SEO First Step: Google Search Console

Transcript from Video:

Hi, I’m Geoff from LeapFrog Internet Marketing. This video, in association with SixthSense Marketing, is where do you actually start with SEO. What is your first step? Well, as an SEO agency, this would be a very, very first step with a new website as a client. And this is Google Search Console. So, why would you need Google Search Console? There’s probably five reasons you need Google Search Console. You actually need to tell Google the website exists, we’ll go through this. You need to actually show Google your website content through something called an XML sitemap. It really helps you understand what your rankings are so you can then do something about it and improve those rankings. And it’s Google telling you if there are problems with your website, Google actually wants you to have a good website with a good user experience. And you can also tell Google if you wanna target a particular country like the UK. So, let’s go through those in more detail.

So, first of all, connect and verify. So, to actually connect your website to Google Search Console, you just need to add your website in the top left here. So, go to search.google.com, that sitemap, and click Add a property. And then in URL prefix, just add in the domain you want to add and press Continue. You then need to tell Google that you are actually authorized to take over this property in Google Search Console. And you can do that in two ways. We’d recommend doing it through Google Analytics, but you could also do it especially if you’ve got a WordPress website. If you go into the Yoast plugin in your WordPress site and add in the Google verification code there. The next step is to submit your XML sitemap. So your XML sitemap, you can normally find if you go to your website and then do sitemap.xml. It will take you to your sitemap. Sometimes it redirects you. And then you need to take that URL, copy it, and submit it to the sitemap here. The XML sitemap is one of the first places Google goes to on your website.

It’s basically a list of all the content on your website, which you can see here. This is, for example, the blog. The third reason is actually see your rankings. If you then navigate within Google Search Console, up to…it’s towards the top, search results, you can start to see your rankings over time. This is over the last 28 days. And you’ll be able to see what the keyword is your ranking for, how many clicks you got, how many searches were made in the last 28 days where your website showed up, and more importantly, what your actual ranking was. One to 10 is page 1 of Google. This gives you the power to take further action in terms of your SEO. The fourth reason is to actually find problems. Google will tell you via Google Search Console, not through any other kind of intermediary, if there are problems. If you click on to coverage, it will tell you if there are any technical issues. And it’s good to work through these technical issues with your web developer, whoever built your site to clear these, and that should improve your rankings further.

The final reason is, and this isn’t very well known, you can actually tell Google which of their search engines to target. So, let’s say you’ve got a dotcom website, Google will assume as default that you wanna target the world basically, worldwide. But actually, with a dotcom, you may decide to actually prioritize people searching for you in the UK. So if you scroll down and open up the legacy tools, and then click on international targeting, you can then basically select what country you wanna target, and that should mean you’ll get a 10, 20% increase in your rankings for that target country. So, that’s it, really, five reasons why you should connect Google Search Console and how you go about that.

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Geoff Roy

SEO Director at Leapfrog Internet Marketing

Geoff lives and breathes SEO, and enjoys the challenges of getting client websites on Google page 1. Because the digital marketing world changes so quickly, Geoff enjoys researching and posting about how the latest changes can be leveraged to improve leads and sales.

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SEO First Step: Google Search Console

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