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Google Search Console Tutorial
Better rankings and more traffic for your online store
In this Google Search Console tutorial, we’ll show you how to connect the console to your online store. We’ll also go through step by step what data Google Search Console gives you, what it means and what consequences you can draw from it.
What is the Google Search Console ?
How many internal links your website or online store has, how many backlinks refer to it and how many store pages have been indexed, all this is important for how your store ranks, i.e. how well you can be found in the search engines. You can expand your visibility only when you have a status quo, i.e. you know how well the store is performing. Only then can action be taken to boost your rankings. A tool that monitors the whole thing is the Google Search Console.
Google Search Console Tutorial - What do you need for setup?
Let’s check in advance what you need for this. You logically need a store or a website, as well as a Google account. If both are available, we can start. Just type“Google Search Console” in Google Search and click on the first organic result. As a complete beginner, click “Start Now” and then you need to enter your store URL in the right pane and click “Next”.
Validate your property
Now you will see the console layout you may already be familiar with, but that is of no use to you yet. You still have to validate your domain, i.e. confirm that you are the store or site owner. There are several methods available to you for this. Firstly, a particular file can be downloaded here and can then be uploaded to your server using FTP client. After that you would click on Confirm there. We will perform the second method in a moment. For the third one, you should already be using Google Analytics. That means the snippet anayltics.j s or gtag.js would already be on your home page. The same is the case for Google Tag Manager. Lastly, you could also link your DNS record.
An example of how to confirm your ownership of the store
The easiest method is to place an HTML tag in the code of your store. We will demonstrate this using a Shopify store as an example. To do this, go to the themes settings and click on “Edit code”. Select the theme.liquid and paste the code you just copied from the consple here under the <body> tag. Then save and confirm in Search Console. Then your property should be finally set up and your data should be submitted.
If you would like to see this demonstrated in more detail and also learn how to submit the sitemap to the Console, the Shopify Sitemap Blog is available here.
Google Search Console Tutorial - The Overview Dashboard
Let’s take a detailed look at what the console can do. In the overview area you will see a dashboard that provides you with three diagrams. The performance chart will show you how many clicks your store has generated in a certain period of time. Below that, the coverage announces how many valid pages are in the index and how many existing pages had problems. Improvements are then illustrated in the final diagram. This could include e.g. user-friendliness on mobile devices count. So if you don’t build your store pages responsive. Then this could be denounced by Google, which of course may well cost you rankings.
The Google Search Console Performance Report
In addition to the general dashboard, you can view a detailed performance report. This can be filtered depending on the media type. So web posts, images or video posts or news. Of course, the time period is another filter factor. Thus, this display would show you the clicks, impressions, then the relative value of the impressions that led to a click (CTR) and the position on Google. You can then look at it in detail below. So what was searched for on Google, what is defined with the search query. Then, for each individual keyword, we have also broken down again these four parameters just described. So then for every single keyword that we want to target, we could get statistics here. This would allow to notice changes and thus to elicit whether the marketing measures were successful. This means that you can then also look at the graph for a single keyword by clicking on the search term.
Google Search Console Tutorial - The Detail View
The analysis data does not necessarily have to be related to the search queries, but can also, for example, be based on the search results. also be related to store pages, i.e. categories or products. Furthermore, there is a country-specific breakdown, a subdivision into mobile and desktop, as well as a representation of the time periods, i.e. how your store performed on which day. This can potentially be useful for looking at how much more traffic came from a discount promotion on Black Friday. The next point is the URL verification. That means you can now take a store page, copy it, paste it here and it will be analyzed. What we can read from this is that the page was indexed but there seems to be problems. As a side tip, if you want to check if your site has already been indexed, go to Google and enter “site: your-URL” in the search leisete.
As we can see in our case, this is played out in the SERPs. But what are the problems now. We click on products and see 9 warnings. It is missing the SKU, the description, the manufacturer and so on. This can and should be fixed by you in the store.
View and analyze indexed pages
What we could already see as a second diagram in the overview dashboard can now also be viewed in detail. It makes no difference whether you click on Open Report or go to Coverage via the sidebar.
Anyway, here you will see the number of valid indexed pages, the number of existing but excluded pages, as well as the number of problematic pages. That is, these were indexed, but there are problems and the number of erroneous pages, that is, those that should be indexed, but were not. Once again, these can be examined in detail. We only want to say a few words about the sitemap, because you have linked the detail video here. The sitemap is in any case a file – often in xml format with a page overview, which lists all pages of your store hierarchically and thus also considers the subpages. This can then be submitted here so that the Google bot knows what to crawl.
Remove crawled pages and Core Web Vitals
You can use the “Remove” section to request which already crawled pages should be removed from the index. Then you have the area for improvements. Unfortunately, we do not have any data for this at present. What we could do now is to check our PageSpeed. This is one of the Core Web Vitals parameters that determine your visibility on Google. The other two parameters are interaction and stability. Overall, the Core Web Vitals are something like KPIs for the user experience. As you can see, these are then displayed separately for mobile and desktop.
In the Security and Manual Actions section you can see if there are any security issues on your site. This can be e.g. your property should only have“http” instead of“https“. Then that would possibly be noted in this area.
Google Search Console Tutorial - Manual Measures and Security Flaws
However, if there were any major security deficiencies, this would be checked manually by a Google employee and then noted under “Manual measures”. So if there is duplicate content on your site or if you deliberately want to deceive someone with the content of this site, you would not be penalized, but these links would be however, be invalidated by Google. This means that they simply no longer appear in the index. If that is the case, it would be noted here. Finally, we have the link area, the area for internal links and backlinks, which is the most important for SEOs. Here you can see the division into external links and internal links. That means on the right side we have the most linked pages within your website. This can be e.g. be a landing page that is included as a link in a blog. On the left side we have the external links. So once pages within your store, which are linked via external pages. Then links from outside your store that point to your store, i.e. backlinks and as last link text on external pages that point to your property.
Search engine optimization with eBakery
In the settings you can then view the confirmation of ownership of this property, as well as add users. This can be useful if you want to work with an SEO agency and should give them access. Then a new user would be added here by entering the email address of this agency.
That was a summary of the most important information from Google Search Console. I hope this gave you an insight into what stands for what, so that you can at least analyze and evaluate your store performance. From this, a strategy can be developed with the help of SEO experts, be it on-page optimization, a backlink strategy, a social media marketing strategy, influencer marketing strategy or, or, or. There are many, many approaches that vary from store to store and from industry to industry. If you are interested in bringing your store to the top of the SERPs, please contact the SEO specialists at eBakery.
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