5 Best tips to improve your SEO using Search Console

It is all about visibility. Once your business or brand gets featured among the top few search queries or results, it is a good enough indication that your brand has arrived. This is known as SEO or Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of improving a website’s visibility by increasing its search engine rankings. It also includes getting backlinks to your site, as well as having content optimized for long-tail keywords and a variety of strong driving phrases to improve traffic. The more ways you invest in SEO, the more it will pay off. As companies are always using new business strategies to stay ahead of their competition, many small businesses are finding alternative ways to get their product online. Your web presence is your brand’s public impression to your customers. It is a fact that search engine optimization requires significant time, effort, and investment. For your business to grow in today’s market, you must hire a professional SEO company in Auckland.

This is much easier to say than to do, and getting your SEO bang on is a challenging endeavor. This is where an SEO agency London comes to the rescue.

A quick run-through into SEO

By now, you would have heard the term SEO. From the above, you also know what it stands for – Search Engine Optimization.

SEO refers to the method of refining your website to increase visibility in search queries. The search queries need to have keywords that mention similar, if not the same, products or services offered by your brand.

SEO is an organic lead generation tactic catering to unpaid search results. However, several free resources help businesses and brands augment their SEO – Google Search Console is one such resource.

What is Google Search Console (GSC), and how can it help augment your website SEO?

Google Search Console,  previously known as Google Webmaster tools, is a free service that helps fix and find technical errors, submitting sitemaps, view and assess backlinks or hyperlinks.

Improve positioning of underperforming keywords

The metric that marks keywords as under- or optimal-performing is the rank or position in which they appear. For instance, keywords appearing in ranks one or two are considered optimal-performing.

The underperformance stems from the reason that most users do not go beyond the first two search results – this means lost traffic for brands. However, you need not worry! Brands can swim through the tide and flip the narrative by increasing the ranking.

Google Console provides an easy way to do this. All you have to do is go to the Search Results report and toggle the average CTR or Click-Through Rate and the position data, and you are good to go.

Optimization using high keyword rankings but low CTR

A proven fact is that a page that sits at the first, second or third position gets the most clicks. However, businesses can improve the CTR by going to the Search Results report.

Once there, filter the keywords according to their average rankings. Further on, narrow down the filter by specific rankings – say below 3.1. This shall display all the keywords that have an average rank of below 3.1.

One might ponder at this point as to why the top-ranking keywords do not garner the highest clicks. The reason is ranking is based on the number of impressions and not clicks. Impressions are the views attained by a particular banner ad or product listing.

Fix Sitemap Issues

Now, this one concerns the site architecture. It is of paramount importance and needs an immediate remedy.

The way around this for companies is to navigate to the Sitemaps report. Upon entry, all you have to do is click the icon that sits next to a sitemap and click on the See index coverage button.

What follows is a tab that displays the warnings, errors, valid and excluded URLs. If there are no errors whatsoever, but Google Console shows an excluded URL, this probably is because of duplication. The probable cause for this might be that the old URL still appears as “published”. The solution then is to delete that post.

Evaluate the content types and topics with the most backlinks

Research reveals a direct correlation between backlinks and organic traffic and visibility. With that said, the more the backlinks, the more the traffic. The great news is that this is not the difficult part.

The tricky part is identifying relevant topics that make up the talk of the town – identifying this can be overwhelming. The reason is the virtual world throws at us different hashtags and trends frequently.

But, you need not fret. There is an easy way of getting to the bottom of this. First, go to the Links report. Then, click More on the Top linked pages report under subheading – External links. The trick is to look at pages with the most backlinks but from unique websites. Once done, you can look for patterns.

Study your web pages that require internal links

As opposed to backlinking or hyperlinking that concerns third-party or external links of other brands or renowned websites, internal links cater to linking specific web pages within your business or brand website.

Most businesses today have a designated blogs section on their site. Say you are to talk about veganism. You have a web page that already talks about high-protein foods – link this page to your new blog post on veganism. The rationale for doing so is to add life to the so-called obsolete or older blog. Think of this as callback or recall. Doing so helps in indexing your new page faster and transferring PageRank to the new page.

Go to the Links report. Then, click More on the Top linked pages report under subheading – Internal links.

Summary

Online surfing is all about visibility, traffic, and relevance that entails featuring among the top few results in the search engines. This advent is known as SEO.

It refers to the procedure of developing your website to increase visibility in search queries. There are several free resources out there, and Google Search Console is one such resource.

The tool augments website SEO by weeding out underperforming keywords, identifying high-rank keywords with low CTR, fixing site issues, evaluating content types and topics with the most backlinks, and studying web pages requiring internal links, among a ton of other features.

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