Using Google Search Console to Get Higher Ranking

Google Search console is a great tool by Google as it allows you to easily see the current status of your website performance and can also be used as a very useful tracker for the general health of your web pages and how Google’s web crawlers are seeing them across devices.

Personally, I like to use Search Console to get new pages indexed quickly and check if all my available pages are properly indexed and rendering correctly for PC and mobile.

Google Search Console can also be great for generally checking performance, in terms of clicks and page impressions, which can be filtered easily for web pages, video or images so you can easily track performance of these elements.

The basic ‘Overview’ page below shows a typical B2B profile of a company receiving traffic and clicks on weekdays and a dip for every Sunday.

The red arrow shows that there are a total of 720 valid pages that have been indexed and that there are zero pages with errors.

Further down the LHS menu is the ‘Coverage’ tab.

This shows the current indexing status for pages, you can see that on this example, Search Console has highlighted an error in red that needs attention.

It’s also well worth checking the pages that have been ‘Excluded’ sometimes this can be intentional, but always worth a check to see why the pages have been excluded and then re-indexing if necessary.

Adding a sitemap to Google Search Console

This feature enables you to manually update your sitemap, so that new content, site changes and content are indexed at the earliest possible point.

You can see on the graphic below that I have added a new sitemap, ‘sitemap.xml’ Search Console will then give a ‘Success’ message when the sitemap has been added.

Sitemaps are usually generated and updated automatically, by programs like WordPress via Yoast SEO, but when you are adding content regularly, it’s a good idea to manually update as per the above.

This will ensure fast indexing so that your optimised content is visible ASAP for Google search queries.

Checking an individual page’s indexing status

The URL inspection tool is great for testing an individual page’s indexing status, and also for getting new pages indexed very quickly.

Simply click on ‘URL Inspection’ on LHS menu, then paste in the URL of your new page in the top search bar as shown. Wait a few minutes for Google to do its checks, then click on the ‘Request Indexing’ button. A further few seconds and Google confirms that your page is in the priority indexing queue.

The ‘Test Live URL button on RHS allows you to test the live website page for any potential errors. You can also see that Google checks the page for mobile usability.

Creating regular, fresh content that has good SEO, then regularly updating sitemap and priority indexing of your new pages means that your page impressions/ clicks, visible in the ‘Performance’ tab in LHS menu, will increase over time.

It’s not a quick fix for your SEO, but adding content in this way means you will be winning the war for organic search results, and bar a bit of hard work in writing content, it’s all free so saves on your Ads spend over time.