Why Search Console is Google’s Most Valuable Free Business Tool

One of the most valuable marketing tools in the world is available for free. We are not talking about Google Analytics, Facebook, Twitter, or the major platforms most people are aware of. This tool is a behind the scenes tool that takes a little more technical expertise to understand, Google Search Console.
Google Search Console provides an enormous amount of value by providing insight into how you can improve your website on what is by far the largest search engine, Google. Google organic search traffic can drive as much as half of all traffic to a website on average, making it incredibly important. Thus, making the most of Google Search Console can be the difference between growing and not growing your business on the web.
Here are some of the key areas that Google Search Console can help you. There are many more areas but these are just some of the easy ones to utilize.

Web Traffic Data:

You can get your web traffic data via Google Analytics and other tools, but nothing is as accurate as Google Search Console which is organic traffic straight from the source. Google Search Console shows you exactly how much traffic is coming to your site via search each day, and it also has tons of intricate data about the search data to explore.

Rankings:

There are many rankings tools you can pay for but what better tool than Google itself. Google tells you exactly your average rank for your traffic, so you can see exactly where you end up for certain keywords.

Click Through Rate:

Here you can see valuable click-through rate data to see how many people are actually clicking through to your website. Ranking is great but if no one is clicking maybe your page title or meta description need work.

Crawl Errors:

Crawl errors are issues Google is finding in your website. I would track down crawl errors and work to rectify them immediately. This can help improve your ranking drastically if there are many issues like old pages not being redirected to new pages etc.

Indexing:

Indexing is key because Google needs to index your pages to rank them. Typically the more indexed pages, the more likely your site will be to rank well. Therefore monitoring and ensuring you are constantly improving and increasing the number of indexed pages on a weekly or monthly basis via blogging or other means will help your SEO traffic.

Structured Data:

Google has made a big push to enforce companies to structure their data for better indexing. If you are a restaurant, have reviews, have blog posts, or other types of structured data this could be key to increasing rankings. Structured data allows you to inform Google about specific data like a menu, reviews, author data, and other types of structured data.

Preferred domain:

Google wants to know which domain is your preferred domain, www or just HTTP without the www. This helps Google know which domain to rank in search rankings. You should optimize your domains to route to the preferred domain and set your preferred domain in Google Search Console.

Links to your site:

The number of links from other sites linking to you drastically increase your rankings. This has been a main part of the algorithm since the beginning. Google will actually tell you what sites link back to you, and what they consider real links via this part of Google Search Console.

Sitemap Submission:

Sitemap submission allows Google to understand the pages on your site more quickly. This is a critical thing you should have automated so that Google is always consuming the latest version of your site.

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Google Search Console also has many other features that I would strongly consider looking into. These are just some of the easier ones to understand and utilize. AMP pages are increasing in value and are another great one to look into.
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