Optimizing Your Website's Performance with Google Search Console

As a website owner, one of your main goals is to increase your website's visibility on the internet. You want people to be able to find your website easily when they search for relevant keywords on search engines like Google. This is where Google Search Console comes in.

Google Search Console is a free tool offered by Google that allows website owners to monitor their website's performance on Google's search engine. With Google Search Console, you can see how Google crawls and indexes your website, which keywords people are using to find your website, and how your website is performing on Google's search results pages. Google Search Console is a tool that every marketer should be familiar with.

There are a lot of different sections with Google Search Console that can help you out. With this, Google will also send you the occasional email, and these can be one of two things either a recap of your performance or an error to look at. While the recap emails can be helpful, they give less details than just looking within the tool will provide you. The error emails are similar but give you the details without looking into Google Search Console. This is beneficial, especially if you're dealing with multiple websites. 

The error-related emails can sometimes be scary since they give the same high-intensity sense of urgency for all of them. This is an issue because a page with a redirect should not be given the same weight as a 404 error. We will review the different errors and how worried you should be about them. 

Page Errors

The main area of errors is page errors, which is also the most critical area to watch out for. This section helps you understand why pages aren't being indexed, how to improve page experience and view data about your website. 

Ideally, you would gradually increase the number of indexed pages as your site grows while more pages start ranking. You should not expect some URLs to be indexed especially if you are noindexing some pages or have your robots.txt file up to date.

Within the page errors, you can also see the source of the issue, this is either Google or the website itself. If an issue's source is Google, then you can't really do anything about it besides try to push Google to crawl the URL again if you have resolved the issue. Once you have fixed the issue, you can also validate the error. 

Seeing spikes within your page errors is something to look after, if you see a spike, it doesn't always mean something is wrong, but it is crucial to keep an eye out for it. There is also a warning which can be an issue but doesn't need immediate attention. The main warning you'd receive is indexed, though blocked through robots.txt if you do want the URL to be indexed then remove it from the robots.txt if you don't, then use noindex instead.

Mobile Errors

Within the mobile euros section, there are two statuses your page can have, either usable or not usable. This can be a page-by-page issue or a template-wide error, and it is up to you to fix it. If a page is usable, it doesn't mean that the page is fully optimized it means that your page meets the minimum mobile usability requirements, and a not-usable page is anything below the minimum. 

Video Page Errors

One thing to note is that this report doesn't show you the number of unique videos on your site, it only covers the indexed pages. If you notice that the number of videos indexed is lower than you expected, then Google is having difficulties indexing the pages that contain videos. If you continuously put out videos, you should be able to see a trend of indexing videos increase. 

A critical thing to differentiate between is a video being indexed and fetched. A detached video does not mean it is showing up on Google; it just means that Google has read the video file. Fetching is not required for indexing, but a fetched video will be eligible for additional features on Google. 

With videos, it is essential to note that only one video can be indexed per page, but the same video can be indexed from multiple pages. As well as video sitemaps can help with indexing. 

There are a handful of requirements for a video to be indexed, including: being embedded within a host page, the host page must be indexed, adequately sized, have consistent metadata, and more. A prominent video must be above the fold and appropriately sized.

Schema Errors

This depends on the schema type but often results from missing data such as images, addresses, prices, etc. The primary way to avoid all of the errors in terms of schema is to make sure that every area within the schema you're using is filled out. Mostly, these errors are only significant if it is one of the core parts of the schema. 

Google Search Console is a staple in every marketer's life, and having considerable knowledge of how to utilize it is crucial. Once you understand what the errors mean and how to fix them, you can essentially be unstoppable regarding SEO. 

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Please don't let the nitty gritty of the tool stop you from understanding or using it to its fullest potential. If you need any help with your SEO or inbound marketing, Instrumental Group is here to help! Please take a look at our growth services or contact us today to get started.