Why to use Google Search Console for SEO & PPC?

Google Search Console provides a wealth of insights that help in boosting organic or paid campaigns. Not only that, it is also an easy tool to operate and understand. In this blog, we are going to discuss how you can use the valuable insights from Google Search Console to boost the performance of SEO & PPC campaigns. Along with that, we will also get into the several aspects of the Search Console that will help you understand the tool better.

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a free tool provided by Google where you can easily enter your Domain name or URL name and can monitor, maintain and troubleshoot its presence in Google Search results. Google changed its name in May 2015 from Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) to Google Search Console (GSC).

It is generally recommended to set up an account on Google Analytics first, as it makes the transition to Google Search Console a little easier. This is because the Console uses same details as Analytics. Nonetheless, you just need a Google account to get started on Search Console. It could be either an existing account or a new one. Open the Console, click on ‘Add property’ and verify your ownership of the website.

Adding and verifying your site in Google Search Console: –

If you are using this feature for the first time then you need to add and verify your site to the Search Console to prove whether you are the site’s owner, webmaster, or authorized user or not.

Adding and verifying is an easy process here: –

• All you need to search “Google Search Console” then a “Welcome to Google Search Console” dialog box will open. There you have to enter your site’s Domain name or URL name.

• After that click on continue.
• Next, you will be asked to verify your website. There are two different methods to do this.
  • By entering the Domain name
    • If you choose to enter the Domain name to continue then enter the domain name and click continue.

• • • A dialog box will pop out with the “Verify domain ownership via DNS record” name. Provide all the details needed and click on verify. After that, you can check all the details needed.
  • By entering the URL
    • Now, if you choose to enter the URL name then enter the URL name and click continue.
    • A dialog box with the name “Verify ownership” will pop out.

Here, you can see many ways to verify your website those are

1. 1. 1. HTML tag
      2. Google Analytics,
      3. Google Tag Manager
      4. Domain name provider

• You can choose any of the above options. After selecting your desired option provide all the details required, upload all the documents required, and then click on verify.
• After that, you can get all the information related to your search.

A few features that Google Search Console offers are: –

• It confirms whether Google can find or crawl your site or not.
• It shows the relevant queries that a visitor may ask on your website.
• It shows you the ranking of your website.
• It finds indexing issues and requests to add new contents to fix these problems. You can also resolve mobile indexing issues because as we know one can use mobile first indexing rank better.
• Google Search Console shows you which websites are linked to your website.
• It reports problems like indexing, spam, or any other issues in your website.
• It shows troubleshoot issues for mobile usability and other features related to the search.
• It gives full traffic data of your site like how often your site is being searched, what search results pop up your site, how often people click on your site after appearance and, what kind of problem slows down your website.

Who can take full benefit of Google Search Console?

Well, anyone who is a website owner or runs a digital marketing agency, can use the Search Console. It can be beneficial to anyone who owns a website no matters whether that person is a specialist or not, is experienced or not. It is especially beneficial for people or agencies who are seeking to optimize their campaigns.

• Business owners: –

Business owners can directly use Google Search Console to see the performance of their sites and figure out the issues related to their website. You can very often notice the benefits of Google Search Console for small business.

• SEO specialists: –

SEO specialists can use this feature to monitor their client’s website’s performance and figure out the ideas to generate more traffic for the websites.

• Site administrators: –

A site admin can use this feature to get control of the site, to check and resolve several errors like hacking and malware which may harm it. One can also ensure if the adjustments are running smoothly or not by analyzing search result performance.

• Website developers: –

They can use this feature to monitor and resolve small errors while developing the website like common issues with markup such as errors in structured data.

Google Search Console for SEO campaigns

For SEO Campaigns, Google Search Console is a very beneficial tool as it helps in website optimization. You can monitor traffic on your web page result and check what keywords are helping in gaining traffic. It is important to do proper keyword research to rank your website.

There are few points to clear you how Google Search Console helps in optimizing your website.

• Enhance rankings for underperforming keywords

Underperforming keywords are those keywords that can affect SEO optimization of your website. They can also lower down the CTR of your website. Suppose you search a query; it is pretty obvious that you will first click on the pages that rank on top. So, the same condition applies to your website too. Hence, it is better if your webpage results on 1^st or 2^nd position in SERPs.

With the help of Google Search Console, you can find these underperforming keywords resulting problems in SEO optimization and monitor the CTR and position data.

You need to select ‘Search Results’ in Google Search Console to do so. Then, scroll the queries report and sort the results in descending order. You will notice a data box with the top-scoring keywords on the top. You can then check the underperforming keywords and can change them to continue the flow of SEO optimization.

• Helps in fixing sitemaps issue

If sitemaps that you submitted to Google have some issues then it may confuse the viewers and cause some other problems. Google Search Console provides you the benefit to check the cause of sitemaps issues.

You can open the ‘Sitemaps’, click on the icon next to a sitemap. After that, click on the ‘See Index Coverage’ button. A new box will appear with the number of errors, warnings, valid URLs, and excluded ones. Here, you can check the issues causing trouble to your SEO campaigns and resolve your problem.

This also helps SEO agency that provides SEO services and they can continue SEO optimization process on your website without any trouble.

• Know the content types that can gain more backlinks

Backlinks are an important factor for in SEO as they act as a stamp of confidence. So, you or your SEO agency providing SEO services to your website should be more conscious of gaining quality backlinks for your website. It will also send qualified traffic to your website.

So, to know what kind of content you should publish on your website for the purpose of gaining quality backlinks, you can check your older content and sort out which ones have gained the most backlinks.

For doing so, go to the ‘Links’, then click on ‘More’ on the ‘Top linked pages’ report under the ‘External links’. Then sort the report by ‘Linking sites’ in descending order to validate which of your webpages contain the most backlinks from unique websites.

Here, you can check the pattern of your content that have gained the most backlinks and can follow the same pattern or can use different ideas to create great content.

SEO agency can also avail the same strategy while writing contents for your websites. It could be a good factor for SEO optimization.

Many digital marketing agencies also provides content marketing services so if creating a content seems a difficult task to you, then you can always take a hand of these agencies. They can also provide full design and development services of your website.

• Know and update the pages that are dropping organic traffic

You must be aware of the fact that your pages can’t get the same number of traffics all the time. There could be many reasons why you are losing website traffic like pages may become outdated, publishment of better pages, and much more.

This may drop your website’s ranking.

If you have outsourced SEO services to a trusted SEO agency then it’s their responsibility to weed out the issues that are causing loss of traffic to your website.

So, what an SEO agency can do is that it can go to the ‘Search results’ report, there it is good to add a date range filter comparison to see data for the past few months as compared to the other few months. It is preferable that SEO agency will only care about clicks and in order to do so click on ‘impressions’.

Then, click on ‘Pages’. Sort the reports in descending order to know about the pages having the biggest traffic drops. Click on the URL and switch to query to know the query that is actually causing the drop in the rank of the website.

Furthermore, the SEO agency can resolve it from here and continue providing their SEO services without any trouble.

Why link your Google Ads to Google Search Console?

By linking Google Ads account to Google Search Console, you can see the difference between the organic and the paid keywords. Google Search Console or GSC is equipped provides the users with several insightful reports like the Search Query Report through which you can easily compare the difference between the paid and the organic keywords.

You can easily see in a simple report whether the keywords used are getting enough traffic for your website or not. You can also turn down the paid keywords if you are going over budget.

How to create a Google Search Console Linked account in Google Ads

To create a Google Search Console Linked account in Google Ads, follow the given steps: –

• Access ‘Linked Accounts’: – First of all click on the ‘Settings’ button at the top of Google Ads dashboards. Then a dropdown box will appear with 8 options in it. There click “Linked Accounts” in account options.

• Select the ‘Search Console’ from your list of options.
• A dialog box with the heading “Link Search Console to Google Ads?” will appear. Click the link titled “Link” to link the Google Ads to the Search Console.
• Then enter your website address, and click “Continue”.
• Your Google Search Console account is now linked to your Ads account.

Google Search Console for PPC Campaigns

When it comes to PPC, the Search Console can be of great use to fish out keyword ideas. Sifting through the Search Query Report on the Console can provide a wealth of information when it comes to keyword ideas. It is so obvious that the person will use Google Ads Keyword Planner Tool for keyword research, but then also getting an idea of performing keywords will be helpful in selection of keywords. If someone is a PPC specialist who creates or manages a PPC campaigns, then that person can get tones of keywords ideas for their clients using the Search Console.

How PPC service providers can make use of this search query report is by sifting through the queries, say every quarter or bi-annually, deleting the irrelevant queries, highlighting the relevant ones and then, clubbing them together based on themes. The PPC clients can then review these queries, and decide if they want to add it their PPC ad campaigns. If the clients green light it, you can create ad groups with associated keywords. Thus, it can help improve the click-through-rate (CTR) of the PPC campaign.

So, it helps in both PPC marketing as well as SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as it maintains a smooth flow of search and generates issues if the website is not running smoothly. In the case of SEO, it helps to optimize the website by suggesting relevant keywords to it.

It also helps the PPC Clients as it is helping in maintaining a low budget to select effective keywords for the PPC Clients and make sure that they are investing right.

In the case of PPC agencies that provides PPC services, the Google Search Console reports a running graph of a website which helps them maintain and monitor the data. It also uses to ensure that they are choosing the right keywords for their client’s website.

Google Search Console also shows the ranking of your website which again helps the PPC service providers to confirm if the keywords selected by them are relevant or not. Here if the position of their client’s website is not up to the mark then they can change few keywords that can attract more traffic to their website. It will help the website to gain more visitors on it which will also help in ranking the website.

Hence, the Google Search Console tool is a great tool to use in your PPC campaigns.

Why to connect your PPC campaign to Google Search Console?

Connecting your PPC to the Google Search Console is important because it generally shows that the performance of your website is best when your website has both organic and paid visibility for relevant queries. This results in much higher traffic to your website as the queries/ clicks are shown in both organic and paid listing.

By connecting your website’s organic and paid search data and viewing these data together you can analyze the website’s performance and can improve your marketing through both these channels. This also affects the ranking of the website as it allows you to make a firm decision about what is good for your website.

Wrap up

Assessing the quality of traffic on a website, getting the idea of well efficient keyword for it, and monitoring all the queries on it is something that every website owner wants to do. By this time, it must be clear that one can do all of this with the help of the Google Search Console Tool.

Not only this, but it is also important for digital marketing agencies that provide SEO services and PPC services. They can monitor activities on their client’s website and can work accordingly to optimize it and later rank.

SEO and PPC are different in innumerable ways, but when they work in tandem, it not only increases your chance to get quality traffic but also boosts your conversions. Hence, it is always advised to integrate SEO and PPC to get amazing results, and Google Search Console helps in making an effective strategy to make SEO and PPC work together.

Hopefully, all the above ideas will help you to grow your business in a better way.

Reference link

1. What is Google Search Console?
2. How to link Google Ads account to Google Search Console?
3. All about PPC