Search Console Tutorial [2021]: A Step-By-Step Guide to Ranking Higher & Gaining More Traffic 

VIDEO