Why You Should Be Using Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC) is one of the internet giant’s most versatile tools, providing users with a suite of options to help keep their website healthy and monitor its successes in search results.
Instead of focusing solely on how users interact and engage with your website, GSC makes it possible to explore and learn how those same people find your site in the first place. And when combined with the other SEO tools at your disposal, you can start making the improvements needed to maximize retention and help your customers find exactly what they were looking for.
In this week’s episode, Dwight and SEO Strategist Gary Jones discuss the best uses for Google Search Console in 2023 and why you should add GSC to your list of tools if you haven’t already done so.
Read the full transcript from Episode 46: Best Uses For Google Search Console here
Dwight:
Second time’s a charm, Gary. We had to stop the recording because the amount of dialogue that was happening out of Mr. Jones about the new podcast intro that we’re going to be having. He’s just determined he wants it to be some type of bagpipe rendition of some ’80s hair band and I couldn’t get him off the topic. And I don’t get it. Your connection to British pop, British alternative pop. Wanting that as part of an intro.
Gary:
Yeah. Well, I just want to culturally enrich always.
Dwight:
We’ll go through your top five lists, okay, that’s in your iPod that you still use. But in the meantime, to keep listeners engaged and on the tips of their seats, Search Console. What is a Search Console, Gary, and why does Google matter? What is it? Today we’re going to talk about…
Gary:
So…
Dwight:
So Gary’s going to talk and I … We’re going to chime in about Google Search Console and now in the big standard year of 2023, which it’s amazing because I sit here and look at Search Console and when it came out and when Disavows happened, then all these things happen going back over 25 years in this business, probably 26, 27 now. But Search Console, what is it and why do businesses need this with their online property?
Gary:
I think it’s a good point and I think it’s something that we should talk about, because I think Google Search Console is kind of like an unsung hero and I think it may be one of the tools that gets overlooked for some of the more flashier ones, but at it’s core, it’s basically a way of monitoring the performance of your website on things like Google Search. So it makes it…
Dwight:
No, keep going man. We can talk over each other. This is dialogue.
Gary:
So I was just going to say, so it makes it possible for you to see how your site is being indexed. Is it being indexed on Google Search Console. Do you have a site map in place. How is it performing on those pages. Unlike GA4, it’s actually given you data on how it’s performing on the page rather than how people are using your website. So it has so much information that can really help you when it comes to if you are a new business, old business, if you’ve never had Google Search Console before, it’s a great way of getting to know your website and how other people see it.
Dwight:
It’s like a first date or reading their online profile. No, I’m just joking. He went into a lot of depths of it all. But I want to just break it apart Gary, and we can kind of go back and forth in regards to this, but I think to sea level, well not even sea level, but I guess to some of the people around my age, they’ve been through 20, 30 years of life, Search Console is going to be your connector to Google and it allows you to submit your website and then you get to look at and see how Google embraces your website and then what they say about it.
And then we can get into small technicalities because on a high level, people are always like, “Well who’s coming to my website and where do they come from and why aren’t they buying? Why aren’t they filling out the lead form?” It gets into more granularities of that. And that’s the wonderful part, is you get to understand the diagnostics. It’s kind of plugging a computer into your vehicle and having the mechanic go through the diagnostics and telling you what’s good, what’s bad, how things are performing, where is it benchmark against standards and testing and other aspects.
But more importantly is that your site is connected to Search Console. So that you are saying Google handshake, it’s nice to meet you, this is my ID and this validates who I am and here’s my website. And I’d like you to come in and look at all the pages and give me some feedback of where you think we should be and why. And then possibly give me some suggestions or give me some pointers of how I can make things better because I’d like to be competitive and I’d like to show up above my competitors. So we get to a lot of little specifics of how agencies like us utilize Search Console to help clients. So let’s go into some of those, Gary.
Gary:
I mean you touched on a really good point at the start there as well, when you’re talking about you have to validate. So you’ve got to take ownership. It’s a bit like your business profile, like your Google business profile. You need to validate and Google Search Console and Google itself needs to know that you own that website. There’s a bunch of different ways of doing it, but you may want to work with a team to just make sure that that’s all set up. Because, on the outset it looks kind of complicated. And I think that’s the thing about Google Search Console, it can look quite complicated, but I think it’s essential to have it. It’s really essential to go through that little fiddly bit of getting it set up because when you do, there are things it unlocks that you can’t really get from anywhere else.
So one of the things I really like about it is the query section. You look at the performance, it’ll tell you how many clicks and the impressions, where it’s showing up on Google search. But one of the big things it does, is it tells you how people are finding you, the keywords people are using, the queries people are using to find your website. And I think that’s kind of fundamental to understanding your audience and also why people are going to your website, their intent, those kind of things. Because if you go on those queries, you look at that list and you find out you’re a manufacturing website, but people are going on there because they’re actually looking for a product that the name of your website or your business sounds like, that’s a problem. And you see that and you can solve that problem by making updates to your website, but you would never know that unless you have that information. And I think that’s a fundamental thing.
Dwight:
Gary, quite contrary, what is the difference between Search Console and Analytics? I thought I already had something to tell me all this stuff. It’s called Google Analytics and now there’s this big hoop law about it going to a GA4 and I get this big yellow box in my analytics when I log in to see all my traffics, what’s the difference between these two, Gary? I thought I’m all set up and ready to rock.
Gary:
So good question. GA4 is there big new thing. And I think this is why I wanted to talk about it, because I think there’s a lot of emphasis on GA4, but GA4 essentially tracks people on your website. It’ll tell you their user journey. What they’re doing, how they’re clicking on things.
Dwight:
Analytics essentially tracks what goes on your website with users. Search Console is how Google is embracing and seeing your website and giving you some hard data, validated data of how people are finding your website. Words showing up in search results. So there is a parting of the C’s there, because analytics is going to give you more drill down details. If you want to know that they’re using a mobile phone. If you want to know what country they’re coming from. If you want to see live traffic on your website, if you want to see how many people and the pathway from entry to exit or bounce, how long someone stays on a page or through a funnel to a conversion point, that’s going to be analytics. But Search Console is a bit different, but they work hand in hand. They share data, don’t they?
Gary:
Well, you can link them as well. So it’s really easy to do. You can go into your GA4, as long as you’ve got access to the same accounts. And again, you might want to work with a partner just so you have these things sorted out in the way you want them sorted out, but you can link them and then they share data and then it kind of spills over. So your kind of the health of your website and how it’s showing up on in Google results kind of leads into that kind of website side of things as well.
Dwight:
Interesting.
Gary:
So that’s a very easy thing you can set up in between those two things. They kind of mesh together. The other thing that’s really important with Google Search Console is it can give you that vital information of how it’s appearing on Google Search results, but it also gives you an idea of the health of your website. So it’s got all of these things where you can track how things are working. So it’s got the call web vitals and experience tabs and that’ll tell you just simple things like, is your website usable on a mobile device? Things like that. And that’s huge in 2023 and it’s been a big ranking factor for many years now. But how things perform on a mobile device is something you want to know about.
Dwight:
Exactly. And so, an important thing for listeners, businesses to understand is that if Google’s making some of these changes or they’re talking about the user experience with a core factor that they grade against or is it mobile friendly, you need to take note because they know their users, they are the data conglomerate. That’s really what Google is, it’s data capture, continuous and a live environment, they aggregate data. And that’s what they sell off and that’s what we try to manipulate on a regular basis. But if they’re telling you that there’s Core Web Vitals of your website that are meeting or lacking in a certain threshold, you need to take note because you need to determine whether or not you’re being competitive. And also who it is that’s working on your site if they’re doing things that are helping or hindering you. And a lot of times there’s no malice in regards to those things.
It’s a live environment, it’s living and breathing. And so, we have to take note and play within those sandboxes. But Gary brings up a lot of good points. Once you’re validated and you have a site map, which is essentially the index of your website, all the pages in a very computerized file that Google will read and then it sends out its little spiders, their bots and it crawls your website and indexes. And then after time it tells you where you kind of fit, where you rank, where you show up, what’s going on with it. But what’s interesting is when you get into e-commerce and larger sites, larger data induced sites, so let’s say you have a third party tool, we have customers that have large databases like in Sage or it’s a in-house system to control inventory. They do in-store, they do in-person, over the phone and then online sales. And you have to mesh that data in a lot of ways.
So there’s a lot of crazy things that go on with all this technology, it’s just work. Just throw magic pixie dust and this stuff just kind of happens. But it’s important to know is crawl budget and that’s something that you can throttle. So how many times or over a period of time Google’s bot comes to the site, it visits, it tells you the last time it showed up at your site and how many pages it actually… We used to call it slurping or sucking up an indexing. And what if you have tens of thousands of pages? Is Google going to give a crawl budget every single time and suck up and look for changes on 10,000 pages? If you have products that are essentially a SKU number but they’re in three different sizes and four different colors, there’s not a lot of differentiators there.
And maybe you need to find out ways to present those attributes as one product and allow the user to make a selection and to remove 27 pages from your website and bring it down to just one page, because of all those attributes that are made up of that. So you can control your crawl budget or you remove some of your site maps or you ask Google not to cross certain site map on days of the week. You can start to manipulate these things to get them to other areas of your website to take notice of those things to give influence to those. It is snaky, you have to be careful in the things that you do, because Google essentially doesn’t like that in a lot of ways. But it tells you what it’s crawling and what it’s including or not including and why.
There are a lot of false positives. It does throw a lot of little red lights at times. And it could be something where your server that your website’s at has some updates or does a backup and there might be a maintenance time of 20/30 a minute that happens at 2:00 AM on three days a week. And that just so happens when Google Bot came by and it says that you have a 500, we can’t access your website. So it’s false positives. There’s things you have to start to learn and what some of these things mean and how much is it hindering? Is it really, really a problem or is it not a problem or is it something we have to consider? Where’s the benefits of some of these things? So in summary here, Search Console is something you definitely want to utilize and participate with your web property, because of the large amounts of data and feedback it gives you.
We care about Google. Another part in there that I do like myself too is, a long time ago, way back in the day before there was internet, no, when there was internet, but back in the day, Google used to be able to show you your backlink profile. So those of you that are keen to SEO and understand what other websites linking back to your website and pages within your website, the quantity of those, the volume, keywords they contain. So many different aspects of those do influence rankings in where you show up in Google. And that’s a long story. That’s talking about the evolution of the world, the big bang theory almost. You can go pretty deep on that, but Analytics used to show you your backlink profile way back in the day. There’s probably some people listening that are like, “Oh yeah, I remember that, I remember that was great.”
And then they took it away. Then there was no way you could find it out except for third party tools. And now Google does show you your backlink profile in your validated Search Console account. So you can see the websites that are linking to you, what keywords are associated with those links that are coming to you and that’s what they’re validating and doing. So God, this can just go on forever. We could talk about this for hours, Gary, but to summarize here, if you have a dirty or toxic, or let’s say that you hired a company and they did a bunch of backlinking for you, because they said it was going to boost your SEO and make you the best HVAC company in small town Wisconsin. They went on and got you a bunch of spammy junk links from a bunch of scraper sites and now you see that your rankings have dropped and then maybe somebody like us does an audit and we see that you have a little bit of toxicity with your backlink profile.
One of the things that happened, I want to say this was like 2010, 2011, somewhere around there, but Google came out with a Disavow Tool. So inside of Search Console, I can look at my entire backlink profile and then I can sculpt and take certain URLs and say basically I have this group of friends that all give me some type… They say, “Yeah, I know him, I know Dwight, I know Gary.” And they link to me. But a lot of people I don’t want to maybe be associated with or maybe there’s a group that are linking to me purposely because I’m from a bad neighborhood and I don’t want to have associations with them. So now I can take an entire text file URL list, specifically at a long URL, the page specific or domain specific, the entire domain.
And I can tell Google, “Listen, these are people that I think just don’t represent who I am. I don’t want to associate with them. I don’t even want to consider them not a friend, and I don’t want to consider them like a compadre. So don’t take them into consideration. Don’t even consider them in my whole entire backlink profile. I don’t want to be associated them. I don’t want to have any benefits or any negatives from that relationship that they’ve given me.” And you upload the file and Google does what they’re supposed to do with it. Supposedly, it goes into a purgatory black pit and the whole entire aspect is they don’t consider those URLs anymore. So you could use some sculpting to see how benefits happen out of things like that in bad neighborhoods and other aspects. That used to be a black hat technique, is we would be hired to then crush a competitor online by giving them a bunch of very crappy backlinks from very dark neighborhoods and bad places.
And that was back on the onion, you could do that with a lot of different networks in the Middle East, so on and so forth. But Google’s found other ways and signals now that they can kind of skeet through those things. But now, this is maintenance on your backyard. You have a house that’s your domain, that’s your website, and now you need to take care of it. You have to maintain it, you have to do things with it. And Google wants to make sure they uphold supposedly, they want to uphold the integrity of the internet and the integrity of their search results. Now truth be told, they do have stockholders. People do have their stocks in their portfolio. Alphabet needs to make money every quarter. So it is a paid business. It is going to modify search results and do things towards their advertising programs that are going to help them make more revenue for their shareholders.
But there’s got to be some level of some fairness in regards to it. That’s the game we’re playing. That’s all what’s in regards to all of this. But Search Console is going to get you a lot more view and data and feedback that you’ve been wanting and lingering for, yearning for, sorry. And the other good news about that too, is if you have traffic that’s coming from Bing, you know what Bing is? That’s, that Microsoft product search engine that gets probably about 6 or 7% of world internet traffic, but that’s the default install with their Edge platform on any type of laptop that’s running the, is it just the Edge or it’s just the Microsoft platform? I don’t even know what that operating system. Is it Edge? That’s the operating system for PC? You would know.
Gary:
Do you mean like Windows and stuff?
Dwight:
Oh, Windows, sorry. Yeah, Windows. So Microsoft Windows. Bing is your search engine, but you can import all of your validation settings from Google Search Console over into Bing Webmaster tools. And then you can have a lot of the same data over there in the Bing search engine. So you’re going to have essentially two different places where you want to have your site indexed and validated so you can get good data from it. And then you can start to go down this rabbit hole of like, “Oh, what does all this data mean? And how much of an alert is this? And how much of a problem is this and how good is this? And why is this say this is doing so good, but I’m not getting the traffic or the sales.” And blah blah, blah, blah, blah. So to summarize it, Gary, you want to kind of round it up here for our listeners? Because if not, I am going to talk on for the next hour.
Gary:
I think Google Search Console is an essential thing in 2023. I think it has great uses and I think what’s great about it, is when you have access to it, when you have it set up, there are beginner things that you can look at. There are intermediate kind of level things that you can start checking and monitoring. And then there’s expert level things that you can do. And I think you talked about all three of them Dwight, there’s sculpting of your crawl budget, that’s more of an expert thing. The queries thing where you can just see why people are coming to your website, what are they typing in to find it. I mean, that’s a very easy thing you can do. It’s very easy to understand and it’s very easy to access with Google Search Console. So due to just how easy it is to use and how accessible it is, I think everyone should at least spend 10 minutes to check it out, look at it and evaluate what they can learn from it.
Dwight:
Yeah, definitely a big important step. And if you need help with that, always reach out to someone like us or some trusted provider that’s out there and get them to walk you through it and set it up. And so even a small overview, even ask them, I would challenge you, we’re in that time and age now, “Hey, do a Loom video or do a Zoom video and record it for me and walk me through that you set it up and that it’s working and go through some of the important parts that I should know about.” And have them send you that video and watch it a couple of times. Then ask some questions, learn about it, the more you know, the better off you’re going to be. And that’s the way you can run your business and look at focal parts of where you’re making your investments and how you get return on those investments as well.
So in conclusion, going on through the summer, we have some big news over here at Trademark Production. Some things are going to be changing, which are going to be pretty awesome. And that’s going to include the podcast. So these intros and exits from the 301 redirect, which it’s clear, very close to my heart. I love the 301. The vacancy during COVID was kind of a bummer deal, but it’s going to be reunited with… It’s reinvigorated, it’s going to be rebirthed with something even newer and better that’s going to be cooler and hopefully it’s going to be something in snackable formats.
A lot of our friends and customers, a lot of the audience members are going to listen to these things as they walk on the treadmill, go for a walk with Sammy their dog, mow their lawn, drive to work, do a bunch of different things. But the important part is we’re doing these because we want to give you some suggestions and give you some insights for no fee whatsoever, just to get you more interested in what the digital world can be doing for you. So signing off today on the Search Console thing and my man from Wales, we will talk to you next week.
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