Insights

3 Google Webmaster Tips to Boost SEO

Google Webmaster Tools is an SEO essential, providing you with valuable insights into the way Google sees your site and uses that information to include your site in user search results.

Coupled with Google Analytics, which provides data on who is visiting your site and what they’re doing while they’re there, Google Webmaster Tools completes the data picture helping you understand how users are finding your site on the first place and whether or not your search listings are bringing users to your site.

iFactory is a full service digital agency with expertise in Search Engine Optimisation as part of our Digital Marketing services. We can carry out competitive SEO analysis for your organisation and develop an effective strategy to improve your SEO outcomes. Call us today on 07 3844 0577 or drop us a note to have chat about how we could help you.

1. Ensure your pages are ranking

When you search for something on the internet, the results you get are not technically everything that is available on the web but rather everything that your chosen search engine has been able to index.

To index pages, search engines need to crawl your site. If search engines can’t crawl your pages, they can’t index them so one of the first things to do inside Google Webmaster Tools is check for possible crawl problems.

The Crawl Errors function lets you know all the pages Google was unable to crawl and why.

Next steps:

  • Review and repair crawl errors returned by Google Webmaster Tools (the most important URLs with errors will be listed first). You may also find the Fetch as Google and HTML Improvements tools useful for troubleshooting problems with your pages.

2. Improve your search listing

The HTML Improvements page helps you identify issues that could be affecting your page rankings like problems with your Title, meta-description and non-indexable content.

Ensuring these things are optimised for search could have a positive impact on your page rank and help to target the right site visitors.

Next steps:

  • Regularly check the HTML Improvements page and work to resolve any issues Google found when crawling and indexing your site.
  • Check your title and meta description and make sure your content includes your target keywords / queries

3. Drive more traffic to your site

The Search Queries features inside Google Webmaster Tools is a goldmine for SEO. Here you can see how well your pages are performing at the search level, or not.

In Search Queries you can analyse:

  • Queries –  the precise search terms that returned pages from your site in search results;
  • Query List – the top 2000 searches (queries) that returned a page from your site in the results;
  • Impressions – the number of times your website pages have be returned in search results;
  • Clicks – the number of times people have clicked on your search listings; and
  • Average position – where your pages generally appear in search results for each query.

Sorting queries by clicks allows you to see the actual Google queries that bring the most traffic to your site. From here you can easily determine if Google has the right idea about who you are and what your site is about.

Next steps:

  • Review your Search Query data
  • Revisit your page content, title and meta descriptions and edit to target the queries you want
  • Revisit your content to improve clicks

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