Transcripts
1. Introduction to Google Search Console Course: Welcome. This is a beginner's
guide to Search Console. By way of introduction, I have managed websites for multiple watching
fabric companies. And I've saved the
middle of dollars using this simple tool
of the Search Console. And in this course, I'm going to distill many years
of experience in a live hands-on manner
to teach you how I had several clients
as their SEO export. So with that, let's look
at the table of contents. So we will first see the
overview and performance. We will see how we can access the oral health upside
within a matter of seconds. So we'll look at the
overview tab and see, is there a website performing
as we expect it to be? Then we will use the
Performance tab to see, is the website getting
the right number of clicks and impressions? And is that
increasing over time? Then we will use the
URL inspection tool to inspect each URL and see if that's behaving
as expected or not. After I access the overall
health of the website, we will look at the indexes. Over here. We'll see if we look
at the entire website, virtual pages are getting indexed with that
all the pages tab. And then we also gain a deep
understanding of Sitemaps, which is a very important topic in every conversation we have about the search engine
optimization of a website. Having looked at the oral side, we will then dive deep
into the user experience. And we look at three
important things that are now included in the Google Search
landing page experience. That is, what is the experience or user
has with the page, but it's interacting
with the patient. And then we will look at two important components
of page experience, namely core where vitals diving deep into this topic and
also mobile usability. Then we will focus on e-commerce websites
that are on the rise. In today's world. We will see how Google recommends two
structures and such, that site using products,
lipids and materialistic. And then we will also look at external links and answer
important questions. Like, are we getting
the right links? Which pages are getting
the maximum lengths? And not only that, when a
website links to our page, what is the anchor text they're using to link to our page? And all of this we will
study using the link style. By the end of this course, you will no longer
be a beginner. In Search Console. You'll be an expert
in Search Console. So I'm very excited to be going
on this journey with you. So let's get started.
2. Quick Assessing Webshite Health with Overview Tab: We'll start a
journey of learning Search Console from
the overview tab. This tab gives us summary
of the entire health of our website from search engine optimization
and search people. So it's a very important tab. This tab is organized in
terms of cards, like, as you can see that
the card format and it has some important cards. One is performance. That is, how many clicks as is the website
getting over time. And this is very
important because if a search engine
optimization strategy is working and I've
applied is healthy, we should see that
clicks increasing over time. Second is index. Again, this card alone has saved my clients millions of
dollars because this cartels how many
pages are getting indexed in your reply among
all the pages, so forth. If e.g. you have an
e-commerce website with housing products and we see
only 100 or getting index. That really highlights a
very important problem, which can be found primarily through
Google Search Console. So this specific website
has around 197 products, and therefore we
can see one-ninth sense pages getting indexed. So this is a healthy website
in terms of indexing. So experience is
something which Google has started to include
in the search rankings. And this tells how fast and how suitable is the experience of a web page or a
URL for the user. What Google calls
page experience. And we'll see later
in the lecture series that page
experience consists of core bug vitals are very
important concepts that will look deeply into in
the subsequent videos. And mobile usability. That is the page mobile
friendly or not. So again, here we can quickly see the how many
good URLs we have, how many failing URLs we have. And later in the video, we'll see how to fix these. Shopping is very relevant
to e-commerce websites. And here we have two components, like products, snippets
and merchant listings. And this is more around
structured data. Google lays out a
very detailed manner how to market products in
an e-commerce website. And we'll see that we'll
talk about the shopping in the left-hand menu of
the Google Search Console. And finally, enhancements. Again, this is also closely
linked to structure data, and we'll cover this
in detail when we talk about shopping and so on. So this is the overview tab. We can see how many
clicks we are getting. How many pages are
getting indexed. What is the experience
of a user on the page? Shopping and enhancements. And Google also included some Search Console insights
that delta heard inside, like how many views we have got, what is the average
engagement time? What is the most
popular content, and, and so on. So with that, now
we'll move on and look into each of these cards in detail in the subsequent videos.
3. How many clicks your website gets and where does it rank on Search: Performance Report tab: Okay, so we will cover
the performance report. This is a very important report and it covers three key things. One is impressions and clicks. That is how many
impressions and clicks the website is getting it. And what time we should see this increasing because that means the SEO strategy is working. Next, we'll talk
about search queries. This is what are
the users searching for when the website shows
up in Google Search? Again, if you're not seeing
the relevant queries, that means that there's something
wrong with the content. And third is countries and
devices and such features. That is, which countries
are the users from? Wherever price goes
up at devices is which devices are they using
when the website shows up? And again, they should align
with the overall strategy. If you are targeting
a particular country, then they should show up in
that particular country. So now let's move on
to Search Console. So let's orient ourselves
with this report. So at the top we have
clicks, impressions, and average click-through
rate, an average position. Then we have a visual display. And over here we can see
different things like queries, pages, countries, and so on. So let's start with the top one. So clicks is how many
clicks are we getting? Impression is when
a user searches for a search term and our
website is showing up on the Google search. Click-through rate is every time click happens after
an impression. It's position is the
average position of all search queries. And this is a chart that displays everything we
have selected here. So e.g. if I only want
to see clicks that I can check only the clicks part and this will
show up on the charge. One of my favorite features in Search Console is
this filtering. So if you select date
for last three months, you can compare it with
the previous three months. This can really show how your website is performing
over a time frame. So we can see generally, or three months, the clicks is higher as you can see
on the number as well. But this is usually
a good indicator. Now, it might surprise us to see that the average
position is lower. So in the last few
years or 47.7, but now simply 1.2, but
the clicks are higher. So this usually means that certain important keywords
we are now ranking higher, which are leading
to higher clicks. And that's usually a good sign. That is the comparison report. I turn back to the three months. Now looking at the bottom
part here you can see query the other search terms
that a user's search for, for our website to show pages, or which pages are showing up and how many
clicks they're getting. Now, if we select a page, we can also answer the question which queries
are leading to this page? If you go to queries, we can see these queries are leading to
clicks on that page. Then going to countries, this is neutral countries
are showing up for. This is important because
they should align with the overall strategy
of our website, which will contribute
targeting devices or the devices that users have
used to see our website. And this can really
inform that how should definitely have a
mobile strategy as well, because there are
large number of users who are accessing the
site using mobile. Then search appearance is basically when all our website
is showing up in search. And these are the dates when the refresh shows up in such. So e.g. like October 3rd, there was one click
because of organic search. And October 2 there
was also one plate. Another very important feature
here is the filter icon. If you want to see like say, which are the top queries
that are linked to coffee. Then we can search it here. At this can display which all coffee terms are leading
to clicks on the website. So that is the performance
report, again, a very key report
in Search Console.
4. Is URL indexed by Google : URL inspection Checking each URL using Search Console: Now we'll talk about another powerful tool
in Search Console, which is the URL
inspection tool. This tool allows us, again to achieve three
important things. First is find the current
index status of the page. The page is index not. And if it's not indexed, we can also request indexing. Second is that we can request Google to
crawl the new page. We can also test it live to see that if the page
is callable or not. Third is that we can see what
Google actually indexed. So it's a very rich report. So let's go over to search
console and see how it works. So if we go to Search Console
and we type in the URL, an example, and this URL must be or the property
that we are managing. So once I enter this, I get this three cards where postcard indicates
the URL is a Googler norm. Second card indicates if
the page's index nodes, so it says, okay, the Google which
agent index the page. When was the last crawled? How the pH found? An indexing shows that if
the page was index node. So that's the page experience. In the enhancement and
experience overheard. This is linked to
more structured data and we will talk
about that shortly. But before I go there, let me cover these details. So first is we can test a live URL to see that the
URL is indexable or not. So this usually takes a
murder to be a bit impatient, but it will show in real time if the URL
can be indexed or not. So I will just give
it a minute or so. While this is working, maybe we can look at
the structure data for the enhancements. So if we search for SEO
markup for e-commerce, that is where we can
find structured data. So let's aside from
developers@google.com. And this indicates, and
if you go to product over your Google basically
tells us how we should mark up our
product information. E.g. every time we
have a product, we should give it
a name like the knee or the product description, user reviews and so on. That is what is showing up in the announcements
section of the report. And in the meantime, the live test run, and
there were no issues found. So therefore it not
indicate any error. Now, if there were issues found or the URLS change
pretty significantly, then we can request for new
indexing using this button. Again, this usually takes a second or so and
indexing is requested. Finally, we can also see what page has Google
actually cord. So if you click on
view called page, we can see it here, the page that Google
has called screenshots. We can see what's
Pinterest google has. And finally, more info. So this removes any ambiguity around if Google can
see the URL or not, and it's a very helpful page. So this report,
again to summarize, tells us in the URL
is being indexed, not hours that you are indexed
by looking at the agent, the time and if it's
being called an OT. And finally, if you
have structured data on the website,
starts showing here. So e.g. product stability
is what we just saw, that if the products have been mocked up in the
right manner or not.
5. Are all URLs getting indexed? Check using Google Search Console: So now we'll talk about one of my favorite pages and reports in the Search Console,
which is the Pages tab. And the reason that this
is so important is that I have had clients who have invested millions of
dollars and on SEO. And this is a page that
really give them the result. So this page alone helped one of my clients increased
traffic by 300 per cent. Why this page is
so important now, this page tells us that how
many pages are getting index? Now, if you're an
e-commerce website with say, 200 products, he wanted this number
to be similar on the range of the number
of products we have. What is happening in
my client's case is that this was dislike three, while we had 200 production and it was getting very hard to something which is very hard to notice until we started
monitoring the patient support. And Google is very
informative here, Google shows clearly
of all the pages, which pages are getting
indexed as we saw here, and which ones are not getting index like Victoria artery. Which pages are
marked as duplicate? Which pages are marked as
duplicate by the user? Which pages are marked
as duplicate by Google, which we said crawled
but not indexed. So Google is able to find those pages, but Google
is not indexing. So you can see for this client there are a lot of pages
that will never indexed. But then after you fixed issues, all that went down. So any website that we have, if we know that the website has around thousand
pages or 200 pages, we should ensure this matches
with that with that report. And then for these issues, Google gives a detailed
information about each of these. So if we search for
this page on Google, e.g. index coverage report. And over here, if you do Control F and search
for page with redirect, then we can see what
it means so that you are redirected to another URL. This URL was not indexed. Second, if you look at crawl,
but non-indexed, crawl, but not currently, don't index the pages core by
Google, but not indexed. It may or may not be
indexed in the future. No need to submit this URL. So based on this, we can get information about
what is happening with each URL and without
the page report, it's very hard to see because
with the URL testing, which we have here, we
can do one at a time. But this shows us for all
the URLs at one shot.
6. Sitemaps using Search Console - Essential for SEO: Okay, so now we'll
talk about another, very often talked about report in Search
Console is sitemaps. And a site map is
basically a way for a webmaster or owner of the site to tell Google
which all URLs it must crawl. I think the first question that usually comes with sitemaps is, does every upside need
assignments? And the answer is no. Like if your website
is very well linked and it's a small website
that can be easily crawl, then it does not need a sitemap. But if it's a larger plate or the thigh which is
not very well linked. That is, each page does
not link to is not reachable from at least
one page in your website, then yes, a sitemap is helpful. And the main purpose of a sitemap is to
indicate to Google, these are the important
URLs that you must crawl. And based on this, you can
discover the entire website. Looking at sitemap, report to. This is usually the
syntax will find a sitemap that is the domain
name and sitemap dot xml. So I have here a sample
website like knee parallel.com and I just entered
sitemap dash index.html. I can see all the
sitemap that have been submitted for
this specific website. So e.g. if I click on this one, these are the
different URLs that the website wants
Google to index. And if you want to
create a sitemap, there are many
automatic generators. One common one is the Screaming
Frog Sitebulb generator. And it clearly explains. So if you Google
crazy peroxide map, then you can find this XML generate and it's usually pretty
simple to generate. Based on that, let's go
back to the sitemap report. So now that we have seen
what a sitemap looks like, Let's analyze the report. So this shows the date that the sitemap was somewhere
at the last trade date. What is the last red
date when Google read the sidebar, the status, if Google was able to actually
read the sitemap or not, how many URLs was discovered
inside the sidebar. And you see there is
a small icon here, right? C index coverage. As we'll see in these
lecture reports as well, that if we click here, we can see the pages, reports for the URLs
found incitement. And again, we'll cover this
tab in detail in this, in these sections and then we can see if they
were indexed or not. So to summarize, the
sitemap is a way to let Google know which are the important URLs
that it must crawl. And from there it can discover
the other. That's right.
7. Search Rankings and Page Experience using Google Search Console: Next we'll talk about another very important
report in Search Console, which is page experience. The experience is included
in search rankings. And this is calculated
for each URL. So if you see a certain URL routing high and a
certain URL ranking law, we should check the
paid experience. And this report is visible
in a search console. And there are a few things
that go into experience, primarily three things, as we'll see in the Search
Console as well. One is mobile friendliness. Second is if it's an
HTTPS web site or not, like e.g. as you can see her. And third is the core by vitals, which also we will
cover in detail. So let's go over to the
Search Console property. Over here, you have page
experience is divided for mobile and for next time
so that two sections here. And as we talked about, three inputs go into
calculating page experience. One is called vitals, which we'll talk in detail
when we cover core vitals. Mobile usability is that if
it's usable on mobile or not, again, this is something
we will cover in this tab. And finally, if
it's HTTPS or not, and this is calculated
for each URL. So we can actually see that
whether for a URL group, it is a good score or not. So just to give an example, if you go into core vitals, then over here we can
see that there are some issues with what
we call core vitals. If I look deeper, it tastes exactly for which
URLs the score is low. So the key takeaway here is that even if one you are in the website has a good
weight experience, Google wants to ensure
the entire website has good, bad experience. And therefore, the PID
experienced score is calculated for all the URLs. And this report gives a view of the different components
are working well or not. And then we can dive deep
into each of these to see how we can fix issues
or how we can improve them, or they're already
working just fine.
8. Checking Core Web Vitals using Search Console: The next important
report is called vitals. And this is something Google
has added to ensure that the web is fast and every user gets an
excellent user experience. And this is a very
important report. So we'll spend some time here. The three things that
go into covert vitals, one is largest,
couldn't pull paint. Second is first input delay, and third is
cumulative direction. So let's understand
all of these three. Largest continental
paint is the time it takes to load the largest
image or text block. So an easy way to remember
it is lowering speed. And there are many
ways to optimize this. One common way is to use something called a
content delivery network, which I'm sure many of
you are familiar with. But this basically is
a technique to place the content closer to the
user so it can load faster. The two largest
continental paint, Google ensures that the largest
image can load up past. The second is first input delay. This is after a user
clicks on the page, how soon does it get a
response from the page? So this is more
like interactivity because the page can load fast. But if we don't get
a response from it, that is what Google is
tracking to force input in a third is cumulative
layout shift. That is, how much the left-right shifts while
it's being loaded. Because, say if you're reading a blog and the text is
continually shifting, that is not a very
good experience. So that is visual stability. And Google calculates this for
each URL on the website to ensure that the user
has a good experience regardless of whichever
page the user is on. Now there's a tool called PageSpeed that can be
used to see these URL's. And we'll take a look
at that shortly. But first, let's go
over to Search Console. This is the core by vitals. Again, we have a
different section for mobile and a different
section for next time. If you open the
report for mobile, you can see how
many URLs are poor, how many need improvement? How many need code? So this is a relatively
new project. I'm working on, scope
for improvement. And at the bottom, it's exactly the issues
we talked about, like why URLs are
considered good. One is largest connected paint. Second is cumulative
layout ship. And if there was an issue with the first input delay,
that would also show you, let's see if we click on
largest continental paint, we can exactly see which URLs
are causing the problem. So if I click here, I can see these URLs are causing problems in the
largest contact with paint. And the SCP, or the largest conditional
paint for this group is 6.2. Wants to see the
trend over time. Now the neat thing about this feature is that
once we have fixed it, google gives you an
opportunity to validate. Now this way we can let
Google know that the issue has been fixed and
how Google can check. We can do something similar for the cumulative left shift. Click here, and then
we can see, okay, so for in this case a zero
effected, you are as noun. That means the team
has fixed the issue already for the
cumulative leadership. Now, going back to the core, the vitals and this now I think the obvious question to ask is that how do we know what
all we can do to fix this? So this is where we can leverage
the PageSpeed Insights. If you search for page insights, then this tool shows up
and we can enter any URL. So e.g. I. Will take amazon.com. And if I do analyze, this takes some time. But you can see for
Amazon it gives you the mean inputs largest
kinda hold pinned post input delay in
Cuba dealerships and the different scores over mobile and also
for the next one. And so now it's also doing the complete diagnosis of
this specific website. And this usually takes some time given the length
of this website. But once it's done like e.g. it will give opportunities and diagnostics where we can see what improvements
we can do, e.g. server imaging
next, input format, image formats like Beppe. So it's recommending to
turn images from say, a JPEG image and so on. So this is the core, bye-bye to report and put
each of these issues. We can find solutions in
the piece begins site. So if you see her, see
her see colorful paint. This is the, so I'll
just do this first. Field painters at the score For largest conditional paint. This is the score and accumulated leadership.
This is the score. And then if you want to see your session based
on each of these, so we can just click here and see what is the solution
for that specific issue. Bit, LCP or CRS. And TBT is totally
blocking time. And this is once the
front-end calls the API, how long it takes to respond. So this is also one of the
factors that feeds into the order usually
impacts everything else. Again, we have option to look at for a mobile or a desktop view.
9. Is your website mobile friendly ? : The next report we'll talk about the mobile
usability report. And in today's world
where majority of the population accesses the
Internet via mobile phones, District Board has
become increasingly important to first
go over to the GAL4, to the Search Console property and see what the
report looks like. And then come back and look
at the four main reasons why the score might below
going or the property. If it click on mobile usability, we can see how many of the URLs are mobile
user will notice. So if we click on View
data about usable pages, then we can see that 37
pages are marked as usable. And here are some examples that Google has seen for
mobile usable and pages. And this is a report
that at least we worked very closely with
the client to get the number of zeros,
not usable issues. But if your website has
issues with mobile usability, there are four common
issues that you might see to positive
incompatible plugging. This is something we have
seen multiple times, especially with
clash, and this leads to low mobile usability reports. Second is mobile responsiveness. That is, the website
does not change its size because when it's been accessed in a desktop
or mobile phone. And this can be checked
using the viewport and any front-end developer
would know how to fix this. The third most common
reason we have seen is contained is
wider than the screen. That is, especially if their tables and horizontal tables. We have seen that
the table does not reside itself to
fit in the screen. For this, clickable
elements are too close, especially if you have
multiple buttons on the page, like for e-commerce, the
first click Add to Cart. And by now, there needs to be sufficient distance
between those buttons so that users can
easily navigate. And Google can measure
all these reports. Once we fix all this, then you should be able to see a similar mobile usability
report where you can see all the pages are
being indexed properly. This report also shows
what was the agent use. So in this case, the
smartphone color. And then was this
page last updated? And I think just to the side, you can also export this data either into sheets or
Excel or download CSV. This is a common feature
in Search Console.
10. Products and Merchant Listing in Shopping: Next we talk about
the shopping report, which is extremely useful to
any page that has products, even if just product reviews
or that sells products. Especially with the
rise of e-commerce, this report is becoming
more and more important. The products snippet page contains data about
structured data. That is more specifically
products structured data. So just to look at that a bit. So Google has really specified how we should mark up
product information. So over here, if we
look for this page, which is titled product
page in the south-central, we can see Google
specifies that if it's a product review page, this is how it should be
structured in the front-end. If it's a if it's a page
like with an offer, right, there is just
clearly specify what is the product name,
what is the image? What is the description
of the product? What is the seller keeping
unit, what is the brand? And also the offer? The products snippet page tells if all this
had a properly or not taking one more
example product with an offered and
shipping details. So we heard we have to offer. But in addition to the offer, we also have shipping
details like delivery time, transit time, shipping
destination, and so on. So similarly, if you want to indicate
free shipping or not, the next day shopping
listening experience, which is product snippets, is for any page that might not be selling
products as well. But shopping,
listening experience after pages that are
selling a product. This basically
enables a product to be eligible to be listed as
popular products. So e.g. if I search for say, black tea on Google, I can
see popular Blackberry. And these are the
products that have been structured using
the formula that we just saw on this page. And then they start
being eligible to be listed as a shopping
list to experience. So with that, we'll go over to search console and see what information Google has about
these structured reports. So we can see the
other product snippet for any patient that has products not as reselling and motion distinct or
products that are selling. To starting with
the product page, it can tell us how many validly
Mac products are there. And if there are any issues, it can indicate it here. So e.g. like this, these 39 products have
the structured data, but certain views
are missing, e.g. price by it until and SKU units. So Google is recommending
that we should add these. Because if you see her, and if you scroll up
again and we search, the SKU is one of the required fields,
are recommended fields. And since we don't have
it on the website, google is recommending that. And over here we can see view
data about violent items. We heard, we can see
which all products have validly marked input. Similarly for motion
listings, it's very similar, but it is more for those pages that are selling
a product because if it's a product review page that will not appear
on motion listings. Especially if you are
managing e-commerce website. Structured data is
something that becomes very important as is
shown in Search Console. And this report, that is the product structure data would help to see how we can
structure that information.
11. Which external links and internal links are linking to your website: Next we will see one of
my favorite reports, again in Search Console,
which is the Link support. So again in the sidebar, if we scroll down, we
can see the links. This report tells us which pages are getting
maximum external links, which pages are linked
most internally, that is, page inside your website is looking to linking
to another page. Then. Third, which all
websites are linking to your website port is what is the main anchor
tags that are linking to? All these are very important
for search rankings, e.g. if you see top linked pages, if I click on More, the other pages that are getting the maximum links from
external websites. And we can also see
that if I click here, I can see which all websites
are linking to that page. Similarly, we can see the
top link pages internally. So if I click on a page, I can see which all pages internally are
linking to this page. Again, this is very important because if a website
is well linked, Ghoul can easily call it
the going back to links, the top linking sites. So this is again
extremely important because given
Google's algorithm, if important web sites are
linking back to your website, that means that Google
will place them high on search rank. And finally, something which is often overlooked
is the anchor text. But Google really considers it important that what is the
anchor text when people are linking to your website
and other relevant to the content on
your website or not. Because the other anchor
text that really influenced what search terms and search
queries website show up for. So again, if you have higher SQ form or you're actively doing search
engine optimization. This is a report
that it should track on a regular basis to see. Are you getting external links? Are you getting links
from important websites? Because if it's all websites, then it can actually harm you. And are they using the right anchor text to this can really be used to get an audit of
your search engine strategy.
12. A Request and Thank You: With that, thank
you everybody for taking the time to go
to the course with me. I thoroughly enjoyed recording these videos and
sharing with the group. And I have a request to make. If you like the course, please leave a positive review and let others know because that will really help them
discover the material. And of course,
equally importantly, if you have any questions
ask in the discussion forum, I'm very responsive and ensure I get to each
and every question. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Shailendra
