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The Digital Marketing Podcast
Google Search Console. Re-discovered
00:19:03
Daniel and Ciaran take a fresh look at the service formerly known as Google Webmaster tools. Now rebadged up as Google Search Console, this free tool from Google is one to take a fresh look at if you haven't recently. We walk through some of the new...
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com hello, and welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast. My name is Kieran Rogers.
- [00:18]
B
And I'm Daniel Rolls.
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A
And today, Daniel, we're going to be talking about the service formerly known as Webmaster Tools, which is now called Google Search Console.
- [00:28]
B
Yes, a Google Search Console. We've been doing a fair bit of work with this recently. We've been creating some kind of interactive learning for this, but actually it's one of those platforms that if you don't revisit it from time to time, you'd be amazed how much has changed. Now, if you're not familiar with it, Search Console is a tool from Google and as Kieran said, used to be called Webmaster Tools, and they changed the name for no particular reason. And it essentially allows you to keep an eye on various things around search. So, for example, are the search engine spiders that read your website able to access your website? Okay, are there any problems? They go through and look at a load of other things that we're going to tell you about. But to get it set up in the first place, you need to prove that you own your website. So you go in, you put your website in, and it will say, prove that you own this website. And it will give you some different options for doing that. Once you've proved that you own the website, it then gives you the kind of data that you can then go through and interrogate and find out a little bit more about. Now, one thing I became aware of, and just as a kind of setup, it will see your HTTP and your HTTPs as two separate websites. So if you move from one to the other, as we did, so just as a rule of thumb, having a secure HTTPs is better from a search point of view. It makes you a bit more of a trusted kind of source of data. For Google's point of view, your old setup of Search Console won't be getting any data anymore. So when you'd move to HTTPs, you need to go through and make sure you set yourself up in Search Console again to get that data through. Now, we'll talk about this in a moment, but actually, analytics, you can pull a lot of the data from Search Console into Google Analytics, particularly in reference to web traffic and how many people are visiting from Google through to your website. And we had a bit of a panic attack with this because we moved to HTTPs and suddenly analytics would tell us we'd lost all of our search traffic. And we thought, oh, no, what have we done? We've done something stupid and actually it was just the fact that Search Console wasn't connected to the secure version of our website. So look out for that one. So, Kieran, why don't you take us through a couple of the reports that you found have been super useful.
- [02:28]
A
Yeah, so I've been going through this all in great detail and I have to say I've actually been working on this over the last couple of months. They keep on adding things and moving things around. So thanks, Google. You've made my journey that much more interesting and I think as a result I've learned a bit more as well, which is always, always good. Keeps me on my toes. So first of all, have a look in the search appearance menu. There are some really good things in there. But I'm particularly enamoured with the data highlighter, which if you haven't played with it before, you may have heard of something called Schema Markup. Now, what schema is, is an additional markup you can add to your HTML pages, which helps search engines to understand various different objects that you might have, like dates or events or particular types of content like video or articles. There's a whole, whole bunch of different attributes that you can mark up your content with. And doing it's well worth doing because actually what it does is it helps the search engines to understand what your site content is all about. And as a result they can choose to give you sort of enhanced listings and information within the search engine result pages. So definitely an interesting one. If you haven't looked@schema.org that's s c h e m a dot org, you can go and find out more about it there. But not all of us are code monkeys, Daniel. That's very true, myself included. And so there's a lovely little tool called Data Highlighter. It's been in there a while. And what this enables you to do is to go through a couple of your pages. It's nice. What you see is what you get interface, you get to punch in a few web addresses of pages you're particularly proud of or that follow a particular type of format that's common on your website. And what it enables you to do is go through and literally tell Google, well, this bit here on the page within the template, that's the title. This bit here, that's the date that it was published. And this bit here, that's the author. And in this way you're actually able to, through the data highlighter, go through. I had a go on Target Internet. We went through probably about 10 different pages, just marking them up with various different variants of the page that Google was finding. And actually having done that for 10 pages, which is an enormous amount of fun, I greatly enjoy. It's kind of a coffee break thing. You can, you can do it. Then went through and found 170 plus similar pages that it, it could mark up with the correct schema markup. And no coding was required, no keyboards were killed in the whole process. It was really, really good. So definitely check that out. It's fun. You can do individual pages or you can set it to find groups of pages like we did.
- [05:09]
B
I think it's really important because as the web gets bigger and bigger, Google is obviously it's going to be harder and harder to filter all the content out there. So when you've got things like recipes or you've got events or you've got articles or anything else like that, you can just highlight what's what within the content and it's just making it easier for Google to understand your content as well. Now another feature under that search appearance menu I think is a really important one which is AMP accelerated Mobile pages. So why don't you tell us a bit about that, Kieran?
- [05:37]
A
All right, so amp you hear it refer to AMP or amp but it stands for accelerated mobile pages. And this is another form of additional markup as I understand it. Again, this is for a non technical person's view of it because I am a non technical person largely. But it's open source initiative that enables web pages designed for, you know, larger and more powerful, more robust Internet connections to serve other devices that aren't so marvelous and powerful with their Internet connection. So basically it makes pages load a lot faster on mobile devices. And who doesn't love that, right when you're on a mobile device? We've all been there and had the slow experience and it really does make an enormous difference on mobile devices, particularly over slow, slow networks. And I think with Google's, you know, continuing focus on mobile first and mobile devices, as more and more people just consume more and more Internet through their mobile devices, this is going to become a really key technology. We've already seen, you know, Google start to make changes and adjustments to the search engine results pages and favoring content that's been particularly optimized for mobile. Although there's no evidence out there yet that amp pages have that effect, I think it's probably only a matter of time before, you know, amp as a technology starts working its way into the Google search engine results pages as A distinct advantage. There's definitely, definitely a lot of interest in it. And this tool enables you to find any of the markup that you've got on your website, if you have any, and start problem solving it. Should Google be finding any problems with, with understanding what's what and what's where?
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B
Just to give a bit of a background how this really started off is if you're for example reading a blog post on your mobile device, you might not really care about all the graphics around it and you might not care about the other kind of bits of JavaScript and all the other funky stuff within the page. So where this really started was allowing you to pull out what is the core content on the page and then deliver that in a format that's super optimized so it loads super quickly, which kind of makes sense. So I think it's a really interesting one. They've adopted it and they seem to be pushing it harder and harder as well. So I think is worth looking at now from the search appearance results you then get into the search traffic reports as well. There's a number of in here that allow you to look at things like where are you actually targeting your pages internationally? Mobile usability. So the mobile friendly test is linked to from here as well. But I think a couple of things that are really important is the links to your site report. So just want to explain to us what that's all about.
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A
Yeah, so basically if you want to get a top level view of who links most to your content or your most linked to content, you can go into the links to your site report and get an overview of that. So if you go into it, you'll see the total number of links Google is seeing in its index. Who links most gives you like the top five or so that it can see together with a count of the number of links. So I can see for Target Internet. Daniel, we have 423 links from Yahoo.com.
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B
Yeah, I was quite amazed by that as well.
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A
Lot of Yahoo love there to investigate that. You can also see underneath that how your data is linked. So you know what, what words typically within your website are being used to hyperlink and cross reference various content within your site. I think that's quite useful as well. And also looking at your most linked content. So for target Internet the about us page is linked to from just about everywhere. They're really, really good. And if you click on the more links you get more than the top five. I think for who links most we get sort of around the first couple of hundred or so, which is really, really good. And then again you can drill down and get individual information on those links by sub clicking through. So definitely a good one to look at. What I would stress is that it's very much an overview, so not necessarily getting every single link from this tool, although it does give you a good count of them in the top. It just gives you like a sample of the typical links that, that you're getting. Nobody to dig in, but still, still very useful.
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B
Yeah. One thing we found with this is that we're publishing lots of content all the time. And if you go into the links to your website, most linked content and then you, you sort it by source domains, which basically says, show me the content that's got the most external websites linking through to this content. When I look through this, our homepage, targetinternet.com has got the most, but then from there the podcast has then got 56 other websites linking through to it. And I can see my bits of content that are basically working. So our SEO tools report is working. We've got our digital marketing toolkit. This is really great because you can go in and start to say, yes, which bits of our content is the kind of content that attracts links and therefore I should do more of that kind of stuff because obviously the more links you're getting, the more you're actually going to see yourself driving up the search engines as well. So it's a good indicator of content quality and how it's grabbing people's attention as well. So let's go from the search traffic reports, my favorite one actually in here is under the Google index, which is the next set of reports, and there's one that says content keywords. And the content keywords is just a list of words that Google thinks your website is about. And as standard, it shows you the first 20 and you can see more. But let me give you a bit of an example of this. So we went in here and after doing some keyword research within the Google Keyword Planner, we realized that people were searching a lot for digital marketing courses. And courses was not a word we really factored into our content anywhere. We talked about training, we talked about elearning, but we didn't really talk about online courses. So I made a decision and went, okay, we've got splattered all over our homepage, the word digital marketing elearning. And having done some research, we worked out there's about 30 people on the entire planet that will ever search the word digital marketing elearning. A month. So you thought that's not really great. So we've changed it to online digital marketing courses. Now the reason being is most people don't know what elearning is, let alone the fact they might want it, whereas they do search for courses. So in this list of content keywords, the words that Google feels are significant about our website, the word courses was nowhere to be seen. We then changed our on page optimization. So we rearranged the words and our pages and our titles and our headings and those sorts of things. And now the word courses is at number five in this list, which means Google realizes that we are relevant to our digital marketing courses. It doesn't mean we're instantly going to get rankings for that word, but it just means that Google understands what the website is about a little more as well. So you can look at this list of keywords to understand what Google thinks your website is all about. And if you're not getting your on page optimization right, this might not be really that reflective of what your content is all about. So it's definitely worth looking at this on a fairly regular basis just to make sure that Google really gets what you're all about as well.
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A
So I'm going to champion one of my favorite reports which is the search analytics report back in search traffic, the first one there. And what I love about this is you can take a look across the board at clicks, impressions, click through rate and position and sort of overlay these kind of four key metrics within the graphs really. And then you've got a number of different angles that you can look at it. So you look at it from a perspective of queries or from a perspective of pages or countries or devices or search type and you get to see some really, really valuable data. And to my mind it's the only reliable place where you can get, you know, an average position for how you re rank for certain queries. I say average. It will obviously vary from user to user depending on their preferences, but Google are still sharing that average. And for me this sort of fills in a big part of the gap that was left open from Google's removal of logged in users, search queries and data within Google Analytics. Yeah, really, really, really useful report.
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B
It is great. And what you can also do if you have got Google Analytics within the search reports now, the acquisition reports that tell you where you're getting your traffic from, there is one now that says search console and when you go in there it will say you can link up your Google search console to your Google Analytics, you go for a few steps and a lot of this data is then pulled into Google Analytics. So you don't need to log into the two separate tools necessarily all the time. But it does tell you things like what people are searching on different devices, which has been missing for ages in terms of that data. So there's some great insights into what people are searching for, how your position's going up and down, how that tracks against how much visibility you've got and everything else. So I think you're absolutely right. It is a fantastic report. One of the last reports to mention is there's a couple of them, but security issues is one that hopefully you won't have to look at. But security will tell you, does Google think your website has been hacked or anything else? Because if they think there's any malware or hacking on your website, they will generally remove you from the Google Index or at least put a big warning all over your website saying, we think this website's been hacked. And that will obviously be a disaster from a business point of view. So keep an eye on the security issues. The other one is on the dashboard. It will tell you any new and important issues. So for example, it will go through and say, are there pages in your website that seem to be missing? So we had a reasonable increase in 404s, pages not found, and we've got 112 404s at the moment. And what's happened is that we changed some of the structure of our website and we removed some content and Google has come back and says, well, this doesn't exist anymore. Where is it? So we need to go back and just make sure that Google is understanding that because these are the kind of signals to Google that can indicate your website is not of the highest quality, it might think it's not being maintained. It's not going to be a great user experience. So the dashboard will give you any new and important news. And actually, if they think you're doing any black hat, if you're doing any dubious SEO practices, they will actually tell you in here now and they'll give you a bit of a warning. So definitely worth looking at.
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A
There's a couple of things I want to add to this because coming from the agency world, I've seen a number of people get caught out by the security issues. The first thing is you really don't ever want to have any security issues crop up when they do, as Daniel said, alert you. But a lot of people maybe haven't logged into their webmaster tools account for a long time and if you've not got it set up with you as having access to it and it's set up to go to somebody who's left the organization, you're not going to get any alerts. And the other thing you do need to do is to go into Search Console preferences and make sure you have ticked the Enable email notifications. Now they do promise you they'll never send you more than one message a month typically, but if you haven't ticked that it's never even going to email you. And the first you'll hear that you've got a problem is when customers search for your brand name, your website comes up in the search results and next to it has this really, really quite disturbing and upsetting note that Google think this site has been hacked. It really won't do your street cred with customers any good whatsoever. And I have had a few people fall foul of that that we've rushed in to help with. And the final thing is that one of the easiest ways of getting your site hacked is if you don't update your content with the latest patches. In particular, I'm talking about WordPress seeing a lot of people fall foul of this and you know, you may have other people if you're a small organization, other people might look after your website. When you log into WordPress it does tell you on the dashboard if any of your things need updating and please don't ignore that. If your web hosting company or your web developers are ignoring that, get onto them because that is the easiest way of getting your site hacked. And when people get in there they can do all sorts of really quite cruel and painful things to try and game Google System and leverage other websites up the rankings and I guarantee it'll push yours right down really, really quick. It's a real devil to get all of the mess out once they've gotten in there. So keep yourself secure, keep yourself updated, make sure you've ticked the email notifications in the console preferences and also make sure you are set up to get those alerts and check it, check it regularly at least once a month, if not more regularly if you can afford the time.
- [18:01]
B
Yeah, absolutely. So get back in Search Console, have a look what's changed there since you went back in. We've got a couple of blog posts on the topic as well. So if you go to targetinternet.com blog you will see a couple of articles on Search Console in there as well. And good luck with improving your SEO efforts.
- [18:23]
A
Thanks for listening to another episode of the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by Target Internet. If you'd like to get more information on the show, get hold of back issues of this podcast, or get details on any of the links we mentioned, please visit our website at www.targetinternet.com. if you've enjoyed the show, we would love to read your feedback. Please rate us in itunes or even better, write us a review. Or if you have any questions, please get in touch. We'd love to Sat.