Google Search Console Tutorial - Google Webmasters Tools Tutorial

Key Takeaways

all right what's up everyone welcome to the Surfside PPC youtube channel today is gonna be our Google search console tutorial also refer to as Google webmasters so we're gonna be going over this tool offered by Google basically what the Google search console does is it tracks your website's performance in the Google search results so when people are typing in specific keywords that bring up your website you're able to track all of that so I'll get into everything that you're able to see and it'll also show you some resources in terms of any issues you have with your website indexing in Google whether it's the desktop version mobile accelerated mobile pages if you have any security issues on Google it'll track you with that you can look at your backlinks so it's a really great search engine optimization tool specifically for Google so which is obviously the biggest search engine that's gonna drive traffic to your website so the first thing you want to do is install Google webmasters on your website you could use Google webmasters Google search console interchangeably but the first thing you want to do is install it on your website so the way I've done it is I first set up Google Analytics on my website so any of these articles here I'm gonna have a bunch of URLs in the description of this video so go there if you're looking for any of these articles but under the analytics help it shows how to set up analytics tracking so in this article it's gonna say basic instructions find your tracking ID so basically start by going to google.com slash analytics you create a property in Google Analytics you add you then install the tracking ID on your website if you're using a wordpress website you can do this with a plugin like monster insights Google Analytics dashboard plug-in this will allow you to track everything right in WordPress and it will also help you install it on your website and then once you do that what you want to do is get your website on search console so you add your website so you start by going to this website here google.com slash webmasters you're able to add your website to search console and then you can verify it using Google Analytics so that's why you want to set up Google Analytics first because you're able to see all of that data right in Google Analytics so I'm gonna open my Google Analytics profile here the website I'm going to be working on today is beachfront decor so this is one of the articles we'll go over but I have Google Analytics on this website and if I go to the admin section at the bottom left hand corner under product linking I can click on all products this will allow you to link Adsense Google ads a lot of different things to your website you can link search console right to your website so you could just come here it's gonna say add search console so it's looks something like this link add exchange so you'll do link search console you can click on it it's gonna allow you to click here to add your search console website through Google Analytics and enable the view so you're able to see all the website data in your search console so we're gonna click on save and what you're gonna be able to tell is you come back here under acquisition so if you're on the left hand side acquisition search console you can see landing pages search queries countries devices a lot of different information so if I'm just looking from January 28th to February 3rd I'm able to see which pages had the most impressions in the Google search results which ones drove the most clicks the best click-through rate and you could actually track this all in through with some of your goals so if you have transactions or any conversion tracking over here on the right hand side you're going to be able to see which pages are providing the most from you know specifically from Google organic search results so it really gives you a lot of information so I like to use it right through Google Analytics if you're not familiar with how to do it we have an old tutorial on our channel for Google search console beginners tutorial this is actually the old version of it so this our new tutorial is going through the new version of the Google search console right in the beginning of the video we go through exactly how to install it on your website so if you have any questions if you're really looking for kind of a video guide on how to do that this is one we'll help you with in the first five minutes it really shows how to install it on your website if you're not familiar with it and again with WordPress makes it really easy with different plugins monster insights is one of them there's a few others that you can use so once you have it installed what you're gonna have here is you sign in to google.com slash webmasters sign in it's going to tell you to go to the search console so you open your Google search console page we have ours here for HTTPS you know beachfront accord comm and we're able to see our overview so how our performances are coverage in the Google search engine any enhancements that we need to make and any errors that we're having so I have a lot of accelerated we'll page his errors right now and that's what the Google search console is really good for is telling you that I need to fix these certain errors before I start getting more traffic to some of these pages because I changed my accelerated mobile pages about a month ago I tried to update the design and everything like that and it actually hurt my Google rankings because the pages are now getting errors on them so what I need to do is go back to what I had previously because previously I was getting more clicks from accelerated mobile pages it's actually hurt my traffic recently so what I want to do is go through each of these things on the Left performance URL inspection coverage sitemaps mobile usability accelerated mobile pages you could see some security things here we don't have any security issues but if you have any you will see them here also backlinks under the settings what you can do is actually add other users so if you have a few different people working on your website if you hire an SEO SEO agency to work on your website you can add them through the settings and give them different levels of access so that they can access this data and really understand how to optimize your website for search engines so the first thing we're going to do is I'm gonna click here on the left hand side on performance so this is gonna show show our total clicks impressions average click-through rate in Google search results and our average position so you can see if we scroll down a little bit they have search queries top pages so we can see what our top pages are in terms of clicks and impressions top countries so where our traffic is coming from so mostly United States but we also get you know plenty from Australia United Kingdom Canada devices so you can see mobile desktop and tablet and then search appearance is gonna show rich results accelerated mobile pages non-rich results so this is actually very low for me recently because it's showing that you know I'm having so many accelerated mobile pages errors so I'm not actually getting as many clicks from that so what we're gonna do is come back over to search queries and I'm gonna add average click-through rate to the graph and I'm gonna add average position to the graph so it's gonna show a bunch of different things here you can kind of see your trends over time for us it's showing date for the last three months now there's a few different things you can do if you click on specific search queries so let's just say I do beachfront decor I can track that over time you might want to get rid of some of these things because the Graff can get a little hard to look at but you can kind of see over time it's been pretty steady for beachfront decor you really want this to be going up especially for your brand and really for any search query but you're gonna see some dips and you're gonna see you know certain days are gonna be better than others certain weeks or gonna be better than others so click on total impressions we're gonna get rid of the search query at the top here so when you click on it it's gonna create a filter up at the top you could also just do a new filter for a search query specific page you know country device and search appearance what I want to do is I'm gonna use this page as my example beach themed bathrooms so if I if you type in beach themed bathrooms into Google right now we have the 4th listing so there's a few different ones above us and you know we get a good amount of traffic to this what this page but what I can look at is if I go to pages so I can see which ones have the most amount of clicks most amount of impressions beach themed bathrooms is one of our top 10 it gets a lot of impressions so if I click on it what I can do is actually see what specific search queries are driving the most traffic to that page so Beach the Ambassador Beach bathroom ideas beach theme bathroom ideas so you can see it's all pretty similar but it's gonna give you some ideas like beach themed bathroom paint colors so if I want to add a little bit more traffic to this page that's a little section I can add to my page is beef steamed bathroom paint colors you know what are the most popular ones which ones do we recommend here are some examples of what they look like so there's a lot of different ideas here it's saying there's 455 different keywords different search queries that have at least driven impressions so you can find a lot of different areas of opportunity really and the other thing you can look at is you know for something like this coastal bathroom decor I can create a whole new page of content for maybe 50 coastal bathroom decor ideas and that's gonna drive more traffic to my website for these keywords because I'm already ranking pretty well for them same with ocean themed bathroom you can kind of help yourself drive more traffic to your website by really optimizing for all these different popular keywords so that's really where the Google search console is gonna help you drive more traffic to your website if you come into performance seeing what your top search queries are your top pages are seeing some areas where you need to might improve a little bit so I'll give you some examples of that so if we come to search queries one thing I like to look at is my average click-through rate on pages with my top impressions so what you're gonna see is 1.4 1.7 so something like pineapple betting right now we're getting about 5,000 impressions every three months it's showing but only 51 clicks beef signs almost five thousand impressions only 26 clicks whereas tropical betting you know we're a much higher there you see other rates that are much higher actually our top ten here really isn't a great click-through rate they're all below our average click-through rate of two percent if we go to our top 100 let's say so you'll see something here coastal bedroom furniture we have a six point one percent so that's something where maybe we look at okay what's helping drive more traffic to that page that we might not be doing for you know something like nautical bedding where we have 3500 searches every three months and only four clicks so it's really gonna help you understand where you need to improve see which keywords you're ranking for and really sometimes you can pull out keywords and create better content for them so if you scroll down a little bit you know for us we're gonna have to go down a bit I can find something like shark bedding make sure I have a shark bedding article make sure the content there is good make sure the images and everything represents shark bedding we're linking to some of our different products and that's gonna help us drive even more traffic that page hopefully improve this click-through rate one of the things that really drives click-through rate is the average position in search results so 17.5 is pretty low position but you'll see with the ones basically with the top click-through rate you tend to have a better position here so costal TV stands but there's only been you know only six impressions for that so if we look at our top impressions you're gonna see nautical bedding 14.4 is it the position and a very bad click-through rate so as we scroll down you can see 27.84 bohemian bedding really bad click-through rate Beach bedroom ideas 3.1 average position three point four percent click-through rate so you really want to optimize your existing content for a better average position to add more traffic to that page really more traffic to your website so that's performance there's a lot you can look at there and what I like to do is you know look at the top 100 you use this and export the data and then can look at it in a spreadsheet and kind of monitor that if you use this data the search queries that you're getting along with the Google Keyword planner so we have a tutorial on our channel for that we'll put the link in the video description if you're look use the Google Keyword planner let's say you pull the top 100 keywords you want to rank for that you know they get the most searches that the most competitive they're really the way ways you're gonna drive the most traffic to your website and you compare it with the search queries you're currently getting it's gonna help you see where you have some opportunities and some areas where you're really missing out on traffic so using the performance this is the main thing I use in the Google search console but I'm gonna go through everything here so the next thing is URL inspection when you click on URL inspection it's gonna open the search engine at the top it's gonna say inspect any URL so what we did is we came over here copy this URL paste it right in there so beach team bathrooms so what URL inspection is gonna do it's gonna show if you have any coverage issues in the Google search result it's gonna show the mobile usability of your page and it's gonna show the accelerated mobile pages version of your page so our accelerated mobile pages version is invalid so right now it's actually not appearing in Google search results so that's one way to use URL inspection is to make sure that you have basically green checks for coverage mobile usability and accelerated mobile pages because we're still getting traffic from this page but our accelerated mobile pages version is just not working so we need to make sure we fix that so the next part with index is gonna show coverage and sitemaps so with coverage it's gonna show any errors that you have any warnings that you have the total valid pages that you have indexed and the number of excluded pages that you have so we have a lot of excluded pages just the way our website is set up we're not really gonna go through that valid pages will show the number of pages indexed you want this number really to keep going up because that shows you're continuously adding new content to your page valid with warning so these are any warnings that you want to make sure you fix and errors so just for example we have a server error right here it's saying 53 total pages it's showing right here some of the different errors so it's gone down recently we're down to 72 right now so if we click on it what we can do is say okay we have fix this error a server error for us is probably temporary issue with our web server with hosting so what I'm gonna say is validate fix we fixed this error and what that does is it tells Google we want you to check to make sure that this error is fixed and if it's fixed we want these errors to go away so that's one way to kind of Google is able to track okay this website owner this webmaster is taking care of their website and making sure that they're fixing any index issues that they're having in return let's give them better search results basically better rankings in search results because if you're continuously fixing your errors fixing your warnings and making sure that you keeping track of all that Google is able to make sure that your index pages and everything like that is as high as it can be because you're really keeping track of everything that's going on so clicking on coverage again you can see 72 will go to this err submitted URL blocked by robots.txt so it'll show some of these issues we really don't have any of these issues right now it's setting validation passed so we started it on November 16th we pass on November 30th so a lot of those errors went away you can see now it's showing some more pages but right now these are just warnings so it's not really something you need to worry about too much now the next thing is sitemaps so our sitemap is created by the Yoast WordPress plugin if you're using WordPress you can just you there's a bunch of different sitemap plugins if you're not familiar with how to create a sitemap for your website one thing you can do is just use the service XML sitemaps com it's gonna create an XML sitemap for your website they have a free and simple one they have a pro one they have a PHP script that you can install on your website so any of these will create a sitemap that then you can add to Google so ours is just beachfront accord comm slash site met sitemap underscore index dot XML you want to make sure it says status success here they're able to discover URLs when we add new URLs our sitemap is automatically updated so I like to use WordPress because we just use a wordpress plugin Yoast and that just helps our site map continuously be updated it's gonna be verified by Google there's no errors with it so I highly recommend using WordPress for that reason or a similar service that allows you to generate a sitemap that automatically updates so one benefit of using the PHP script is that your site map is gonna continuously update you are gonna have to pay for that so if you don't have a site map yeah I highly recommend doing that because it's worthwhile because it's gonna help Google recognize when you add URLs when you update existing URLs any changes to your website are gonna be added to your site map and Google is able to track that much easier so the next thing down here is gonna be enhancement so under mobile usability you can see if there's any errors how many valid pages you have so for us we don't have any errors right now so that's good if we did you can click on the error and make sure you validate the fix like I showed you in the coverage version so our mobile usability is very good usually that depends on the theme you're using if you're using any custom HTML things like that sometimes you can have some issues but right now our mobile usability is good now on the other hand our accelerated mobile pages is terrible so we're actually redoing a fixing our accelerated mobile pages we've been trying to do some fixes here but we kind of got a lot of the errors back so we're kind of trying to figure it out right now so it has a bunch of different errors here and the same thing when as I make the changes I can come in here and validate the fix so that's something I'm actually gonna be doing this week because we're not getting the accelerated mobile pages traffic that we should be getting so we're gonna be doing some enhancements and this is really where Google search console helps you is by saying you know you have a lot of opportunity with your pages in the accelerated mobile pages version you know basically when people are searching on mobile they'll serve accelerated mobile pages rather than just the regular mobile search results and people can easily click through to your website and it's it's much faster you can get a lot of traffic that way we were getting a lot of traffic to one of our pages three accelerated mobile pages before we had this issue so it's something that we really want to fix so that's something that we're gonna be working on so enhancements you can see some of the errors you have with mobile with accelerated mobile pages how they recommend going through that fixing any errors we need to do that ourselves so that's something that you'll kind of find along the way so next thing is security and manual actions so under manual actions if there's any issues they'll show you them here under security issues if there's any issues they'll show you here we have no issues right now so that's always a good thing we have had issues in the past but usually it's very helpful to get Google is able to say hey you have these security issues make sure you fix them otherwise it's gonna hurt your rankings it's really gonna hurt your website so it's just basically an extra set of eyeballs looking at your website the back end any security issues that you have whether or not you've had basically someone try to hack your website or if you have any flaws that Google is able to recognize so that's very helpful and you'll get an email if you have any security issues and you can go fix them as fast as possible another reason to use Google search console now the next thing and the last thing I'll go over is links you're able to see the backlinks to your websites to your website and also internal links so I need linked pages internally so we have a total of 3.1 million internal links external links we have five point five thousand you could see which pages are the top link who is linking to you so we have a lot of different web sites linking to us we actually own farm house calls so we have some some links back to each of the web sites I don't think we actually have eleven hundred total links so I'm not sure where that where that link comes back to top linking text so you could see what people actually use when they're linking so source image source peach front to core so you're able to see a lot of different information here in terms of what your top backlinks are but really I like to use the performance see you know some opportunities this is basically one of the best search engine optimization tools because you can see you know what search queries you're currently working well for which ones are not driving traffic to your website and really where you need to optimize the other thing is index any coverage issues you're having obviously accelerated mobile pages that's a big issue for beachfront decor right now so that's something I'm going to need to fix but if you come back to performance I have something like 101 beach themed bathroom ideas if I go to pages click on the beach theme bathrooms so I can see the top search queries and really optimize for some of these ideas so it's four hundred fifty five total I can go to five hundred see what's getting those impressions and just really try to find some opportunities some of these are things that might be a little bit broad and then on the other hand you're gonna find things like coastal bathroom decor coastal bathroom ideas things that I can really try to optimize for by maybe even creating a whole new post a whole new page on my website that might be similar to this one but just really geared a little bit different towards people you know coastal is a little bit different than Beach nautical they're all a little bit different so just different things that you can kind of optimize for and really create content that can serve perfect for what people are searching for so that's the Google search console tutorial if you have any questions please let us know so what you do is go to google.com slash webmasters sign in with your Google account you can get started really quickly and easily you can verify your website through Google Analytics and then you're gonna be able to see all of this different information see what's driving sales on your website if you have ecommerce tracking setup beachfront core is an affiliate website so we don't have any e-commerce tracking we get a lot of just clicks out we kind of tracked that separately so again if you have any questions leave them in the comments thank you for watching our video today and make sure you subscribe to our You Tube channel