GSC is a free service provided by Google to manage your website’s search functionality. The search console is a collection of reports and tools that help you rectify errors as well as strategize and optimize your search engine rankings.
1.Google Search Console is invaluable for anyone needing to monitor:
1.Their site’s performance in search results
2.Content accessibility
3.Malware and spam issues
2.To Optimize your site:
1. Initial Checks
Checking the recommended level of crawl rate which is specified by Google. If any website is found to be indulged into any black hat SEO or any webspam than violations will appear in “Manual Action”.
2.Targeting of the Audience
The main preferred audience location which is being set.
3. Language Specification for the website
Recommendations: –
Language specification, i.e, Hreflang tag specification on important landing pages is an important SEO correlation ranking factor and therefore it must be provided
4. Mobile Usability Test –
Clickable Elements too close together
An error of clickable elements such as CTA and buttons which are too much close to each other as found from Google crawler.
It produces bad user experience and therefore it needs to be fixed.
5. Generic Mobile-Friendly Test
Open new search console dashboard and click “mobile usability” and then select “Valid”.
Now, GWT dashboard will show you one important thing which is “Mobile Friendly Pages”. And here all the pages which have any single sort of mobile issue or error will pop-up.
6. Advanced Search Appearance – Structured Data
With the era of semantic search, structured data and schema mark-up is getting important with each passing day. GWT has a special feature which enables us to check the errors we have in our structured data.
Incorrect structured data will hamper with the intent specification of our site and therefore it must be made proper.
7. Advanced Search Appearance – Data Highlighter
If a website doesn’t contain basic schema or local business schema than they can use the data highlight for highlighting important information related to one’s website.
8. Advanced Search Appearance – HTML Improvements
This is an important section of GWT as it shows the relevant on-page corrections which need to be done for ensuring a proper SEO score.
9. Advanced Search Appearance – AMP
AMP is an important SEO penguin 4.0 update and this feature will help in identifying potential issues with your AMP pages and it will also tell whether you have a valid AMP page or not. Here no data have been found as it takes some time to fetch all the data.
AMP pages can be custom prepared from ampproject.org with a series of technical events.
10. Crawling Arena – Crawl Errors
This is yet another important feature of GWT and it helps in identifying all the necessary crawl errors and detailed URLs where the errors have occurred.
Different crawl errors can be solved by different methods such as 4XX errors.
11. Crawling Arena – Crawl Stats
Current Observation:-
It’s important to keep an eye on the crawl stats so as to make sure that the amount of crawl budget (crawling per day) is not wasted.
Wastage of crawl budget might lead to improper indexing and ranking.
Furthermore, it will also help in making a proper report on the rendering time and page size measure.
This sector is completely technical SEO sector and will all appropriate measures all the three measures can be retained. Such as improving sites architecture and speed for improving crawl budget; improving the waterfall for improving download score, and improving the DNS fetch time for improving the rendering time.
12. Crawling Arena – Robots Checker
Robots.txt is a very crucial file and thereafter it needs to be handled pretty well. Improper handling might lead to your landing pages not getting crawled and index.
A proper robots.txt should be set up using the proper protocol and then it should be checked against GWT for errors.
13. Crawling Arena – Sitemap Index
The sitemap index should be up-to-dated and also it should be indexed as well.
Another important feature is that one can use the new GWT feature for checking the number of sitemaps which is present. This feature is important in case someone has multiple sitemaps such as image, video, etc.
If a sitemap is not found then a proper XML sitemap should be prepared using proper XML protocols and then it should be updated inside GWT.
14. Crawling Arena – URL Parameters
Sometimes we do use URL parameters in the form of any query string or UTM codes. In which case, this feature of GWT comes into play.
At first, we need to find out which URL’s from our website contains query parameters and UTM’s and then we need to analyze if the URL’s are a good landing page or not.
If the pages are important for ranking than this feature will come handy.
If we detect any of our Landing Page using query parameters then we can use this feature to make sure that our landing page is well crawled by Google for better search appearance.
15. Crawling Arena – Detailed COVERAGE Issues
From the new GWT dashboard, you will find a “Coverage” tab and it will serve a lot of importance.
16. Blocked Resources
This section will help in identifying the blocked resources as discovered by GWT.
If important resources are blocked from Google Bot for crawling than it will affect the indexing as well and therefore it needs to be fixed if detected.
17. URL Inspection
URL inspection is an important tool and it will provide all relevant important details about the URL entered.
If any issue is detected, it can be fixed from the tech end.
3.Conclusion:
GWT audit and fixing serve a whole lot of importance for an enhanced SERP appearance and visibility.
GWT is the basic of all tools which is still underrated by many but it’s one of the most important tools which one can utilize for.
