Did you know that Google tells you the health and effectiveness of every page of your website? Let me explain. Here is a Google Search Console review.
Love them or hate them, Google dominates the search engine sites. Fortunately, what is good for Google is also good for the other search engines on the web. What if there were a site that told you if a page had issues for ranking. Or, what if, a page does not work with “mobile” very well.
There is a tool that does exactly these tasks. It is called Google Search Console. You link your webpages to it via a Google account. For us, we use WordPress exclusively. We link each one to a Google account so a Google Search Console review can happen regularly.
It is similar to the best Google analytics WordPress dashboard I covered in an earlier post. This site though is actually Google telling you exactly what is up with every page on your website.
What is a Google Search Console?
Let us take a look at the inside workings.
You will sign into your Google account. We use several Google accounts to separate the emails from the analytics. Keep it simple here.
Now, you simply “link” your website to the Google Search Console. Once you have the 2 sites linked, the Console starts doing its thing.
Be aware that the updating, syncing and all takes many days to work. No search engine updates all pages on all sites every day. There is a way to force it to update. I will go over this in a minute.
You will want to use the Search Console in parallel with Google Analytics. They are separate platforms and provide very different views.
We use a superb plug in called MonsterInsights to link the WordPress sites to Google Analytics. The complicated system that is Google Analytics is made easy and displayed via MonsterInsights.
So, back to Google search console. Allow about a week for the console to troll your site and develop data. One of the best ways to make this happen is with sitemaps.
The best way to accomplish this is with a plugin for sitemaps. Many sitemap plugins are available. I will not spend time going through them here.
Enter the sitemap URL into Google Console. It is usually yourdomain dot com/sitemap.xml or similar. You will post this URL into Console any day you want to force a search engine troll.
What results do we see from Google Search Console?
This is just one of the views from a newly created WordPress blog. We posted good, rich content every other day for 2 months. No search traffic, no joint venture traffic. All organic traffic picked up from the trolling of the search engines. Like I mentioned before, we resubmitted the sitemap every 3 days of so.
Google is rewarding this site with consistent upward traffic that will only get better over time.
This is not rocket science. It is also NOT a get rich fast method of SEO. SEO will never be fast ranking but it will be long term and attractive.
Finally, I want to emphasize consistency and quality are the key. Regular work daily and weekly will pay off over time. Link your sites to a Google Search Console and review the results regularly to tweak pages and optimize for the engines. It will pay you back!
