Introduction

It really doesn’t matter if your sole-trader business, that’s to say, a plumber who’s just starting up his / her own company or instead, on the other hand you might own a chain of stores across the U.K and employ hundreds, if not thousands of staff, you might want to use Google Search Console and Google Analytics.

Because each tool that’s provided by Google has so many different uses, we are going to in this article concentrate on Google Search Console. Our seo consultants find this tool so useful they use it every-single-day, its essential to our agencies work, and as such, we thought we would dedicate a whole blog post to explaining why you may also find Google Search Console useful for your business.

So, what is Google Search Console?

Well, it’s a reliable tool offered by Google that provides you with a wide range of data, for example the data can range from “average position” data, so this will tell you where a keyword or a phrase rank on average for your business.

So, let’s say your business sells furniture online, you might want to track where you rank for “3-piece sofas”- you can use Google Search Console for this, that’s if your websites optimised for that term, so presuming you rank somewhere in the index for this term, so for example, as you improve your seo, you might want to check for example, if you’ve moved from position 33 to position 29 for example, or if you’ve gone the other way, and your site has moved to say position 50!

Yet, there’s so many more uses for this Google tool, that’s to say, you can see the number of impressions a keyword has, so for example, for “3-piece sofas” let’s say for example on average there’s say 5000 searches for that every day, so if you sell sofas, that’s obviously going to be one your seo company focuses in on.

Theres other really important stats too, for example number of “clicks” and also links to your site, so you can see, that if you run a company, and that company has a website, then you’re going to want to have a Google Search Console account.

Does your agency use this tool?

We most definitely do, yes, on a daily basis we use the “Performance Tab” to check where our clients websites rank in Google’s index. So, for example, we might have written a rather long piece of evergreen content marketing, we might have used the Google Search Console account, to make sure the written work gets indexed, then we will monitor to see if for a keyword, this improves, and we will also use Google Analytics to see the number of organic visitors to that piece of work, what the bounce rate is, also the average time spent reading it, we might then use other seo tools as well, to see if that piece of white hat, high-quality work, if its attracted any top-quality, do-follow backlinks, so that we can report this back to our customer.

Why would you need this if you already have SEO tools?

It’s true, there’s quite literally thousands of seo tools out there, some are used for SEO in a general sense, some just monitor incoming backlinks, others are used to send your social media advertisements when you want, that’s at a time or date that your specify, there’s a lot of different companies to choose from.

However, here at our agency, we use Google Search Console because its from Google, and because this is the search engine that our customers most often want to optimise their company website for, to improve the companies seo, well, we therefore use Google Analytics, and Google Search Console as the data is reliable and we think that these tools are very useful.

For example, at our agency, our seo consultants use the performance tab on a daily basis, that’s to check “average position” data, and to see incoming backlinks, and to also use the tool to see how we are improving our customers seo each month.

So, whether we are working on a really large e-commerce website, that’s selling, for example bathroom items, or we are working for a law practice, that has a lot of solicitors, we use Google Search Console because it simply offers data our SEO agency needs in order to see how well we are improving our customers seo.

The Performance tab, and why this is useful

Okay, so as mentioned, the Google Search Console tool has loads of different functions, however here at our agency, whether it’s a Monday morning, or a Friday afternoon, there’s a function that we use throughout the working week, that is the “Performance tab” its so useful, for example, our seo experts will check:

-Number of impressions

-Average position

-Total clicks

All of this information is in the dashboard, so with one glance, all of this information can be seen by the seo consultant.

Total Clicks, number of impressions, average position

Backlinks

Okay, so apart from the Performance tab, what does our agency use this seo tool for?

Well, our team uses the tool to see incoming backlinks, so for example, lets say we are working for a business in Wales, that retails luxury coffee, lets say this is not your normal coffee, its won taste awards, its ethically sourced, its organic, so needless to say with some PR effort, it gets positive thumbs up from food bloggers, newspapers, and also from cooking websites, and as any good seo agencies would do, we need to capitalise on this, by making sure that from these top quality websites, we get do-follow, quality backlinks, and yes, we use Google Search Console to see if we are earning these links, so that’s the other main use of this seo tool.

The manual action, and why you definitely be checking this

You most definitely do not want, a  Google Manual Action, you also don’t want any type of Google algorithmic penalty neither, as you can get these from doing SEO wrong, so this is why, a business should check its Google Search Console, to see if it does have any manual actions.

URL inspection and why this is sometimes used to speeds up indexing

Okay, so from time to time, we also use this feature, its true, if you have a website that’s ranked high on Google, then Googlebot will “crawl and index” the work- what does that even mean?

Well, think of Googlebot kind of like you would a hawk, now a hawk doesn’t miss much does it? It spots something, it then sweeps down to have a look.

Well, Googlebot is the same, it follows “backlinks” and also internal links, to make sure its “index” is kept up to date, and you may well be thinking well, what is an index? Well, an index is Google’s list of websites, pages, and blog posts.

Now, if you’ve just added a new piece of written work, that’s just finished 10 minutes ago, well, Google isn’t likely to know you’ve just clicked the “publish” button, and walked off to get yourself a well-deserved cup of coffee, nope, that’s because it hasn’t been indexed yet, that’s to say Googlebot hasn’t indexed the work, and used Google’s algorithm to work out how good the work is.

So, well your stood next to the coffee machine, waiting for your latte, the work wont have been indexed, and therefore wont be in Google’s index, so in order to help Googlebot, what some seo agencies do, ours included, is to sometimes help to speed up the indexing, that’s to say, we can log into a customers Google Search Console account, and manually enter the URL, so yes, you guessed it, we can help to speed up the time it takes to index the work.

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