What Do Bloggers Need to Know About Google Search Console?

Google Search Console can be an important tool for your blog’s growth – no matter whether you’re a newbie to the blogging world or lucky enough to have an established platform. Better yet, it’s free! 

So what does the Google Search Console help you with specifically? The suite of analytics can give you incredible insight into what is working for your blog and where you may need improvements.

What Does the Google Search Console Include?

• Search Appearance: Do you feel like you are writing about trending topics and don’t understand why your site isn’t getting more hits? There may be a disconnect between your content and how it’s presented as a search result. Use search appearance to fine tune your page’s metadata, and watch as those clicks increase.

• Search Traffic: The number of visitors and the pace at which this increases offers a lot of insight into which elements of your blog work and which do not. Tracking traffic is also vital to measuring the effectiveness of your efforts to improve the blog. For example, if you have implemented a new strategy with content and SEO, it’s important to be able to measure growth accurately over a certain time frame. 
  
• Google Index:  Looking at the health of your site as a whole is important, but you should remember that is a sum of its parts. By using Google Index, you can take a deeper look at individual URLs on your blogging platform, including blog posts and other unique content.

• Crawl: How your site appears to potential readers is crucial, but it’s important not to forget about search bots too. These are the mechanisms through which search engines interpret your page and influence key factors like traffic and visibility. Use the crawl tool to make sure your site looks good to everyone – including search bots.

How Can the Google Search Console Improve Your Blog?

Google Search Console can also be an important tool for established bloggers. It can be a lot of work improving or simply even maintaining your search results rankings due to constantly changing algorithms and trends. 

If your page suddenly drops in ranking, it can be confusing and stressful. Luckily, Google Search Console can offer insight into why drops have occurred and how you can go about fixing them. A lot of the time, the causes behind drops in ranking or site visibility are simple and can even include:

• crawl errors
• suspected malware
• content flagged as spam

Double checking your site’s health with Google Search Console will help you quickly identify these potential issues, and also find the guidance you need to rectify them.

How Does Google Search Console Support Your Blog’s SEO?

Structured Data

While it may sound a little abstract, structured data is actually a pretty simple concept. Sites with blogs often use content formats like reviews or ratings. This can be an eye-catching feature to have in your site preview on the search results page.

By using Google Search Console, the review data from your site can be migrated across and formatted to appear as actual star reviews on the search results page. 

If your audience is looking for a post on a specific product, including actual stars in the text snippet indicates what the content is without them even having to read it!

Searches

Once upon a time, Google was very generous with the information they would share about popular searches and effective keywords. However, now that information is a bit more difficult to pin down. It can be a bit more challenging when it comes to optimising your content.

Search Console actually returns this level of access to users and bloggers. You can view the top 999 keywords that are relevant for your blog.

Not only can you find information on what keywords lead to which pages, but you can also see the average position of your pages in search results.

Backlinks are also a vital element for SEO. You can now see all backlinks that the search engine has found, so you can more easily work on improving your content and increasing your blog’s visibility!

Indexing

Although it may not be the most obvious of SEO drivers, indexing is vital to ensuring Google and other search engines understand your blog. When you have a sitemap, Google can run through and evaluate your blog more effectively and is more likely to prioritise your page.

Additionally, Google Search Console will also help you by flagging any pages missing from the sitemap or any that pose a potential question to Google. 

Why Should You Use Google Search Console for Your Blog?

For newcomers to the blogging world, it can be overwhelming enough to deal with analytics and reports through your blog’s own platform. 
However, even with the number of reports and data you can already access, Google Search Console is worth installing.

With it’s holistic approach to evaluating your blog’s health and potential areas of improvement, Google Search Console is more than your average reporting tool.

Used effectively, Google Search Console can become your blog’s control centre. You will get an overview of everything you need to know, and how to stay ahead of the curve for your blog and/or business.

And rest assured, while it may look complicated at first, the intuitive user interface ensures that you will become an analytic wizard in no time at all.

Check out Google Search Console here