Getting your website ranked in the search engines can be a lot of work. There are a few factors that need to considered, like what keywords you want to rank for, what the competition looks like, the content of your website, backlinks, and clean website code. There are also other search engines to consider, depending on your demographics. For most business owners, the majority of traffic comes from Google though so we’ll stick to discussing that search engine.
Google does us a favor by giving us some tools to see how our website is doing in its search engine. Search Console, formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, is a way for us to see what Google sees. Our Nashville web design company uses it to look at our client’s websites to see how healthy they are. If there are things not lining up perfectly, we have a maintenance plan where we go in and fix it.
To set up search console you first need to verify your domain. You will go to search.google.com and begin. There are a variety of ways to verify your domain. If you have access to the domain registrar (think Go Daddy or Network Solutions) you can sign into the registrar from the Search Console. If have no idea who your domain registrar is you may want to check out whois.com just so you know. I’m surprised how many clients domains expire and it takes days to find the information and get it set up again.
If using your domain registrar isn’t an option you can download a file to upload to your website over SFTP. You may have FTP or SSH access and can do it there. Our Nashville web design company limits the use of FTP for security purposes and your host should do the same. There are a lot of tutorials out there on how to use FTP so we won’t go into that here today.
There is another way to verify your domain if you’ve read an FTP tutorial and your eyes glazed over. This way is to add a meta tag to your head tag in the website code. If you are using WordPress as many sites are today you can sign into the WordPress admin and go to Appearance and Edit Theme. Find the file header.php and inside the <head> tag paste the snippet Google gives you.
Once you are done go back to the Search Console and ask Google to verify your website. It will spin for a moment and voila, you’re ready. Well, almost. It takes Google a few days to gather the data and begin showing things. This is somewhat annoying for our Nashville web design company because when we are in Search Console we usually have a mission. But let’s just be thankful.
Now that Search Console is ready, let’s visit each of the pages to understand how it can benefit you.
Starting with the Overview page, here you get a great summary of how your site is doing. From top to bottom you will see Performance, Index, Experience, and Enhancements. If you don’t see one of these sections your website likely isn’t set up to collect all the data and should be investigated by a Nashville web design company. It’s usually pretty easy to set up.
The Performance section will tell you how many clicks from Google search you received. You can adjust the date range and compare against other dates by clicking Full Report or Performance in the left hand navigation bar. When you dive into this page you will see clicks, impressions, average CTR (click-through rate), and average position. The impressions are how many people saw your listing in Google but didn’t click on it. Don’t let your overall average position scare you. If you are ranking for lots of keywords you might be on pages deep in Google that are dragging this number down.
Scroll down below the chart to see they keywords, called Queries, that people are using to find your website. Here you will see the information that most people care about before getting too deep in the weeds of this garden that Google gives us. We recommend checking the total clicks, total impressions, and average position checkbox at the top of the page to make this chart as useful as possible.
On this chart you have Queries, the keywords your customers use to search for you, the Pages that are being clicked on and ranked, and so on. The rest of this information isn’t generally useful to our Nashville web design team or our clients. If your company is doing business worldwide, the Countries tab is worth a glance but this information can be broken down better inside Google Analytics.
Let’s consider how to use the Performance section to boost your search traffic. After you have checked the total clicks, total impressions, and average position, scroll to the chart. Scroll down to the bottom and update the row per page section to some bigger number like 100. Now scroll down to find a keyword or two that are highly relevant to your business that are likely to convert customers. If you aren’t seeing any you may not rank at all or your customers aren’t searching for the keywords you expected. If you are puzzled about this visit trends.google.com and make sure there is enough search volume for the queries you expect.
After finding a keyword or two you like, notice the impressiosn and average position. Assume your average position is 18.5 and there are 350 impressions last month it means 350 people searched for that word and you are landing between the 18th and 19th position in Google, which is on page 2, as there are 10 results on each page. (This does not count Google Ads.) This is useful information because it indicates there are a lot more impressions on page one, your business can rank well for the keyword, and it may be a term in which to focus. Remember, getting to page one is key. Being in the top 3 or top 5 will garner many more clicks but all traffic on page one is to be celebrated.
Schedule a free consultation with our Nashville web design team to discuss how to move your website further up in the search engine rankings.