Google Search Console Archives - Christopher S. Penn

Natasha asks, “Which do you prefer, the old or new Google Search Console?”

Whether we like it or not, new Google Search Console is Google Search Console going forward. Let’s take a quick tour through it to see what’s new and deal with important features like Google Discover.

You Ask, I Answer: Key Features of Google Search Console?

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In today’s episode Natasha asks, which do you prefer the old or the new Google Search Console and why? Whether we like it or not, that new Google Search Console, which has been out actually, for more than a year, actually, actually a little bit longer than that is Google Search Console going forward, there’s no getting around it.

There’s no wishing a good stay in the old version.

And as Google adds more and more features to new Google Search Console, it is becoming the default for how we as marketers will be looking at the performance of our websites from a search perspective.

So let’s take a quick tour through some of the features, some of the things that are important in it that you need to know and need to pay attention to.

By far, I would say there are probably four things here that that you need to pay attention well, five technical number one is security and manual actions.

These are essentially you looking just here for alerts is Google telling you that something is is incredibly wrong with the website.

And I will give them props in terms of their design.

There, they’ve done a really good job making Search Console stand out when something is wrong, this is bright red stuff saying hey, you screwed this up.

In this case, I’m okay.

There’s nothing here that’s that’s screaming, like, Hey, you have security problems with the website, there’s there’s hacked content on your website, if there is where it goes.

And you need to, you need to pay attention to it.

So let’s go to manual actions, see nothing, all good, their security issues, all good there.

Those are things that that you want to make sure are clean and clear.

From there.

Where else markers going to want to spend the time from a structural perspective, you’re going to want to take a look at mobile usability.

I made a bunch of changes on my website in in May.

And you can see that my it the few issues that I had are gone.

You want no red stuff on you all green, no red.

In mobile usability, if you have mobile usability issues, fix them.

Because this is super, super important.

And Google will tell you, Hey, there are things like clickable elements.

So to close together or content wider than the screen, you absolutely have to make sure that you are mobile, mobile friendly.

You also want to go in and fix up anything if you’re using amp, which is accelerated mobile pages.

And and you should be this point, you want to make sure that again, you’re you’re cleaning up some issues, I’ve got zero errors, I’ve got three issues, and that a whole bunch of warnings, I need to go through and fix up some of these things here, images smaller than the recommended size structured data elements issues.

So I have some I have some work to do on there to fix things on my website.

Now what’s important about this, that I need to make sure that these are all technical things.

So when people talk about stuff like SEO, and what should we be doing on our websites? And what does this work? Does that work? The good news is that both Google and Bing, the two largest search engines, they tell you, they tell you right out, here’s what’s wrong with the website, fix these things.

And if you want great search engine optimization results, follow the instructions, fix the things that the tools are telling you.

This is what’s wrong, rather than worrying about like, what’s the latest trick? What’s the what are the newest hacks are beating the Google algorithm, you don’t have to you can just follow directions and and this is sort of the minimum level of competence that you need to have.

Now the parts that marketers will care about most are in search result performance and discover performance.

search results, very straightforward.

Here’s why what’s happening on your website in the last three months, how many clicks from search, organic search, your website has gotten, and then how many times it has appeared in search results.

So my site has appeared in search results 1.49 million times and 24,000 clicks.

Now, you’ll notice here, looking back, right at the beginning of June, stuff started to do a little bit better made some changes means follow directions, fixed things on my website, and immediately see a improvement in performance.

Click through 1.6% average position in search rankings 37.2.

When you start digging in, you can start to see what is it that you get clicks for what is it you get impressions for so these are things that are important.

To me, these are surprisingly, a lot of recent stuff, which is great.

Interestingly, I don’t see my personal brand in there.

And I’ll see Christopher Penn in the top 10 of things that I get clicks for let’s switch over to impressions.

Okay.

They’re an impression.

So this people are still searching for the name.

One of the things you want to do with this this data is you want to keep an eye on it, you want to build a download it download the data over time to understand what you’re being found for.

Like, if this is something that is relevant, great.

If there are things that are in here that are not relevant, you may need to do some more content generation, all the things that are relevant about you.

In order for you to be able to rank well and get traffic, it will tell you the pages on your website that are doing well.

What gets a large number of clicks, like how to set your consulting, billing rates, people process and technology, some stuff that’s not so useful, they should probably just retire.

So that’s search results.

Next is discover.

This one was new to me.

It is probably new to you I’d never heard of this discover is when Google offers useful stuff to browsers saying you might also enjoy sort of stuff.

And so discover them here it says amp articles is where my site gets a lot of discover traffic.

So when you’re searching for something, Google will say these are you might also find that these pages are these articles useful.

This is free extra traffic.

This is where Google is using its machine learning to ascertain the intent of the browser.

And even if your site doesn’t have necessarily those keywords that the browser was searching for the user was searching for.

Google is recommending because it can understand the content of your pages, hey, this is also relevant to what you search for, even if it’s not, doesn’t contain those words.

So for example, if somebody was searching for consulting frameworks, or change matters, different frameworks, one of my articles is on people process and technology people process and platform, which is a consulting framework, I think, oh, gosh, that was a was that he love its framework? Yes, I think so.

The goal is people.

It goes ha love It’s 1964 framework.

So Google’s says to people who are searching for that consulting framework, hey, you might think this other article here is useful.

Right? Because it It knows conceptually, from a topic perspective, what is related.

On Discover, How do you get ranked for discover you need to be using accelerated mobile pages, and you need to be cranking out content that looks like news that is formatted well.

So lots of text on page, longer articles, big graphics, all the stuff that Google expects you to put out there.

So that’s discover it’s free traffic.

And so if you I would suggest if you are a marketer, who is concerned with SEO, that you spend once a week stop in on discovering stopping on Google Search Console, and see how are you doing? What has changed? What things do you look for that you didn’t expect to see? What are you being found for? All these things will help you tune up your marketing and get more traffic to your website? It is not a panacea.

It is not enough by itself.

You can’t do effective SEO just with this.

But this takes care of all the basics.

It’s basic reporting, and tells you what you being found for right and it tells you what to fix.

Fix this stuff first, because if you don’t, nothing else is gonna matter.

So great question, Natasha.

If you have follow up questions, please leave them in the comments box below.

If you would like trust insights, my company to put together a webinar on Google Search Console in more depth, let me know leave a comment in the comments below.

And if enough folks say Yeah, that would be a helpful thing.

To see we can put one together.

As always, please subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter.

I’ll talk to you soon.

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Category: Google Search Console

You Ask, I Answer: Key Features of Google Search Console?

Machine-Generated Transcript

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