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Top 5 Benefits of Google Search Console

Top 5 Benefits of Google Search Console

Estimated Read Time: 4 minutes

Intended Audience: B2B Business Owners/Operations Managers, Web Developers, Site Administrators, B2B Marketers

Are you challenged trying to improve your search results ranking, search traffic, and / or user experience of your website? Then, Google Search Console is the answer. This extremely useful and free tool, formerly known as the Google Webmaster Tool, is a web service by Google that allows you to optimize the content on your website with search analytics. That means you get real-time data on how the search engine is analyzing your website. Accordingly, you can monitor its performance.
Once you are set up, you can check site indexing, receive alerts about errors and / or broken pages on the site, gain insights to improve your site’s mobile usability, and more. These helpful features make it a valuable tool for business owners, web developers, site administrators, and marketers.

Advantages of Google Search Console

Setting up Google Search Console for your website gives you access to valuable insights and reports that have the power to transform your web performance. See how you can take advantage of this FREE beneficial tool to enhance your website:

1. Improve Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) Ranking:

When you build a site for your business, your main aim should be to provide a seamless user experience. The more users find the information on your website helpful, the more your website climbs up the ranks on SERPs to become easily discoverable. Google Search Console allows you to see how webpages will perform on Google’s SERP.

 

To improve your ranking you need to make HTML improvements by using appropriate tags and meta descriptions to structure the information cohesively. Start by using structured data or schema markup to effectively categorize your content based on the business objectives you wish to display on the website. Also, make the most of site links as they appear on the SERPs, below the main URL of the website, allowing users to easily navigate to key webpages. The performance of these elements can be observed using click through rate information on your website’s Google Search Console dashboard.

google search console overview
Google Search Console Overview Dashboard

2. Increase Organic Search Traffic

There is no better way to understand your website’s traffic than by checking out Google Search Console’s (GSC) comprehensive reports to understand why websites in a domain rank higher or get more traffic, and compare the findings with the content on your website. This will allow you to identify SEO weaknesses and give you the opportunity to correct them.

Promising results are achieved by developing content using keywords, effectively managing internal links, and gaining backlinks from external websites with strong page and domain authority. If you include these in your B2B content marketing strategy, you will be able to target your audience effectively and increase search traffic organically.

3. Understand Google's Indexing

When you deploy your website or introduce a new webpage, you also need to check the index status report to know if the pages are properly recognized or indexed by Google, as well as other search engines (e.g. Bing). You can check the GSC to track the number of pages that currently appear in Google’s results. Often, businesses forget to downsize the content on their website, yielding obsolete products and services pages. This too impacts the ranking of your website. Therefore, it’s necessary to audit the website to identify blocked pages, remove duplicate content and URLs, and update keywords to stay relevant.  You can do all that by monitoring the Google Search Console Index Overview.

indexed page coverage on google search console
Google Search Console - Indexed Page Coverage

4. Discover Crawl Errors

Have you experienced errors like 404 Not Found, DNS, 503 Service Unavailable? When these errors occur, they can affect your user experience and website performance on Google. Google Search Console (GSC) highlights such errors and keeps a record to ensure you fix the problem and restore services quickly. The sooner your webpage and its interactive elements load, the better it is for crawling. If there are pages on your website that you don’t want Google to crawl, or you want to look for errors proactively, you could test the robot.txt markup to get the job done.

5. Get Google Site Messages

Stay on top of critical issues such as malware alerts, crawl issues, and spam with the help of Google Search Console. The site messaging feature sends an alert from Google and ensures that you are the first to know when Google detects a problem. When you receive such alerts, all you need to do is resolve the issue as soon as possible to protect your website from potential risks. Once resolved, you can notify Google about the resolution to restore your overall website performance. Pro tip, make sure to quickly resolve such issues to yield true long-run benefits. 

Get Started with Google Search Console

It’s not too difficult to get started with Google Search Console, you just need to put in the time and effort to truly reap its benefits. On top of that, signing up for Google Search Console, as a FREE tool to add to your toolkit, without the hassle of paid upgrades. You just need to get access and prove the ownership of your site to be able to view powerful insights.

 

Are you running low on bandwidth and unable to give your website the attention it deserves? From setting up your Google Search Console to simplifying the process of generating and translating reports, Maven Collective Marketing can handle it all. We offer a comprehensive Digital Performance Audit to determine areas of improvement and will act as an extension of your team to help you succeed with better web performance. Reach out to our knowledgeable experts who will walk you through all of it with ease. Book your consultation today!

Improve Your Tech Website’s Ranking with Google Core Web Vitals

Actionable Insights for Your Website's Performance

Estimated Read Time: 4 minutes

Intended Audience: B2B Business Owners, Microsoft Partners, SaaS-Based Organizations

Google is on a quest to improve the user experience of surfing the internet by optimizing search engine results. Now, optimization is no longer focusing only on creating quality, informative and reliable content; it’s also about delivering a great user experience. To clearly define what a great user experience refers to, Google announced Core Web Vitals that help measure the performance of your website.

 

Google first announced these performance measures in June 2021. By adding these quantifiable measures, Google is trying to help businesses or website owners know where they stand regarding website ranking.

 

If you own a B2B tech website, then this new update is extremely useful for you as it will help fine-tune your current SEO strategy and take necessary actions to improve overall website performance and organic search results, leading to higher clicks and engagement.

What are Google Core Web Vitals?

Under the user experience umbrella, Google has set the following metrics for measuring Core Web Vitals. Read ahead to learn if your website’s core web vital scores are in the green:

Google core web vitals largest contentful paint
Measure the Loading Performance with Largest Contentful Paint

1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Isn’t it annoying to wait for a webpage to load? The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measure is set to capture and evaluate your webpage’s load speed. According to Google, if your web page takes more than 4.0 seconds to load, your website’s performance is poor and will most likely lead to a higher bounce rate. The aim should be to stay under 2.5 seconds to deliver an optimal user experience.

 

2. First Input Delay (FID)

When a user clicks on an interactive element on your webpage, and it takes too long for that action to trigger, your website’s overall user experience is impacted. With the help of the First Input Delay (FID) measure, you are able to track the performance of your website. According to Google, performance at or below 100 milliseconds (0.1 seconds) is considered good, and anything taking longer than that implies that there’s a noticeable lag and needs improvement.

 

3. Cumulative Layout Shifts (CLS)

When an interactive element is clicked upon, nobody enjoys it when shifts its position or redirects them to an unrelated page. Thus, websites need to be responsive and load elements faster to reduce bounce rates and increase user sessions. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) helps you monitor such visual shifts in the website’s layout. To stay in the green and keep your customers happy, aim to achieve a score of 0.1 seconds or less in this metric.

Tools to Measure and Analyze Core Web Vital Scores

measure website performance with Google core web vitals
Get Quality Signals on Your Web Page Performance

Before you invest in any tool, make sure to understand how the Core Web Vitals are measured so that you can compare the results and make informed decisions. The most powerful tool is the Chrome User Experience Tool, which reports directly on each of the vitals. Other tools such as Chrome DevTools, Google Search Console, Lighthouse, DeepCrawl, PageSpeed Insights, Web Vitals Chrome extensions, etc. are also excellent. To start, these tools will help you breakdown the web vitals into measured elements. But just understanding the factors involved is not enough, make sure to test and compare the results with alternate tools to ensure that the numbers are accurate before you act on the results.

How Do Core Web Vitals Impact SEO Performance?

Core Web Vitals are a critical component of your technical SEO. However, to improve performance scores you need to do more than just send your developer a list of metrics to fix. Without any context of the elements that need fixing, you will not be able to see any web performance improvements. Instead, make a list of all measured Core Web Vital elements to provide your developer with granular recommendations to improve your scores.

Why Should B2B Tech Organizations Care About Core Web Vitals?

Every B2B tech business aims to improve its website search rankings. With Google’s latest update, it’s imperative to pay closer attention to the user interface and enhance the website’s user experience. Solely focusing on optimizing content won’t be enough to reach a greater audience and achieve those desired search results’ improvements.

 

Also, it’s challenging to improve the organic search ranking of the website overnight. Consistency is the key, and it’s equally important to constantly experiment to optimize and improve the overall experience of your website. The sooner you adapt and improve upon the measurements recommended by Google, the better it will be for you to evaluate where your website stands and plan for improvements. It will also help you gain a competitive edge in the oversaturated software services industry.

Improve Website Design Based on Web Vital Measurements

Improve the design of your website with core web vitals
Improve On Your Web Page Performance

Here are some simple best practices to keep in mind while measuring the Core Web Vitals for your website and making educated judgments to improve website design:

 

  • Internet Speed or Server Issues: This is one thing that you cannot control. While testing the speed of your website, make sure that you are monitoring the speed of your internet as well to observe how the performance is impacted. Your website’s performance can be severely penalized due to server issues. Therefore, it’s necessary to monitor the performance over time to make the required adjustments.
  • Optimizing Website Content: Content such as text, images, videos, icons, etc. need to be formatted to render properly on different devices and browsers.
  • Cut Out Unnecessary Code: Only keep the code that is empirical to load the website and track insights. Additional or less important JavaScripts can impact the performance adversely. By cleaning up your code, you can improve website speed significantly.
  • Be Mindful of Lazy Loads & Preload Key Elements: Move all the lesser important images and videos below the fold. By using the lazy load method, you can make less important visuals load at a regular speed, thus not directly impacting the user experience. You can also ensure that elements such as the webpage font and hero images are preloaded on the browser to improve your Largest Contentful Paint score. HOT TIP: Remember to design and categorize your webpage according to the hierarchy of content to achieve a seamless flow.

For More Web Performance Tips Talk To A Maven

With the help of these tips, you can consciously take action to improve the performance of your website and provide an excellent user experience for every client and prospective customer. That, paired with a robust SEO strategy will help your website rank higher on Google’s search and maintain that position.

 

If you want to get professional assistance to evaluate your B2B website’s ranking and optimize its performance, make sure to reach out to the seasoned marketing experts at Maven Collective Marketing. Our skilled team of marketing mavens will set you in the right direction to build and grow your B2B business with a captivating website that delivers a seamless experience. Reach out for a free consultation today!