You Ask, I Answer: Key Features of Google Search Console?

In today's episode, Natasha asks, which do you prefer, the old or the new Google Search Console and why? Whether we like it or not, the new Google Search Console, which has been out actually for more than a year, actually, actually a little bit longer than that, is Google Search Console going forward. There's no getting around it. There's no wishing you could stay in the old version. And as Google adds more and more features to new Google Search Console, it is becoming the default for how we as marketers will be looking at the performance of our websites from a search perspective.

So let's take a quick tour through some of the features, uh, some of the things that are important in it that you need to know and need to pay attention to. By far, I would say there are probably four things here that that you need to pay attention to. Well, five, technically. Uh, number one is uh security and manual actions. These are essentially you're looking just here for alerts.

Is Google telling you that something is is incredibly wrong with your website? And I will give them props in terms of their design. Uh they're they've done a really good job of making Search Console stand out when something is wrong. This this bright red stuff saying, hey, you screwed this up. In this case, I'm okay.

Uh there's nothing here that's that's screaming like, hey, you have security problems with your website. There's there's hacked content on your website. If there is, this is where it goes, and you need to you need to pay attention to it. So let's go to manual actions. See, nothing all good there, security issues, all good there.

Uh, those are things that that you want to make sure are clean and clear. From there, where else are markers going to want to spend their time? From a structural perspective, you're gonna want to take a look at mobile usability. I made a bunch of changes on my website in uh in May, and you can see that my the it the few issues that I had are gone. You want no red stuff on you, you want all green, no red in mobile usability.

If you have mobile usability issues, fix them because this is super super important. And Google will tell you hey, there are things like clickable elements that are too close together or content wider than the screen. You absolutely have to make sure that you are mobile mobile friendly. You also want to go in and fix up anything. If you're using AMP, which is accelerated mobile pages, and and you should be at this point, uh, you want to make sure that again you're you're cleaning up some of the issues.

I've got uh zero errors, but I've got three issues and then a whole bunch of of warnings. So I need to go through and fix up uh some of these things here. Images smaller than the recommended size, structured data elements issues. So I have some I have some work to do on there to fix things on my website. Now, what's important about this is that I need to make sure that these are all technical things.

So when people talk about stuff like SEO and and what should we be doing on our websites and and well, does this work? Does that work? The good news is that both Google and Bing, the two largest search engines, um they tell you, they tell you right out here's what's wrong with the website, fix these things. And if you want great search engine optimization results, follow the instructions, fix the things that the tools are telling you this is what's wrong. Rather than worrying about like what's litest trick, uh, what's the uh what whether the newest hacks for beating the Google algorithm?

You don't have to. You you can just follow directions and and this is sort of the minimum level of competence that you need to have. Now the parts that marketers will care about most are in uh search result performance and discover performance. Search results, very straightforward. Here's what's happening on your website in the last three months, how many clicks from search, organic search your website has gotten, and then how many times it has appeared in search results.

So my site has appeared in search results 1.49 million uh times and 24,000 clicks. Now you'll notice here looking back, right in the beginning of June, stuff started to do a little bit better, made some changes, made followed directions, fixed things on my website, and you immediately see a a uh an improvement in uh performance. Click through it 1.6%, average position in search rankings 37.2. When you start digging in, you can start to see what is it that that you get clicks for, what is it you get impressions for? So uh these are things that are important uh to me.

These are uh surprisingly um a lot of recent stuff, which is great. Interestingly, I don't see my personal brand in there. And I don't see Christopher Penn in the top you know ten things that that I get clicks for. Let's switch over to impressions. Okay, they am for impressions, so at least people are still searching for the name.

One of the things you want to do with this this data is you want to keep an eye on it. You want to be able to download it, uh, download the data over time to understand what you're being found for. Like, if this is something that is relevant, great. If you there are things that are here in here that are not relevant, you may need to do some more content generation on the things that are relevant about you in order for you to be able to rank well and and get traffic. It will tell you the pages on your website that are doing well, what gets a large number of clicks, like how to set your consulting billing rates, people processing technology, some stuff that's not so useful, they should probably just retire.

So that's search results. Next is Discover. Um it is probably new to you, you've probably never heard of this. Discover is when Google offers useful stuff to browsers saying you might also enjoy sort of stuff. And so it discover impure it's uh AMP articles is where uh my site gets a lot of discover traffic.

So when you're searching for something, Google will say these are you you might also find that these pages or these articles useful. This is free extra traffic. This is where Google is using its machine learning to ascertain the intent of the browser, and even if your site doesn't have necessarily those keywords that this the browser was searching for, that the user was searching for, Google is recommending because it can understand the content of your pages. Hey, this is also relevant to what you search for, even if it's not doesn't contain those words. So, for example, if somebody was searching for consulting uh frameworks or change management frameworks.

One of my articles is on people processing technology, people processing platform, uh, which is a a consulting framework. I think oh gosh, that was uh was that HJ Lovett's framework? Yes, I think so. It was I think original it was people with process like that was HJ Lovett's 1964 framework. So Google says to people who are searching for that consulting framework, hey, you might think this other article here is useful, right?

Because it it knows conceptually from a topic perspective what is related. On Discover, how do you get ranked for discover? You need to be using accelerated mobile pages and you need to be cranking out content that looks like news, uh, that is formatted well. So lots of text on page, longer articles, um, big graphics, all the stuff that Google expects you to put out there. So that's discover it's free traffic.

And so if you I would suggest if you are a marketer who is concerned with SEO, that you spend once a week stop in on discoverance uh stop in on Google Search Console and see how you how are you doing, what has changed, what things uh do you look for that you didn't expect to see? Um, what are you being found for? All these things will help you tune up your marketing and get more traffic uh to your website. It is not a panacea, it is not enough by itself. You can't do effective SEO just with this, but this takes care of all the basics, it's basic reporting and tells you what you're being found for, right?

And it tells you what to fix. Fix this stuff first, because if you don't, nothing else is gonna matter. So great question, Natasha. If you have follow-up questions, please leave them in the the comments box below. If you would like Trust Insights, my company to put together a webinar on Google Search Console in more depth, let me know.

Leave a look comment in the comments below. And uh if enough folks say yeah would that would be a helpful thing to see we can put one together. As always please subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems?

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