If you have a website, then leveraging Google's webmaster tools is a must, especially Google Search Console. These tools are free and they can provide you with valuable search engine optimization insight that can help you rank faster on Google.
It's literally Google telling you how they see your website and how they help or hurt your ranking!
Chances are you're using Google Analytics, but combining the insight with Google Search Console can give you a roadmap to organic traffic success.
3 Benefits of Google Search Console
1) Learn what keywords people are searching to land on your website
Google tends to hide which specific keywords people are using to land on your website. (It shows up as 'Not provided' often.) But an easy way to work around this is to search for the queries Google Search Console is picking up for traffic.
Once in Google Search Console, click on 'Performance' and you'll see results up until the last time Google crawled your website. For us, we're writing this post on March 19, 2019 and the last time Google crawled our site was March 17, 2019. This is completely normal to see Google bots crawl your site every few days.
You'll also know the last time Google crawled your site by looking at the top right corner. It'll say 'Last updated: (date)
2) Find the most popular blog posts
Just like keywords, you can see what pages people are visiting most to from Organic Search.
For this example, we found the most popular post for us was 20 Best Business Books Entrepreneurs Should Read for Business Growth in 2019.
We also saw our contact page was generating views. Since we started our site only about a month ago, it makes sense Google crawled it first and started to rank it.
However, we can still leverage this insight to optimize the contact page if we see it start to gain traffic.
3) Find which sites are linking to you
One of Google's biggest factor for ranking pages is backlinks. If a website with high authority is referring to you, that 'juice' is passed on. In Google's eyes it sees one thought leader sharing a site that is legitimate and provides value. We won't go into details of backlink optimization, but this is a perfect starting point to start generating a strategy.
If you're finding sites that are linking to your site, start reaching out and generating relationships with them. Provide value to them by simply linking back or giving them a shout out on social; and then following up with them!
We'll be sharing more information on how to leverage Google Search Console for your business in 2020; so stay tuned!
