Google is the best known and most frequently used search engine in the world. It’s also the most popular search engine in Belgium: 94% of Belgians use it for their online searches. If you also know that 70% of website traffic comes through Google, you’ll understand how important it is for your website to be optimised for Google. Today we would like to talk about Google Search Console, the tool to check whether your SEO efforts are paying off.
A quick SEO recap
SEO or search engine optimisation is a way to optimise your website for search engines like Google. This includes, for example, optimising the content and metadata (using the right keywords, clear titles and subtitles, …) or the XML sitemap. This makes it easier for Google to index your website. Indexation means that Google will regularly run through your website to figure out the structure and to determine what your website is about. That information will be used by Google to determine when they are going to show your website when people are searching. The better your website can be indexed, the easier it is for Google to determine which searches your website can answer.
Behind the scenes of Google's algorithm
With Google Search Console, you can study the information that Google has collected about your website. All information shown in Search Console comes from the indexation and is used by Google’s algorithm to determine your position in the search results. You are in fact looking behind the scenes of Google and you can discover how you can evaluate and optimise your website. Furthermore, Console will also increase your insight into the keywords used to arrive at your website, and on what pages traffic from Google ends up. You can find a lot of information in Google Search Console!
- Security issues: has your website been hacked? Should that be the case, you will find all information about what’s going on here, including solutions for the security problems.
- Crawl: bots crawl through your website to extract data for the indexation. Here you will find the problems in that process, including error notifications.
- Google index: are all your pages being indexed right? Blocked sources and problems that stop the indexation can be found here.
- Search appearance: of course, Google also captures how your website is shown in the search results. Here you can find that data and any possible improvements.
- Search traffic: as we said before, Google Search Console also gives you more information about the keywords and links leading to your website. That informationc an be found right here!
Pro tip: integrate Search Console with Google Analytics to collect the information from both tools in your Google Analytics dashboard in a clear and structured way.