Google Search Console Best Practices

Google Search Console Best Practices for Optimizing Your Website

Google Search Console is an extremely valuable tool as It allows you to see how your website is performing in Google’s search result and provides insights on how to improve your website’s visibility and ranking.

This article will discuss some best practices for optimizing your website using your Google Search Console account. If you haven’t setup GSC in our other blog post you will find everything you need to know how to setup Google Search Console, also for readers interested in Google Search Console Insights.

For your convenience, you find below Jumplinks to navigate to a section of this blog post:

Why Add Your Website To Google Search Console?
Adding Your Website to the Search Console
Improving Your Site’s Performance
Using Keywords Effectively
Making Use of GSC Features
Search Console Page Experience Report
Rich Result Status Reports
Removing URLs from Google Search
Conclusion

Why Add Your Website To Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a free web service that helps you monitor and improve your website’s performance in Google search results. You can use Google Search Console for checking security issue, verify site ownership and to see if your website is indexed at all (You would be surprised how many are not indexed by Google at all without the Owner did notice).

By adding your website, you can get Google Search Console data, which is basically an insight into how your site performs in the search engine.

You can find out about the search traffic / search data more specifically which queries are driving traffic to your site, and troubleshoot any issues affecting your site ranks.

Google console has many tools that are useful for website optimization, one of the most important one is definitely the URL Inspection tool. This tool provides information on Google’s index version of your other pages.

In addition, the Search Console can help you request indexing on Google and track the indexed pages over time with Google crawls.

Further you are able to check other information in Google Analytics account such as performance report, index coverage report, and mobile usability report.

Adding Your Website to the Search Console

The first step in optimizing your website using this Console is to add your site to the tool. You can do this with the Console’s page and clicking the “Add a property” button and start HTML file upload.

From there, you will be prompted to enter your website pages URL. Once you have entered the URL, click the “Add” button, and your site will be added to the Console. For a detailed run-up how to add your website to GSC, please have a read on our blog post “How to setup Google Search Console” and “What is Search Console Insights?“.

The index status tells you how many of your pages are indexed by Google and whether any errors need to be fixed, including mobile usability errors or server errors. To check your site’s index status, click on the “Index” tab and then “Index Status.”

Improving Your Site’s Performance

One way to do this is by optimizing your website. This can be done using the “Search Appearance” tab in the Console.

Under this tab, you’ll find several options for optimizing your website, including setting up rich snippets and adding sitemaps.

Rich snippets are special pieces of code that make your website’s listings more eye-catching in the search results. They can include your site’s reviews, ratings, and images.

To set up rich snippets, click on the “Rich Snippets” tab and follow the instructions.

Adding a sitemap to your website will help Google index your pages faster and more accurately. This is especially important if you have a large website with many pages. To add a sitemap, click on the “Sitemaps” tab and then enter the URL of your sitemap into the box provided. Once you’ve done this, click “Submit.”

Using Keywords Effectively

One of the most significant things you can do to optimize your website is to use keywords effectively. Keywords are the words and phrases people use when searching for information on the internet.

If you want your website to appear in the search results when people use these keywords, then you need to include them in your content.

However, you would rather not use too many keywords, or your content will sound unnatural – Google calls it “Keyword Stuffing”.

A good rule of thumb is to use a keyword for every 100 words of content. So, if you have a 500-word blog post, you should use your keyword about five times.

You can use Google Ads Keyword Planner or tools like Keywords Everywhere to determine the most popular keywords. There are further several platforms online which do offer free trials for a more professional Keyword Research – like Ubersuggest or Semrush. Once you know which keywords are most popular, you can use them to optimize your website. For further tips on Keyword Research Tools have a look at our full-fledged Blog Post.

Another way to optimize your website is to create backlinks. Backlinks are links from other websites that link to your website. Backlinks are usually external links and can be viewed in links report.

Linking Sites

This process includes linked pages on your site that point to other websites. Site’s link is done to improve website ranking in SERPS (search engine results pages). The more links you have pointing to your site, the higher your ranking will be although Google also does differentiate in the quality of the links. Buying 2000 Backlinks from Bangladesh for $5 might not always be the best idea. Google by the way explicitly prohibits using bought backlinks.

Since it is harder to get third-party websites to link to your content and buying is theoretically forbidden, why not making use of your own links. It is way easier to link to your content from your own site. This practice is called internal linking.

Internal linking helps search engines understand the context and relationships among different pages on your website. It also helps them understand which pages are important based on how often you have linked to them.

This is why you should make internal linking a habit when writing new content on your website or blog.

Let’s see how to use the links reports in Search Console to help you build internal links.

In Google Search Console, click on the Links report and then click on the ‘More’ link under the ‘Internal Links’ column. The report shows how often you have linked to other pages on your site.

Go ahead and click the filter icon and then select the ‘Target page’ option.

Search Console will now display how many pages link to this page. You may now compare it to other pages to check if pages with more internal links outrank posts with numerous internal links.

If that’s the case, start building internal links to the pages you want to rank higher on. Make certain that you only link to the article when it makes sense. Including links when they do not make sense would result in a poor user experience. A detailed view about internal linking you get in our blog post “Why is internal linking so important?“.

For each submitted URL a user can:

Request indexing for a recently updated webpage.
View how Google discovered the webpage (sitemaps and referring internal pages).
View the last crawl date for a URL.
Check if Google is using a declared canonical URL or is using another one.
Check mobile usability status.
Check enhancements like breadcrumbs.

Coverage

The coverage section shows Discovery (how Google discovered the URL), Crawl (shows whether Google successfully crawled the URL and if not, provides a reason why), and Enhancements (provides the status of structured data).

Coverage Error Reports

While these reports are labeled as errors, it doesn’t necessarily mean that something is wrong. Sometimes it just means that indexing can be improved.

Those errors are happening quite often because Googlebot is simply blocked from crawling the pages of a website.

The report provides a list of URLs that are generating the error.

Clicking on one of the listed URLs reveals a menu on the right that provides the option to inspect the affected URL.

There’s also a contextual menu to the right of the URL itself in the form of a magnifying glass icon that also provides the option to Inspect URL.

Clicking on the Inspect URL reveals how the page was discovered.

It also shows the following data points:

Last crawl
Crawled as
Crawl allowed?
Page fetch (if failed, provides the server error code).
Indexing allowed?

There is also information about the canonical used by Google:

User-declared canonical
Google-selected canonical

A way to fix this problem is to write a new entry to the robots.txt to stop Google from attempting to crawl these pages.

By making 403 errors go away, we free up crawling resources for Googlebot to index the rest of the website.

Google Search Console’s coverage report makes it possible to diagnose Googlebot crawling issues and fix them.

Repairing 404 Errors
The coverage report can also notify a publisher of 404 and 500 series error responses, as well as convey that everything is fine.

A 404 server response is only referred to as an error if the browser or crawler’s request for a webpage was made in error because the page does not exist. By no means, it does imply that your website is incorrect. If another site (or an internal link) points to a non-existent page, the coverage report will display a 404 error.

By selecting the Inspect URL tool and clicking on one of the affected URLs, you can see which pages (or sitemaps) are linking to the non-existent page.

You can then determine whether the link is broken and should be repaired (in the event of an internal link) or routed to the right page (in the case of an external link from another website).

It’s also possible that the webpage never existed and that whoever is linked to it made a mistake.
If the page no longer exists or never existed at all, displaying a 404 result is acceptable.

Making Use of GSC Features

The Performance Report

The top section of the Search Console Performance Report offers a variety of insights into how a site performs in search, including search features such as highlighted snippets.

The Performance Report contains four search kinds that can be investigated:

Web

Image

Video

News

By default, Search Console displays the web search type. By clicking the Search Type button, you can change the type of search that is displayed.

You can filter for Web, Images, Video or News.

A useful feature is the ability to compare the performance of two search types within the graph.

Four metrics are prominently displayed at the top of the Performance Report:

Total Clicks

Total Impressions

Average CTR

Average Position

Total Clicks and Total Impressions are the metrics that are used by default.

One can opt to view those metrics presented on the bar chart by clicking within the tabs dedicated to each measure.

Total Impressions

The number of times a website appears in search results is referred to as impressions. It counts as an impression if the user does not have to click a link to view the URL.

Furthermore, even if a URL is at the bottom of the page and the visitor does not scroll to that portion of the search results, it still counts as an impression.

High impressions are beneficial since they indicate that Google is displaying the site in its search results.

However, the Clicks and Average Position metrics make the impressions measure significant.

Total Clicks

The clicks measure displays how frequently people navigated from the search results to the website. It is beneficial to have a large number of clicks in addition to a high number of impressions.

A low number of clicks and numerous impressions is less desirable, but not disastrous. It implies that the site may require enhancements in order to acquire more visitors.

When combined with the Average CTR and Average Position data, the clicks metric becomes more important.

Average CTR

The average CTR is a statistic that indicates how frequently users clicked from search results to the page.

A low CTR indicates that something has to be improved to boost visitors from search results.

A higher CTR indicates that the site is working successfully.

Average Position

Average Position displays the website’s average position in search results.

An average of one to ten is excellent. A position in the twenties (20 – 29) indicates that the site is on page two or three of the search results. This isn’t all that horrible. It simply signifies that the site need further effort to move it into the top ten.

Average placements fewer than 30 may indicate that the site might benefit from considerable enhancements.

Or the site might rank for a significant number of low-ranking keyword phrases and a few high-ranking keywords.

When all four measures (Impressions, Clicks, Average CTR, and Average Position) are combined, they provide a comprehensive picture of how the website is functioning.

The main takeaway from the Performance Report is that it serves as a starting point for immediately analyzing website performance in search.

It’s like a mirror that reflects how well or badly the site is doing.

Search Console Page Experience Report

The page experience report provides information on the website’s user experience in relation to site performance.

Search Console offers data on Core Web Vitals and Mobile Usability. This is a fantastic starting point for obtaining an overall assessment of site speed performance.

Rich Result Status Reports

Through the Performance Report, Search Console provides feedback on rich results. It’s one of the six dimensions given under Search Appearance below the graph at the top of the page.

Selecting the Search Appearance tabs displays clicks and impressions statistics for the various types of rich results shown in the search results.

This report conveys how significant rich results traffic is to the website and may assist in determining the cause of certain website traffic patterns.

The Search Appearance report may aid in the diagnosis of structured data problems.

A drop in rich results traffic, for example, might indicate that Google altered structured data standards and that the structured data needs to be updated.

It’s a beginning point for identifying a shift in rich results traffic patterns.

Google will now block the URL from its search results for about six months. You can add as many URLs as you want and see them in the Removals section in the Search Console.

Removing URLs from Google Search

We’ve concentrated on using Search Console to get your content indexed and enhance Google Search rankings. However, there may be situations when you want to delete items from Google Search as well.

One method is to provide a noindex meta tag on the page you wish to exclude from search results. However, depending on how frequently Google searches your website, it may take some time before your page is removed from search results.

The Remove URL feature in Search Console allows you to request that a URL be deleted from the search results. Simply select ‘Removals’ from the Index menu on the left.

Now click on the ‘New Request’ button, and a popup window will appear. Go ahead and enter the URL you want to remove, select whether you would like to remove this URL only or with this prefix, and click the ‘Next’ button.

Conclusion

If you would like to optimize your website for Google search or improve search rankings, then Google Search Console is a valuable tool that you should use.

By following our Google Search Console best practices above, you can ensure that your website is visible in Google searches and that you get the most traffic possible.

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Google Search Console Best Practices