SEO is all about how much Google loves you.
And if you want Google to really love you, you’ve got to have some knowledge to make your site magnetic.
Whether you have a website from me—or not—use this free product and make your SEO better: Google Search Console.
Google Search Console is a really powerful tool that tells you all about how Google views your website. (This is often confused with Google Analytics, which tells you about the people who have visited your site.) Google Search Console gives you a first-hand view into where and when Google is visiting your site. It helps you understand, maintain and troubleshoot your website’s presence in Google’s search results. What amazing information to have, right?!
Google Search Console helps you:
- Optimize your content by understanding which queries bring people to your site.
- Ensure Google knows about all of your pages, so it can send people there.
- Understand how Google sees your pages.
- Know about issues that Google has identified, so that you can fix your site.
You can implement Google Search Console all by yourself:
You don’t have to be scared!
- Make a free account with Google Search Console.
- Submit your website/ sitemap. The sitemap is a list of all of your website’s pages, including blog posts, and pages for tags and categories. This is essential because we want Google to know every piece of your site and where it is. Once Google has this information, it’s going to crawl your pages.
- It’s going to ask you to verify that you own the website. If you have a Google Analytics account, you can go through that. If not, it will give you an HTML file to stick on your site.
- Not sure where you find your sitemap? If you’re using WordPress and the Yoast SEO plugin, here’s how to view the XML sitemap in Yoast SEO.
- Start to reap the rewards of inside knowledge. The knowledge you’ll get is unparalleled. After Google crawls your site, it will tell you all about your pages: the ones that have been indexed, the ones that have errors, the ones that are considered to be video, and so much more. It will give you metrics about all of your pages. It’s even color-coded: Green means good-to-go and red means there’s an error that should be addressed.
As your website evolves and you make updates, it’s normal that errors will arise—and it’s also important to fix them. For clients on my WordPress website maintenance program, a quarterly fix is included.
You want Google to see you in the best light, right? Instead of guessing how Google sees you, you can know how Google sees you…by using Google Search Console.
