Google Search Console Guide (+ Tips & Tricks)

Key Takeaways

this has been my most requested video of the past six months and in this video I'm going to tell you how to set up Google search console on Squarespace how to use it in order to increase your web traffic and what to actually do about the errors that you get emails about and how to use Google search console to actually debug your website to find out what's wrong so you can continue to increase organic traffic and don't worry because it's going to be jargon free I hate all the resources on the internet that try and tell you how to use tools such as Google search console which are actually so vital when it comes to increasing web traffic but just seem to make you feel more confused after so it's going to be jargon free and don't worry I do have examples now first of all what is Google search console so Google search console as you can see here is a platform that's made by Google that essentially shows all of the data when it comes to how you rank organically on Google so when it comes to Google search Google search search console just has the data around what you're ranking for where you're getting clicks and how your rankings are changing on Google so you don't need to pay for expensive tools such as a hrefs and semrush Google search console has so so much data for you and as you can see here this is my travel blog and essentially what it shows is the clicks that I'm getting the impressions as well as the average position so the average position we're ranking for the Search terms and then when you scroll down you can not only see the queries are either terms that you're ranking for but you can also see where you're getting clicks the different pages you're getting clicks on what countries etc etc it goes on there's such granular detail on here however you don't need to worry too much about this the main thing that I want you to pay attention to is this graph here which shows you the amount of clicks and Impressions you're getting and then this part here what queries you're actually ranking for and what pages you're actually ranking for them on so that on a high level is Google search console there's also this Pages section here and the sitemap section here which I'm going to show you about in a second but that is the main thing that I want you to be looking at and exactly how you connect Squarespace to Google search Contour is super super easy all you're going to do is go to the Squarespace dashboard and then go down to settings then you're going to scroll down and press connected accounts then you're going to press connect account and then click Google search console and after that you'll go through the process of connecting your Google account and then it's as easy as that your Google search console is connected to your Squarespace website which means after a while you're going to start to get data through and you're going to need to get everything that you need to know in an order to improve your web traffic however there's one thing you need to be aware of before you look into the data you need to make sure that you take your website and put it into Google search console to tell Google that you're ready to be indexed I.E you're ready to here on search engines because without doing this you're not telling Google that you want to be showing on search engines and this is one of the biggest things I see people wrong they connect Google search console or even maybe they don't do that in the first place but if they do they then don't tell Google that they're ready to be indexed and in order to do that Squarespace does make it super easy all you need to do is go down to sitemaps and then in this box here type sitemap dot XML and essentially what this does this submits your site map to Google and your site map is essentially a map of your website and all the pages on it in a way that is easy for Google to understand and put on its search engine so you need to make sure that you do that step because if you don't you reduce your chances of showing on search engines and as I said once you've done that wait a few days and you're going to start to show ranking data as you can see here I connected it for my travel blog about 18 months ago and it's been in racing steadily until recently where it's dropped off a cliff which is a topic I'm going to be talking about later in the video now when it comes to actually using Google search console It's actually an incredibly easy platform to use as we already mentioned the main things that you want to be looking at is queries and Pages you can also then click here to see your average position to see how your ranking has changed over time you can then look at your click through rate of each Pages which is essentially the percentage of people when they see you showing on Google that click on your website so there's all different data but what I'm actually going to take you through now is the six ways that I use Google search console use the data that's presented here in order to increase your organic traffic now one of the main things I actually do is I go to pages and I'll click on a page so for example let's go to this blog here about things to do in Florence for young adults and essentially whenever you click on something what that does that essentially filters the traffic so it only shows that web page so what you're seeing here you're only seeing the clicks and impressions for this web page on my website and it will work exactly the same on yours and then once you click across the queries this is showing the queries that this web page is ranking for organically on Google so if we take this search term here and then type it into Google what you're going to see when we scroll down here that my travel blog a couple things to do is ranking position one for things to do in Florence for young adults so as you can see here this is really really valuable data because we can not only see where our web pages are getting clicks from but you can also see in what countries are getting clicks whether we're appearing in any featured Snippets or stuff like that but the main thing is we can see what we're ranking for and the second thing is still on this section but it's actually around comparing so one of the things that's quite tricky with SEO especially when you're making changes on your website is actually knowing if what you do has an impact on the search terms that you're optimizing your web pages for and that's why Google search console is so so valuable because if you click on this section here that says date and then go to compare you can compare for any web page and any search term how your web traffic is changing month and month and as you can see here this is comparing the previous 28 days to the Past 28 days so we can not only see the change which is super valuable because we can start to see the clicks difference and The Impressions difference which once we've made a change on a certain web page to optimize for a certain key term we can start to learn whether what we're doing is actually having an impact which I think is super valuable because maybe you've got a Blog on your website which isn't performing you go to here you see that it's not performing well you can then look at it on a month by month basis after you make changes to see if those changes are actually impacting the rankings because as I've already said you can look at the average position you can see if the average position change it becomes super super valuable so if you haven't already start to go in the web pages on your website start to compare it on a month basis and see how the work you're doing is actually impacting your rankings on Google and of course that doesn't just apply to page on page as I mentioned earlier my web traffic for some reason has absolutely tanked recently and I need to find out why so all I can do is I can go and filter to compare the previous seven days to the seven days before that I can then come to this and change it to Impressions difference and then see which one has had the worst change and what that allows me to do is start to see which Pages I've had a big drop off which allows me off the back of that to start to do things to learn why things have happened so for example I've got a couple of Articles here that have lost a few hundred clicks and several thousand Impressions and what I can then do I can look on these pages and I can start to figure out exactly what's happened and then start to do actions off the back of it so it's super super valuable and that's only step two now the third thing that you can do with Google search console and one of the main things that I do it for is to check for keyword cannibalization and keyword cannibalization is when two or more pages on your website compete for the main key term and exactly how you look into that what you're going to want to do is go to again search results and the last seven days or last 28 days and then scroll down and find a search term that you're concerned that you may have have keyword cannibalization with so for example a term that I know how you have keyword cannibalization is is Squarespace SEO my other website is SEO space we've got the SEO plugin for Squarespace and we've got lots of different pages on our website that have Squarespace SEO in which naturally means that we're at risk of keyword cannibalization and how you can exactly find that is you go to the search term that you worried you have keyword cannibalization for you click on it which means it only shows data for that term in particular and then you go across the pages and what this is showing it's the pages on your website that are getting Impressions and clicks for the selected search term and of course if you're getting a large amount of impressions for multiple pages that is a key indicator that you have keyword cannibalization because you've got multiple Pages trying to rank for the same keyword and an indicator that your rankings could be getting damaged so off the back of that you could de-optimize certain pages but at least you know that you've got keyword cannibalization and that's one of the best ways in order to find it the fourth most common reason that I use Google search console is the request indexing so for those of you that don't know you can actually manually request Google search console to index one of your pages and that's super important when you either add a new web page if a web page isn't being indexed in Google which I'm going to show you in a second and also if you make any changes on the web page that you want Google to pick up and all you do to do that is take the URL of the page in question go over to Google search console and enter in this toolbar at the top when you press enter it's going to retrieve data from Google's index to see whether it is or isn't already being showed up on Google as you can see here it's pulled through a load of information but the most important thing that you need to look into is this request indexing that is the process of manually requesting Google to index your web page and not doing this is something that I've seen has cost people thousands and thousands of clicks because sometimes even if we submit our site map even if we're following search engine best practice Google just sometimes won't index of pages and this is one of the best ways to do it if it's still not indexing after this step then there could be a more broader area which you can feel free to check out SEO space as Squarespace SEO plugins do we've got a seven day free trial so in that free trial you can see if there's anything else holding back your SEO to stop you from ranking but as you can see here we've requested indexing so if I had made any change on that web page it was an index Etc Google would now manually go through it and hopefully pick up those changes or put it on its search engines and this leads really well onto the fifth way that I use Google search console because as you can see in the previous step I inspected the URL either home page of my website and what this essentially does it inspects the web page to see if it's on Google and what it will actually also do is see if there's any errors or anything that's preventing you from being indexed on Google so if you get any of those emails if you get any errors from Google search console there's a problem on a particular page what I want you to do is get the URL inspect it in this search bar and Google search console is literally going to tell you what the errors are which even if you don't understand them you just copy and paste the error search into Google and you're probably going to find a tutorial on how to fix it so if you're having any problems if you're getting emails do the inspection see what errors come up and go from there and as I just said just Google it you're not going to know how to do everything but someone at least will and the second final thing that I use Google search console for what I want you to do is come down to pages and this is something I was actually speaking to a lady about last week who had over 50 blogs that she'd written that weren't showing on Google search so if you do one thing after this video please follow step six and after you've gone to Pages what I want you to do is come down to this discovered currently not indexed essentially what this section has it's got all of the pages on your website that Google has picked up but not shown on its search engine so essentially these are pages on your website that no one can find on Google and this is going to be a red flag area because if you've got pages that are in here you need to do something about it because especially if it's a Blog you've spent hard earned time maybe even money on getting this page up but it's not being discovered so all you want to do is click on this as I've said it's going to show pages that aren't showing up on Google and when I scroll down I can see there's an article on my website that currently isn't being shown up on search engines so all I can do is then go through and manually inspect it and do other tests to figure out why this page isn't showing up on Google as you can see this is what a page looks like when you do an inspection and it's not showing up on Google and exactly as I showed you in the previous steps all you need to do is request indexing and of course if it doesn't index after that there may actually be errors on your web page so if you do face this issue feel free to leave a comment below and I'll look into it for you but this method is going to help 90 of people especially if you previously didn't know about these steps and just to reiterate something that I get asked all the time is about emails that you probably get from Google search console about errors about things that have gone wrong on your website there's two things that I want you to bear in mind Google is constantly changing its algorithm there may be changes on your website there may be some issues with Squarespace if you're using Squarespace as a website often from my experience most of the emails that you get from Google search console are due to all of these variables that are going on in the background pounds and not actually errors that you have wrong in your website so if you are getting those emails what I want you to do is do the step that I showed you before I want you to inspect the URL in here because what this is going to do it's going to get Google Search console to go through the page and see if there's any errors as you can see here that there's a number of tests that it does and if nothing is being picked up in here you can actually use this button here to test the live URL and what this does it does a further check to see if there's any errors wrong on the web page and if there is it will show you exactly what there are and as I've already mentioned just Google what that error is to see how to fix it so I don't want you to panic when you're getting all of those emails as this inspects and test live URL tool is a fantastic way to see actually what's wrong and as you can see here this is what it looks like when nothing is wrong it says the URL is available to Google so there must be something else going on such as it's just a new web page or something else which is preventing this web page show up but if the is actually an error that's wrong with the web page if you are getting emails about a web page and you do this step you test the live URL and there's still an issue it will show up here and all you need to do is Google what's wrong and there's going to be a tutorial that's going to take you exactly how to do it and again if there isn't anything if you're still having problems feel free to leave a comment below and I'll happily look into it for you and there you are that is from my experience the most comprehensive overview of the basics of Google search console that you need to know I know sometimes it can be overwhelming there's a lot of data involved with Google search console but if you really go through the basics if you really take the time to understand what I've just shown you if you play around with it with your website that's going to help you understand things a lot more and start to utilize Google search console which is one of the most powerful SEO tools and free SEO tools out there and of course if you found this video interesting feel free to subscribe to my YouTube channel where I share lots of Squarespace SEO tips as well as document the Journey of growing my Squarespace SEO plugin at SEO space where we're the leading Squarespace SEO experts but of course thanks again guys thanks for watching this video and I'll hopefully see you in the next one