If creating a website and going live was all it took to expand your business online, it would be easy to succeed in the world of online business. But unfortunately, that’s not all it takes.
Building a website is only the first step.
Measuring how effective your site is performing is when the real work begins. Ignoring your website performance is about as useful as flushing money down the drain!
For as long as you have a website, it’s paramount to track its performance. Luckily, there are innovative tools online you can use to do this in an efficient and cost-effective way.
The Google Search Console is one of those tools.
So what is Google Search Console? It’s a tool that helps you measure, track, and maintain your website’s search traffic and performance. It’s also effective at monitoring keyword rankings, fixing issues, and generally optimizing your site. Furthermore, you have no excuse passing on this valuable tool because it’s free to use!
Google Search Console Explained
Google Search Console is a free multi-functional online tool that will help your website gain visibility on Google’s search rankings. Once your website is up and running, you want it to achieve its goal. That can be anything from growing brand awareness, attracting traffic, or increasing conversions. But you can only know whether it’s performing at optimal capacity if you’re aware of how it’s doing on different search engine platforms.
Google Search Console helps with tracking conversion optimization steps, measuring website traffic, keyword performance, showing which sites link to you, and sharing alerts when Google encounters spam. But note that the tool only provides you with the mentioned information from web searches and not from other areas, such as traffic from referrals or ads. We might as well take this opportunity to note that you can’t use Google Search Console to make any changes on your website directly. But you can use the information you gather to uncover new search engine ranking opportunities, boost your website performance, and pinpoint your sources of traffic.
Why You Need Google Search Console: Search Console Vs Google Analytics
We can understand why some people using Google Analytics might not see the need to use Google Search Console. If you’re to look at it, both tools do share several similarities. For instance, you can use both of them to track online traffic to your site as well as its source. But that’s pretty much where the similarities end. Google Search Console takes it a step further by giving you a detailed report on your website performance. And if you ask any avid marketer, they’ll tell you how this performance report is a valuable source of information that gives you a breakdown of relevant metrics.
The first essential details you’ll find are the number of clicks your site receives from the search results. After clicks, you’ll see the number of links users saw on the search bar, known as impressions. Mind you, that’s irrespective of whether users went on to click the links or not. The report also shows the Click Through Rate (CTR), the number of clicks divided by impressions. Lastly, you can also see the average position of the most popular result from your site using a specific keyword. You can use these data to measure the success of your SEO campaigns and other marketing efforts.
Who Can Use Google Search Console?
The good news about Google Search Console is that pretty much anyone who owns a website can use it. That’s regardless of whether you see yourself as a bonafide digital marketing buff or a newbie in the field. Search Console is relatively easy to use, for the most part, and it’ll be invaluable to business owners looking to understand how their websites perform on web searches. Web developers also find Google Search Console handy, as the tool is effective at helping you monitor and resolve errors in structured data on a site.
Online marketers and SEO specialists benefit from Search Console, as the tool helps monitor traffic and optimize search rankings. Site administrators also find it helpful when monitoring the health of a site. Search Console can help resolve errors, holes in site security, and loading issues.
Conclusion
Google Search Console is a powerful, free tool you can use to gauge how well your website is performing on Google. It tracks traffic and troubleshoots issues so that you can adjust your digital marketing strategies on your website accordingly.
