Google Search Console: use free insights for better SEO
Rachael looking gorgeous in a green dress - when your content is performing on Google Search Console, you’ll be all smiles too!
Using your Search Console Insights for better SEO & more traffic on your small business website: we look at how to use Google Search Console - specifically, how to use the free insights to improve your website SEO and increase traffic to your website.
The main question we want to answer in this blog is, ‘What's the one thing I need to do each month to keep my website moving forwards?’. The way we'll do that is by focussing Google Search Console.
This is a really helpful free tool from Google. It looks at your search traffic and performance. You can then use it to make simple tweaks, fixes and improvements.
Whereas tools like Google Analytics have an absolute depth of information, they are often simply overwhelming. Google Search Console gives you the best of the best. It gives you the highlights and top insights.
You can then cherry-pick pieces of content month by month and work in a much more targetted way, rather than get completely lost in all of the data and metrics.
What we’ll do below is:
Look at how to set up Google Search Console
Run through what you’ll find in Google Search Console and its insights
How to interpret what's in the Google Search Console insights and performance reports
How you a quick example of how to put it all into action on your website
Wildings is a website designer for small businesses. Our studio is based in Torquay, Devon, and we provide small business website design for creative, hospitality & lifestyle businesses across the UK (like garden designers, interior designers, architects, floral designers and more!). If you’d like to find out more, explore our website design for small businesses or contact this small business website designer →
How to set up Google Search Console
The initial setup of Google Search Console is probably the most technical step, but you get lots of handrails and information from Google and prompts as you go.
Simply search for Google Search Console and then follow the obvious buttons on screen to get started. You’ll also need a Google account to set up Google Search console, if you haven't got one already. However, it’s free and is well worth doing, so don't let that stop you!
If you've not set up your website yet, once you’ve logged in to Google Search Console, go to the top left hand corner of the main dashboard screen.
Click on the dropdown menu and then click on the text that says, ‘Add property’. Enter your domain in the left-hand side of the popup window or use the alternative verification method on the right-hand side.
Then follow the verification instructions on screen from Google. We recommend using the left-hand domain option, which we find quicker and easier to complete.
In the verification process you will need to add a little bit of code to your domain’s DNS settings. Depending on where you registered your website domain, this might be GoDaddy, 123 Reg, Google Domains (or one of many others). All instructions are provided on screen with links to Google's help articles.
Read more: Getting started with Search Console from Google
Once you’ve edited your DNS settings, verification will often be instantaneous.
On an ongoing basis, whenever you want to access Google Search Console, simply search for it or (what we do) add a bookmark to your browser to make it easy to find.
What can I expect to find in Google Search Console?
We’ll now do a quick overview of your dashboard and then point out the key place where you find the best of the best insights as it were from Google.
Even the main dashboard on Google Search Console can be a bit off-putting, if you’re not used to it, as there is quite a bit of information. However, the beauty of it is that you can go one step further and get an even more condensed version of your data - your greatest hits, as it were!
Within your dashboard, there are a couple of key sections.
At the top is your Performance report, which relates to how content is faring. Below that is Indexing report, which is to do with how Google looks at and registers your content. Towards the bottom, there's Experience report, which relates to your site’s usability, such as page load speeds and other tools.
The data is presented with a focus on four key areas:
How many people are clicking through to your content?
How often are people seeing your listings (your pages or blogs) in search results
What's the average rate people are clicking through to your site from search results (not only seeing listings, but also clicking and looking at the information)?
Your position within search results
As you may have guessed, all the insights are focused principally on your users and visitors. They are the key things that relate to how people are finding and then interacting with your content. A lot of other data is stripped out that you might find in Google Analytics.
If it all looks a bit imposing and technical on your dashboard, then click on the little button at the top which says, ‘Search console insights’: ‘Understand how your new content is doing’. This is where we spend more than 90% of our time - working through these insights.
What can I find in my Search Console Insights?
Your search console insights is a report that you can get every month in your inbox automatically for free. It contains the most insightful things going on on your website from the last 28 days.
Before we dive into what's going on in your Search Console Insights, here's a quick summary of what you’ll find:
First, is your site overview with a graph that shows the relative trends of what's been going on over the last 28 days
Second is your new content section. Anything that you've recently published will show up here, if it's doing well
Third is your most popular content. This again covers the last 28 days, but looks at what's done best overall on your website whether it’s new or old content
The second second half of the report is more to do with how people found you. So you've got your channels, whether that's people clicking directly or through an organic search
You've got your Google search information, which is to do with what people are typing in to Google and then links from other websites
These are what's known as backlinks, a network of connections around the Internet
Creating a good quality, extensive network which is linked back to your site is really key in SEO, so this area helps you understand that aspect
Finally, which may be of interest to those active on Instagram, there is a social media section, which tells you whether people are coming to your website via your link in bio or the website link in your Instagram bio
As you digest your report and insights, you'll notice that Google picks out and highlights certain things. Depending on the quality of your content, you may see various badges alongside pieces of content, such as ‘top five’ or ‘high average duration’.
These point out which pages on your website are trending and crucially how well your content is speaking to your visitors; how they're engaging with it. By extension, you can then deduce that if there isn't a badge next to a piece of content or it doesn’t appear in the top five, then perhaps it's not doing as well as you may have hoped.
You can then start making assumptions or take away things to work on to get those bits of content up the insight lists.
In the next section we’ll look at these insights and begin to set up a bit of a plan to start working on your website practically.
How to get the free monthly Search Console Insights
Firstly it’s helpful to ensure that we’re signed up to get Google’s monthly performance email.
In the top right-hand corner of you Google Search Console dashboard, you’ll see your user settings (a person with a cog).
Click on that and then under Email preferences, make sure that the checkbox is ticked ‘Enable notification by email’.
Below that you’ll see should see ’Your monthly Search performance for your property’ - make sure this says subscribed.
After that on the first working day of the month, you'll get an email with your Search Console Insights performance report, so you don't need to remember to go anywhere and it arrives like clockwork.
The beauty of the monthly Search performance is that, yes, it's free, but more than that it serves up all the key things you need to know on a plate.
You then simply have to decide what you want to pick to work on that particular month; that might be improving an old blog or making a plan to share more of your content on Instagram and drive traffic back to your website.
How to interpret your Search Console Insights
In your overview graph you’ll typically see peaks and troughs; or in your lists, things that are doing particularly well; or you may notice other bits of content are struggling to get noticed. We can use those insights to ask, ‘what's caused this?’, ‘What's behind that?’.
For example, if you publish something, it might have been really relevant and timely or been a bit of content that really answered the questions people were asking at a particular time.
If a piece of your content is trending in your insights, that's excellent. You could leave it as is, but we recommend making it even better. Don’t rest on your laurels, but take advantage of what’s working or popular and make it even better. This will drive even more traffic to your site.
On the other hand, you might spot a peak or a trough in your insights and ask yourself, ‘Did I do something this month?’. For example, you may have changed your navigation or made some updates. This could have impacted the way people engaged with your content.
Again, use the insights to think about what you’ve been doing and whether it has delivered the results you were aiming for. If it hasn’t, we recommend going back and investigating further.
Another thing your performance insights can help with is generating ideas and inspiration, which is a perennial challenge if you’re engaged with content marketing on Instagram or via your blog.
Your Search Console Insights can show you if a particular topic is resonating with your visitors. If people are lapping up a content topic, use the insight to generate related content ideas for things you can blog about. Ask what other content on your site might people enjoy reading that you can link to?
Equally, the success of the content might be to do with the style that you've used or because you’ve structured it really well with helpful headings; or perhaps you've done some good off-page SEO work. In terms of content, think about overall topic or subject buckets and then brainstorm lots of titles that can go in them.
The ‘Google Search’ section of your insights (How visitors find your site on Google) is helpful for examining what's most meaningful to your visitors. Within the list of search queries, you may find particular kinds of phrases showing up.
For example, ‘squarespace templates’. This would tell me that new people finding our site are interested in doing their website themselves or to save time with a pre-made platform for their new website. I can use that to think about some blog content that can help people who are taking a DIY approach to their website. It’s also good practice to add further links to other bits of content on your website (where relevant and so long as its helpful).
This helps people go on more of a journey on your site, if they've enjoyed reading some content, they can then go and read more of the same. This is a good way to boost pieces of content that have been neglected by visitors.
The ‘How people find you’ section is also very useful in thinking about your wider network. You can see which websites are driving traffic to your site through backlinks or particular social media networks. For example, you may have written a guest post on a site or a particularly helpful industry-related article in an online magazine.
The insights help you spot those open doors so that you can do more of them.
You might find that you've been investing lots of time and instagram, but actually loads of your traffic is coming through LinkedIn. The logical conclusion would be to invest more time in LinkedIn, or at least be a bit like a sniffer dog, following the scents and asking where the trails are leading you.
By using the insights you can maximise the exposure you're getting and what people are looking for.
What to do if content is not performing in Search Console Insights?
In the same way, if you notice things not doing well or well as you would have hoped, you can take the reverse approach.
If things are not showing up in your insights, ask what you can do, such as tweaking the title of a blog or developing it if the content is a bit thin.
Or giving it a further push if you’ve not amplified it or talked about it on Instagram, as much as you might have done.
Use the same process of deduction as above and then go and work on those bits of content that need developing.
Focus too on items that are more likely to drive your business forward.
How to implement Search Console Insights on your website
So that's an overview of how to look at the Search Console Insights and use them to drive your website forward. What we’ll do now is look at how you can put these insights to good use on your website.
What’s the purpose of your blog or webpage?
Before we start tinkering with anything, there's some big questions to ask. Firstly, ask what is the purpose of the blog or the page that you're working on?
It's really important to have that in mind. What's it meant to do? How is it helping your cause as a business. If it's a blog, ideally it should be related to one of your products or services.
or us as a service-based business, all of our blogs will highlight that we are experts in website design one way or another. It's not about selling or being salesy, but making that connection obvious and then towards the bottom of the page there will be a link so that people can find out more.
It's really important that when you're optimising pages on your website that you're not just talking about your dog, but something meaningful and relevant to your business that will actually move it forward. If you have content that has no obvious connection to your core business services, consider radically overhauling it or don't waste any time on it.
Another big question to ask before you do anything is, ‘How is this blog or page addressing my customers’ problems and challenges?’.
It's critical that this relates to the sort of things people are putting into Google and looking for and then secondly, that they're going to read and find helpful what you’ve published.
Again, you might have written a lovely blog about your dog or cat, but if it's not relevant to anything to do with website design or your business, then it's a waste of time. It's not going to help; it's not going to reach the people who are going want to read about what you actually offer.
If you are unsure about how to go through that process, we've written a digital download guide that you can find on our website: How to write brilliant blogs. This shows you how to generate content ideas and then structure them in a helpful way.
A few ideas on how to identify customer problems or challenges and create content ideas from them include:
From discovery calls you've had with people
FAQs you've written and included in your proposals or estimates or elsewhere on your website
Client questions that you've been dealing with
Things that come up in chats on Instagram
Use keywords to write content relevant to your ideal customer
Once you've thought about those big questions, then it's really important to have what's called a keyword in mind for the blog. Or a short string of words, known as a key phrase.
Again, this is all about creating a specific focus for the blog or piece of content. This really needs to link back to your business or the particular service that you're offering; and ideally it will be something that people are typing into Google.
So, for example, for us, some of our typical keywords will be ‘website’, ‘website design’ or ‘branding’. We'll then pair those with one or two other words to make a short phrase.
When we say a short phrase, we mean three, four, maybe five words long, that is likely to feature in a Google search query by a real person. For example, ‘website designer in Devon’, and there are many different iterations of that, from which you can then come up with particular questions to address in a blog or incorporate into a webpage.
Use headings to help Google and readers digest your content
Those initial questions will help you hone your content in a really targeted way. And at this point you can start looking at the content of the blog itself.
Firstly, the headings and the title. The title is self-evident and serves to indicate the big question or problem you want to tackle. As you move down the page, the Heading 1 (H1) acts as your main subtitle.
Below your Heading 1 you can use Heading 2 for the main headings (such as points or paragraphs) in the blog. If you want to introduce a subheading within your main headings (Heading 2), you would use Heading 3.
This may sound obvious, but it's really important that you use headings logically and hierarchically, as this helps Google understand the relevance of your content and also helps readers digest and get the most helpful bits in your content.
Don't mix up headings or use them to add styling to the page; use them logically in order, so don't jump around and use them randomly.
Continue to work on your content: if your blog is already in good shape, add to it, improve it and develop it. If you're not sure how to do that, perhaps look at other high-performing blog articles and look at things that they've covered that you can develop as well.
With the content itself, always aim to demonstrate three things: Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness. Google refers to this as EAT, and that's what you should aim to convey through your content.
Back up your claims with internal and external links
Equally it's great to add links to your content. Links build a web of connectivity in and around your website, whether it's within your website or externally to other sources, such as helpful, relevant or related articles.
The aim with links is to show Google that, if it's an external link to an outside website, you're referencing trusted sources and that you're using those to back up the claims that you're making on your site.
With internal links, you're telling Google, that your piece of content is related to one of your core services or products. The link serves to back up and underline what you’re saying. Links help build that authority and a case that you're the most relevant person who's talking about this a topic, and that Google should put you first over others.
If you’re struggling to structure your site and how to go about that, we've got another download in our marketplace and we've got a structured step by step and workbook that you can go through: ‘How to get started with your website SEO’.
Optimise your images
Another big are for improvement is images. Always optimise images on your website.
Make sure that your images are no more than about 400-500KB (depending on whether it’s in a header or smaller placeholder).
Any images over 1MB are going to slow your website down. It's one of the key reasons why websites grind to a halt.
Pop your images in an imager optimiser like squoosh.app from Google and shrink them down before uploading them to your website.
Make sure you've given your images a nice, short, relevant file name. For example, website-design-wildings-studio-devon.jpg. Make the filename helpful and relevant to the page it’s on and point to your business and location, adjusting for space appropriately.
We suggest no more than six words in a filename, lowercase and separated by hyphes.
After this, work on the image alt text (sometimes known as alt tags). An example of some alt text for an image demonstrating the use of white space in website design is as follows:
“Example of good use of white space for a blog on amazing web design by Wildings Studio a website design studio in Torquay, South Devon.”
For all the nuts and bolts of optimising images, see our digital downloads.
Use it to go through your images nice and methodically and logically, taking your time as you do so. It's better just to do this once, as it can be time-consuming than have to go back multiple times.
Use short, relevant URL slugs
Some of the other big things to do when optimising a blog or page are off–page, as it were, in the settings.
Make sure to optimise the page slug, which is the end text in the URL after the final backslash. For example, blog/powerful-visual-elements-amazing-website-design. See our previous blog on this.
This step is all about providing really good signposts to Google, so don’t just copy and paste the blog title into your slug, but instead pick out the key things that relate to the blog. We recommend no more than five or six words in your slugs.
Write short, concise & relevant titles and meta descriptions
Moving on to your title, it's important to make this as good as possible. Your page title (also know as SEO title) is the thing that will appear in search results most prominently.
Make sure it's nice and short and concise. Keep it to between 50 and 60 characters long (otherwise it will get chopped off and lose meaning and impact).
Following on from your page title is the meta description. This is the very short paragraph that appears underneath the title in a Google search.
Again, you want to get your keywords in there: for us that would be things like ‘website design’, ‘South Devon’ ‘brand studio’ and similar. Your meta description should be no longer than 160 characters for the same reason as above, so you don’t have much space to play with, but it does makes you focus!
A really helpful tool to help with your page titles is an app Headline Analyzer by CoSchedule. It includes a free Chrome extension, so if you have this plugged in, at the click of a button Headline Analyzer gives you a score out of 100 for your title.
Normally we aim for 80 or above (and it has become a bit of an obsession trying to get above 90!).
Headline Analyzer looks at various things such as how long the title is, power words, the word balance and so on.
You can use it to play around with your titles, which is well worth doing as a good title is just so critical for getting people reading it and clicking on your content.
Add helpful related content for readers
At the end of your content, make sure that you point people to relevant, related content with a call to action.
This can be fairly low key, such as following you on Instagram or reading more to do with the subject in question in the blog. You could include a means to sign up to your newsletter.
What we definitely recommend not doing is shouting at people: buy my product or service now!
Understand where your visitors are on their purchasing journey - blog content is generally geared to help people understand more about how they can resolve their problems.If they feel like they can't solve their problem, having read your content, then in their own time, they may well actually get in touch with you.
They don't need you screaming in their ear or ramming things down their throat.
We suggest a call to action that points them to other information that will help them on that particular journey.
Don’t forget when using Google Search Console
If you've done all the above go ahead and publish your updated blog
Make sure you're talking about it on your social media networks
Content needs is a bit of a leg up, so it's really helpful if you're getting people's eyeballs on it through your Instagram account or elsewhere
This traffic tells Google that it's worth reading, particularly if the content gets a high average duration badge
Don't forget to add things like an image thumbnail, if it’s featured elsewhere on your site or if you share it elsewhere
Be methodical, take your time with your optimisation work
Aim for one piece of content a month, which tends to be manageable, and make sure you do it right
Take time to think about the big questions before you start
Remember SEO is a long game - you're very unlikely to see results overnight; it can take up to three months for things to get proper traction in Google searches; it’s a long game
Anything else I need to know about using Google Search Console to boost my website’s SEO?
So there you go - an overview of Google Search Console for small businesses, how to set it up and how to make use of the incredibly helpful free insights to improve your website’s SEO and drive more traffic to your site.
Here’s some further reading:
From Hubspot: The Ultimate Guide to Google Search Console
From Search Engine Land: The SEO's guide to Google Search Console
From Search Engine Journal: Google Search Console Complete Guide For SEO
If you’d like to learn more from us on website design or get visual inspiration, follow @wildings.studio on Instagram or read more of our blogs on website design too.
