Within parts one and two, our Nashville web design company took you down the overview of Google’s Search Console. We discussed how it can help you with your keywords, clean up broken links, index your website quickly, remove sensitive content from the search rankings, and get a better idea of your overall performance.
In this article, we’ll go through the Experience section and the Enhancements section. Let’s start with the Experience section.
Notice first the Mobile Usability section. This will show you how many pages Google sees are mobile friendly and how many pages not so much. Any errors here are imperative to fix promptly. Clicking into the error will show you the page and why the search engine thinks the page isn’t mobile friendly. Often the text is too small, too close together, or hanging off the screen. Perhaps any Nashville web design group can fix this issue for you but if you are seeing it you may have an issue with the core code of the website, an indication your site isn’t using a mobile friendly framework and it may be an indication that that you need to reach out for a free consultation.
Further under the Experiences section you can see a Page Experiences link. Here you can see a summary of other links. This will show you how many pages are looking good on mobile, how many pages are passing the Core Web Vitals tests, and it will split the views between mobile and desktop. Additinoally, you can make sure all of your pages are loading securely over HTTPS. It is interesting how Search Console gives us a lot of the same information in different ways.
Noticing any red errors under Core Web Vitals or HTTPS warrants further investigation. Click on this area and you will go into the Core Web Vitals section under the Experiences navigation. Clicking back on the lefthand Core Web Vitals link will take you the summary. The error page is better to gain insight and fix the issues, so click Open Report if you navigated back to the overview page.
Let’s talk about Core Web Vitals. Our Nashville web design team has spent a lot of time on this topic.
Around August of 2021, Google released a new factor into search rankings called Core Web Vitals. This information can be glanced over in the Experience section of Search Console. Core Web Vitals is a pretty techy bit of jargon so let’s simplify it to say Google cares about your customer’s experience on your website. They measure how quickly your website loads on mobile and how much the page jumps up and down when you scroll on it.
It is true that Google looks at desktop too but since over 50% of traffic is using mobile, Google switched to a mobile-first approach and wants website developers like our Nashville web design company to do the same.
At the risk of getting too technical in the article, the key points you want to remember about the user experience is to make your site load fast on mobile and make sure it doesn’t jump around. To load quickly on mobile devices, let’s oversimplify to hit the big points. First, make sure the image at the top of the page isn’t huge and is in a friendly format like webp instead of jpg or png. Next, make sure the page doesn’t bounce around when you scroll. This is called Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) and you’ve probably experienced it when reading an article and an add jumps on the screen, making you click a link you didn’t intend to.
After you scroll down you will see how many pages show as needing improvement and how many errors you have. Fix the errors first and focus on the pages that need improvement over time. When you drill into the error you may notice some text like “User experience is evaluated for URL groups, not individual URLs.”. This means Google groups pages that have similar source code and determines the whole group is not a good experience. A strong website developer like the ones we have at our Nashville Web Design company will be able to make a few, global site adjustments that fix all of these errors.
The final area on the Search Console Overview is the Enhancements section. This will only show you parts of the website that use schema data or rich text snippets. It means Google won’t give you a Products area if you have no code on your website that tells Google you sell products. Notice we’re talking about code, not content. If you are selling products and you don’t see a Products section under Enhancements, you need to add rich text snippets to better tell Google what your website is about. This is a great time to chat with our Nashville web design team.
Some common areas you may see are breadcrumbs, logos, products, reviews, and sitemap links. But if your site has lots of locations, movies, books, etc. you should see that information too.
As with the rest of Search Console, you can clck into each of these areas to learn more about the valid or invalid content you are serving to your customers by way of search. Any invalid information should be fixed quickly. A common thing we see is lack of product information on e-commerce sites. Google expects some information like brand, GTIN, or manufacturer information even if you are creating the products yourself.
It is important to understand that Google doesn’t have enough information to know you are selling products and it can’t read through the product pages to gather this information without the rich text snippets. This section is populated by what rich text snippets you include and then the Search Console will tell you how well you have done it and what information you lack. The more information you put into this schema data the better search results will populate.
In conclusion, Search Console is a powerful tool to help you understand and improve your search rankings. Google wants to give the best, most relevant search results to its customers and you deserve to be considered. Read through the tools Google provides and make improvements to your website for optimal results and more traffic. As always, if you have any questions reach out to our Nashville web design team. We’re happy to assist.