Backlinko Com Google Search Console
Backlinko Com Google Search Console
Contents
CHAPTER 1:
Getting Started With the
Google Search Console
In this chapter I’ll show you how to use the
Search Console. First, you’ll learn how to add Find Keyword Ideas
your site to the GSC. Then, I’ll help you make in Seconds
sure your site settings are good to go. Boost SEO results with
powerful keyword research
Enter keyword
First, log in to the Google Search Console and click on “Add Property”.
Then, copy and paste your homepage URL into the “Domain” field.
Templates About Newsletter Try Semrush
This was great for security. But it was a bummer for website owners.
Suddenly, priceless keyword data vanished from Google Analytics.
Instead, all we got was this:
The good news? There’s a simple way to get some of that keyword data back:
Link Google Analytics with your Google Search Console account.
Here’s how:
Open up your Google Analytics. Then, click the “Admin” button at the bottom of the
left menu.
Scroll down until you see the “Adjust Search Console” button. Click it!
Templates About Newsletter Try Semrush
Click on “Add”.
Scroll down until you find your website, check the box, and hit “Save”.
Boom!
In most cases, as you see here, there aren’t any security problems with my site. But
it’s worth checking.
Click the “See the XML Sitemap” link, which will take you to your sitemap:
Find
Don’t use Yoast? Go to yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. If youKeyword Ideas
have a sitemap, it’s usually
here. If not, you want to create one. in Seconds
So let’s submit a sitemap to Google. Boost SEO results with
powerful keyword research
It’s SUPER easy to do in the new GSC.
Grab your sitemap URL. Then, hit the “Sitemaps” button.
Free Keyword Research Tool
CHAPTER 2:
How to Optimize Your Technical
SEO With the GSC
In this chapter I’ll share the tactics I use to
SLAM DUNK my technical SEO.
As you know, when you fix these technical
SEO problems, you’ll usually find yourself
with higher rankings and more traffic.
And the Google Search Console has a TON
of features to help you easily spot and fix
technical SEO issues.
Here’s how to use them:
The Index Coverage report lets you know which pages from your site are in
Google’s index. It also lets you know about technical issues that prevent pages
from getting indexed.
It’s part of the new GSC and replaces the “Index Status” report in the old Search
Console.
Note: The Coverage report is pretty complicated.
And I could just hand you a list of features and wish you luck.
(In fact, that’s what most other “ultimate guides” do).
Instead, I’m going to walk you through an analysis of a REAL site (this one),
step-by-step.
That way you can watch me use the Index Coverage Report to uncover
problems… and fix them.
All good. (Well, if you ignore the fact that the page is broken…)
“Submitted URL has crawl issue”
This could be a 100 different things.
You’ll have to visit the page to see what’s up.
“Server errors (5xx)”
Googlebot couldn’t access the server. It might have crashed, timed out, or
been down when Googlebot stopped by.
And when you click on an error status, you get a list of pages with that particular
problem.
But first, let’s visit the URL with a browser. That way, we can double check that the
page is really down.
Let’s see if Google can access the page OK. Again, we’ll use the URL Inspection
tool.
This time we’ll hit the “Test Live URL button”. This sends Googlebot to the page. It
also renders the page so you can see your page like Googlebot sees it.
Now let’s see how Google rendered the page. Click “View Tested Page”, then the
“Screenshot” tab:
Templates About Newsletter Try Semrush
Looks pretty much the same as how visitors see it. That’s good.
Next, click the More Info tab, and check for any page resources that Google wasn’t
able to load correctly.
Sometimes there’s a good reason to block certain resources from Googlebot. But
sometimes these blocked resources can lead to soft 404 errors.
In this case though, these 5 things are all meant to be blocked.
Once you’ve made sure any indexing errors are resolved, click the “Request
Indexing” button:
This time there’s just one warning: “Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt”.
Double triple check that you entered the right URL, then click “Submit
Request”.
Templates About Newsletter Try Semrush
Note: A removal is only active for 90 days. After that Googlebot will
attempt to recache the page.
But considering the page is blocked through robots.txt…
…this page will be gone for good!
Excluded
Now:
There are plenty of good reasons to block search engines from indexing a page.
Maybe it’s a login page.
Maybe the page contains duplicate content.
Or maybe the page is low quality.
Note: When I say “low quality”, I don’t mean the page is garbage. It could be
that the page is useful for users… but not for search engines.
That said:
You definitely want to make sure Google doesn’t exclude pages that you WANT
indexed.
In this case, we have a lot of excluded pages…
And if you scroll down, you get a list of reasons that each page is excluded from
Google’s index.
“Crawl Anomaly”
Yikes! Could be a number of things. So we’ll need FreetoKeyword
investigate.
Research Tool
In this case, it looks like the pages listed are returning a 404.
“Crawled – currently not indexed”
Hmmm…
These are pages that Google has crawled, but (for some reason) are not
indexed.
Google doesn’t give you the exact reason they won’t index the page.
But from my experience, this error means: the page isn’t good enough to
warrant a spot in the search results.
So, what should you do to fix this?
My advice: work on improving the quality of any pages listed.
For example, if it’s a category page, add some content that describes that
category. If the page has lots of duplicate content, make it unique. If the
page doesn’t have much content on it, beef it up.
Templates About Newsletter Try Semrush
Basically, make the page worthy of Google’s index.
“Submitted URL not selected as Canonical”
This is Google telling you:
“This page has the same content as a bunch of other pages. But we think
another URL is better”
So they’ve excluded this page from the index.
My advice: if you have duplicate content on a number of pages, add the
noindex meta robots tag to all duplicate pages except the one you want
indexed.
“Blocked by robots.txt”
These are pages that robots.txt is blocking Google from crawling.
It’s worth double checking these errors to make sure what you’re blocking is
meant to be blocked.
If it’s all good? Then robots.txt is doing its job and there’s nothing to worry
about.
“Duplicate page without canonical tag”
The page is part of set of duplicate pages, and doesn’t include a canonical
URL.
In this case it’s pretty easy to see what’s up.
We’ve got a number of PDF documents. And these PDFs contain content
from other pages on the site.
Honestly, this isn’t a big deal. But to be on the safe side, you should ask your
web developer to block these PDFs using robots.txt. That way, Google ONLY
indexes the original content.
“Discovered – currently not indexed”
Google has crawled these pages, but hasn’t included them in the index yet.
“Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag”
All good. The noindex tag is doing its job.
So that’s the Index Coverage report. I’m sure you’ll agree: it’s a VERY impressive
tool. Find Keyword Ideas
in Seconds
Boost SEO results with
CHAPTER 3:powerful keyword research
Get More Organic Traffic with the
Performance Report Free Keyword Research Tool
In this chapter we’re going to deep dive into Get More Organic Traffic With The
my favorite part of the GSC: “The Performance Report
Performance Report”.
Why is it my favorite?
Because I’ve used this report to increase
organic traffic to Backlinko again and again.
I’ve also seen lots of other people use the
Performance Report to get similar results.
So without further ado, let’s get started…
What
Templates
Is The
About
Performance
Newsletter
Report?
Try Semrush
The “Performance” report in Google Search Console shows you your site’s overall
search performance in Google. This report not only shows you how many clicks
you get, but also lets you know your CTR and average ranking position.
And this new Performance Report replaces the “Search Analytics” report in the old
Search Console (and the old Google Webmaster Tools).
Yes, a lot of the data is the same as the old “Search Analytics” report. But you can
now do cool stuff with the data you get (like filter to only show AMP results).
But my favorite addition to the new version is this:
In the old Search Analytics report you could only see search data from the last 90
days.
(Which sucked)
Now?
We get 16 MONTHS of data:
So let’s fire up the Performance report in the new Search Console and get
started…
1 Find Pages With a Low CTR
First, highlight the “Average CTR” and “Average Position” tabs:
You want to focus on pages that are ranking #5 or lower… and have a bad CTR.
So let’s filter out positions 1-4.
To do that, click on the filter button, and check the “Position” box.
You’ll now see a filter box above the data. So we can go ahead and set this to
“Greater than” 4.9:
You want to filter out everything that’s beating that expected CTR of 4.35%. That
way you can focus on pages that are underperforming.
So click the filter button again and check the “CTR” box.
Find Keyword Ideas
in Seconds
Boost SEO results with
powerful keyword research
1,504 impressions and only 43 clicks… ouch! I know that I can do better than 2.9%.
Now that we’ve found a keyword with a bad CTR, it’s time to turn things around.
2 Find the page
Next, you want to see which page from your site ranks for the keyword you just
found.
To do that, just click on the query with the bad CTR. Then, click “Pages”:
Easy.
3 Take a look at ALL the keywords this page ranks for
There’s no point improving our CTR for one keyword… only to mess it up for 10
other keywords.
So here’s something really cool:
The Performance report can show you ALL keywords that your page ranks for.
And it’s SUPER easy to do.
Just click on “+ New” in the top bar and hit “page…”.
You can see that the page has shown up over 42,000 times in Google…but only got
around 1,500 clicks. Free Keyword Research Tool
Select the date range. I’m going to compare the 2 week period before the title
change, to the 2 weeks after:
Finally, filter the data to show search queries that include the keyword you found in
step #1 (in this case: “best helmet brands”).
3. Finally, sort by “Impressions”. And you get a huge list of “Opportunity Keywords”: