Why Google Search Console is your blogging BFF

Now I’m sure fellow bloggers can relate. But if you have a blog, one of the biggest challenges you’ll face is trying to drive more traffic to your site. You can’t deny that growing your traffic is a pretty good way to growing your business. And chances are your income too. But it’s more than about that. Us bloggers can spend hours writing a blog post. Taking Instagram worthy snaps for the post. And then scheduling in the social media posts to promote the said post. But it can feel pretty disheartening when you feel that it’s only reaching a tiny percentage of the potential audience.

Over the years I tried so many different ways to grow my audience. From Facebook and Twitter to Instagram and Pinterest. But by far the most effective and the least time-consuming way I’ve driven traffic to my blog is through Search Engine Optimisation. Or SEO. It’s honestly one of the fastest and easiest ways to grow a blog. And the best part is that one of the best tools to do this is free. Which is why I want to share with you all why Google Search Console is your blogging BFF.

Now if you don’t what Google Search Console is, it’s essentially a free tool that helps you track the performance of your blog on Google. Helping you fine-tune your SEO strategy and grow the traffic to your blog.

The reason I find Google Search Console so useful is that you can find out how often your blog appears in Google’s search results, which pages of your site are the most popular, which search queries show results from your blog and how many of those searchers click through to your blog.

So if you want to know the basics of this amazing tool, then read on:

HOW TO ADD YOUR BLOG TO GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE

First you need to sign in to Google Search Console, using your business Google account – this will be the same one you use for your Google Analytics. Here you’ll be promoted to add a property. Here you’ll need to add in all four variations of your site:

• https://YOURWEBSITE.COM
• http://YOURWEBSITE.COM
• https://www.YOURWEBSITE.COM
• http://www.YOURWEBSITE.COM

Every time you add one, you’ll be asked to verify your site. To do this, select the HTML tag option and copy the code. You can then use the Yoast SEO plugin to paste the code onto your site. Just go to GENERAL > WEBMASTER TOOLS>GOOGLE VERIFICATION CODE. Then head back into Google Search Console and click verify.

HOW TO ADD YOUR SITEMAP TO GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE

Now you need to add your sitemap to Google Search Console so Google will know what pages it needs to crawl for your site. To do this head to the homepage and select one of your four website URLs from the drop-down box in the left-hand corner. Then in the left sidebar click sitemaps. Enter sitemap_index.xml into the text box that appears (preceded by the URL of your website). Click submit and refresh the page to see your sitemap. You’ll then need to repeat for the other three variations of your URL.

WHAT INFORMATION CAN YOU FIND ON GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE?

OK, so you’ve set up your Google Search Console to start crawling and tracking your site. And now you’ve wondering what kind of information you can find on there, right? Well on the left hand side you can see a menu of options. These are:

• OVERVIEW – this gives you an overview of the main sections of the Google Search Console
• PERFORMANCE – this shows you what pages and keywords your website ranks for in Google and is key to helping you grow your traffic
• URL INSPECTION – this allows you to focus on one particular URL to see if it’s indexed by Google, if it’s mobile-friendly or if it has any warnings attached.
• COVERAGE – this shows you how many of your site pages are in Google’s index, how many aren’t and if there are any errors or issues preventing Google from indexing them
• SITEMAPS – this is where you add your sitemap
• MOBILE USABILITY – here you can check to see if your site is mobile-friendly
• MANUAL ACTIONS – this is where Google will call you out on any manual actions – essentially these are penalties that Google will issue if it thinks you’ve been using underhand tactics to boost your search engine rankings
• LINKS – here is where your top external and internal links will be shown, along with your top linking sites and anchor text

You can spend literally HOURS in there looking at all these sections. It’s honestly so interesting to see what keywords you rank well for and what content if your most popular.

I hope you’ve found learning about the basics of Google Search Console useful, next week I’ll be back letting you know how you can actually use Google Search Console to grow your blog.