Using Google Search Console Like A Pro

  📍 There are a wealth of tools available to anyone who wants to improve the visibility of their website on Google. But one tool that’s often overlooked by business owners is Google Search Console. Not only does it provide a ton of useful data straight from the horse’s mouth, it’s also free.

Which is why I’m so pleased to be joined by Dan White, an independent SEO consultant to explain how you can use Google Search Console to improve your SEO strategy, enhance your website’s performance, and ultimately drive more organic traffic to your site. Dan, welcome to the podcast. Hey, good afternoon.

Great to see you. Thank you for joining. Dan, it’d be helpful for everyone if you could give a bit of an introduction to who you are, what it is that you do, and a bit of background about your career. Yeah, of course. So I scarily have now been in the marketing world for 14 years And across that I have been freelance, I’ve been agency side, I’ve been client side.

Right now I am very much team freelance and have been self employed now for seven of those 14 years. I started off doing everything in the world of marketing that you be thrown at and have gradually over the years gone by more and more focused onto the world of SEO specifically within that property more on site technical and content marketing as a umbrella for SEO rather than the real technical stuff or the world of link building and off site.

Absolutely love it. Work with a whole range of clients all across the UK and Europe, completely remotely. And alongside that, I also have a, what started out as a side project, but is now fully formed business in its own right, something called the DMU. The DMU stands for the Digital Marketing Union, whereby it is essentially a People describe it as a safe, space as it were.

So it’s an online community of some of the very best freelancers, independents, and solo consultants. it’s been hugely beneficial just for me to have a group and network to join, and hopefully they enjoy it too. And that’s how we know one another. Yes, exactly. You somehow discovered it through the world of SEO.

I was referred to it from, someone who I used to employ as a freelancer when I was working client side, Kyle. who’s obviously a member of the DMU as well, and he specializes in Google Analytics. He’s very, good at it. yeah, it’s an amazing community. It’s deliberately small. so there’s no more normally than about a hundred members, from all around the world, lots of expertise, but it was quite nice setting it up because As you may have found this in your early days of self employment, compared to agency life especially, freelancing can be very lonely.

Partly because you’re just sitting in a home office, but also partly when you’ve got questions that you just need validating or you want someone to check something. And that’s why I ended up setting it up. However, there are a ton of freelance groups, communities, and all sorts out there, but what has really nicely differentiated us is that most of them will fall on the spectrum of being early stage freelancers.

So it’s like year one, year two, easy questions that everyone has. most of the people in the DMU are six or seven years into the world of self employment. or if not, they’ve got six or seven years marketing experience behind them. So the questions that get asked and the things we talk about are a bit more.

I don’t want to say advanced in a horrible sense, but those kind of really niche questions where you’re not just going to be able to find a blog post about what pricing, how much you should price per hour, or like service, that kind of thing. And also, my experience of when I’ve posed a question to the members on the Slack channel, about an area, like a domain expertise area, you get responses really quickly from people who live and breathe that particular specialism day in, day out.

And it’s just invaluable. The advice that I’ve received from people has just been so great and so helpful. Even down to the point of just giving me the confidence to do something that I probably in my heart of hearts have known is right, but you just need a third party to validate it.

And there’s lots of little people prodding you as you go along and collect for it builds up to action. And yeah, that’s really nice to hear as well. Yeah. the other thing I’ve absolutely loved about the DMU is everyone has a bad day sometimes. Yeah. And you can go on there and have a little rant and people just support you.

They’ve all been through it We have a rants channel. Yeah For this very reason, because again, there’s very few people you can talk to whether it’s a Partner parents as well that they just don’t they might be able to listen, but they don’t get it Yeah, when it comes to the specifics of normally client stuff Yeah, and freelancing is unique when I first started I’d moved straight from working client side and I’d worked I don’t want to over egg it but I’d got to a sort of Reasonably senior level so direct to level in a mid sized company So I had a team of people and it was at least a couple of weeks and probably longer my knee jerk reaction Whenever anything needed to happen.

I needed to do something was I just get down to do that No more no, that’s gonna be you david. Yeah, it’s you do have to be the You have to do everything as it were certainly at first until you can work out what you can potentially outsource to other people Involve enough people when it comes to a specific area of expertise.

But, yeah, if you had to pick between agency side, client side, self employment, it’s not easy by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s definitely preferable out of the, the three. Was there, anything in particular that led to you, deciding to leave agency life and work independently?

yeah, there was two things, a bit of a push and a pull factor, really. the pull factor was that a number of other friends had also gone freelance in the year before. And you obviously hear firsthand about their experiences both good and bad, but you look at it and go, okay You’ve got more flexibility There was certainly more money that they were making at the time as well and getting to work on the client work that you wanted to work on The push of that sort of unintentionally was that the way the agency that I worked for was constructed With whereby you do the work, but you also do the account management as well And it was great from an experience perspective because you get the full suite of servicing a client.

However, you also then get to the point of realizing that you’re essentially running that client. And then you start to think, hang on, if I can run this client, maybe so just do it myself. Yes. Yeah. I found something similar. So some of the work that I have picked up working independently has been other, it’s marketing agencies who either don’t have the capacity or they don’t have the expertise to do say digital marketing.

and Nope. My way and having, having been CC’d on a few emails that maybe I shouldn’t have been seen how much I’m being charged out at, with the agency, adding zero value other than it’s their client is eye watering. It’s yeah, it’s a weird world. And it’s one of those things where, as I’m sure we’ll come onto this, it depends a lot.

And there are massive advantages to work in agencies that for both freelancers and clients directly. and it’s also to their credit, the agencies that built up the brand reputation in order to win those clients in the first place. because a lot of the clients that I work with now, the agency I work with wouldn’t touch, and I probably couldn’t win individually the same clients they’re working with.

So there are advantages and disadvantages to it, but at the same time, it’s that flex. And this was also, I went self employed before, way before the pandemic and so on, and suddenly to have the flexibility of being location independent. and working on your own terms in terms of time on the average day that particularly in the pandemic and even in more recent years has been an absolute bonus when it comes to dealing with whatever life throws at you.

Yeah, and we were just chatting before we started recording about how you’ve spent the last three months working in Germany. It’s provided you a bit of flexibility there as well to go and see the world and experience life in other countries. It’s been fantastic and I think if it was, let’s say, somewhere Out in asia, maybe the time zone would have created a bit of friction and then clients But essentially I have a laptop and an internet connection and there has been absolutely no difficulties or even worries or concerns from clients I imagine your clients maybe even don’t even realize most of the time aside from the background changing on the zoom calls that Yeah, absolutely nothing And something I noticed on your website dan was that you emphasize when clients are working with You That it is solely you that does the work.

I know a lot of people don’t operate in that way and they will outsource a lot of the, a lot of the doing. maybe a bit like an agency, to other people. it’d be interesting just to, to understand from you as to, to why you feel that’s so valuable. It came about from a few different reasons really.

That, I am the brand, as it were, in that when people are looking for an SEO service, they are hiring a person. It’s not a product, or a tool, or a course. It’s, hey, we want you for your expertise and, deliverability of, either work or advice. So when it comes to it, and again, partly from an agency perspective, but partly just from where the SEO industry is at large, There are so many instances where someone will hire an SEO service and it will be either outsourced to known people who either will potentially, and there’s a lot of it depends in this, lack the technical knowledge of how to do it, or the ability to communicate it, or it will go one step further and whatever work that is delivered to you is outsourced on Fiverr.

automated through a link building tool, something’s run up through AI and in and of itself, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But the fact is, that is not mentioned. So partly as a point of differentiation in order to sell myself, it’s a case of okay, when you hire me, this is the person that’s going to be talking to you on calls.

This is the person that’s going to be doing the work. This is the person that’s going to be actually understanding your business rather than almost a little bit what like you said there when it comes to the agency model, Pay me a premium fee for it and it’s some junior executive who is actually doing the work Again, sometimes that can work depending on the size and scale and objectives of a website But at the end of the day, I work with typically quite big clients with quite big websites quite big budgets And they’re happy to pay because they want to get the results and if that’s just all being I’m the wrapper, as it were, for a product or service, which actually is not the thing you’re selling.

Then that’s where it just, my view, creates complications and tarnishes the SEO industry a little bit in time. I think as well, for the outcome in a lot of instances, it’s having a single point of contact who’s responsible for the whole process. and knows it. It’s not an account manager who’s then that single point of contact, but they’re just finding other people to do work and manage that process.

It’s, easy to make it more coherent and therefore more effective. Definitely. it just makes the process easier. and again, I should sort of caveat with this, with the fact that. If you’re working on a multi channel campaign, for example, you are going to need to involve more people if you’re working on an enterprise level website It’s going to need more one person can’t do absolutely everything exactly but like you say it’s just that knowledge the knowledge you have of the client the way they work the industry the market All of that sort of feeds in to as much as doing the seo And then being able to communicate it back in a way, which hopefully makes sense to the client Even if they’re not All that familiar with, in this instance, like what an area of SEO is, because they’ve just got the confidence that person is doing it and doing a good job.

Yeah. look, thank you for that introduction, Dan. The topic I want to dive into is using Google Search Console, and the reports available in it to improve your SEO and inform your marketing strategy. For anyone who’s not familiar with Google Search Console, can you give a bit of an overview as to what it is and how you can use it?

Yeah, of course. So Google Search Console, originally you might have ever heard it as Google Webmaster Tools until it reoriented a couple of years ago, is essentially if you’re in a car, it’s your car’s dashboard and that is it for this website. So as you mentioned earlier, it’s completely free. All the information is there.

It’s accessible and it will show you Google’s almost live interpretation of exactly how your website is performing in Google. So it’s not performing overall. It’s literally how Google is finding, crawling, indexing your website. So you’ve got a lot better idea of actually in reality, how things are going.

It will give you all the information. The only downside with it is that it will not tell you how to solve any issues. So in the typical like car dashboard function, if the red light comes on, you go, okay, there’s a red light, but What does this actually mean? And that’s where I come in. Brilliant. So let’s say you take on a new SEO client.

What are the things that you start off with when you’re looking at Google search console? So immediately, and this is with the caveat that this is a preexisting website, it’s not just broadly launched. So first of all, look at kind of the search appearance. So you’ll get a big graph, it will have clicks and it will have impressions.

And it’s okay, what is this graph doing? you can backdate it up to 16 months and over there, over that, you can then start to build up a bit of a trend, i. e. it, on the, it sounds very simple, but is it going up or is it going down? What are the weekly and monthly fluctuations? Is there a seasonality to it as well?

Again, you’d expect if it gets, if you have a Christmas related product, does it spike in December and then drop into January? And what is that graph looking like over time? I guess in a, alongside that, you’d know from the client beforehand, whether or not what SEO, if any, they’ve done before. Whether that’s in house or they’ve hired an agency.

And you’d be matching that knowledge and what they’ve explained to that graph as well If and i’ve had this before in the past Oh, we’ve spent x thousand a month with an seo agency and you go, but the graph hasn’t moved. Yeah, why? Where exactly so it’s a case of that. the next area which is always the port of call is the errors section as it were.

I feel again that should be caveated because some of the errors are errors. So you’d be looking at kind of a page index report. And within there, what you’ll also start to see is, okay, previously we looked at the results of, say results, what Google is giving clicks and impressions for. It then burrows down a bit deeper and goes, okay, you have another graph.

What is red? What is green? And you go, oh, there’s a lot of gray as well in there as well. Why are those pages having an issue in whatever shape or form? Sometimes that can be really clear cut. Other times it can be a lot more elusive and you have to really dig into the data to go, it’s that a bit of that issue and a bit of that issue that might be combined.

but normally that’s the kind of, the two starting places at least to check On a scale of one to ten how horrific is this website? As it were and then we go, okay, Let’s just get the lay of the land and then see what we go Is the roof on fire or actually are we okay? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I think, the thing you mentioned about the, performance data, I find really valuable. Google search console provides some really useful filters in there. So you get initially before you apply any filters, you just get the entire view of the world and the traffic that’s coming in, but you can start applying country level filters.

I think device level filters are in their keyword level filters as well. And it’s so, helpful just to be able to see, okay. What number of impressions are we getting for these different keywords from this location? How many of that, those impressions are turning into clicks? I think an impression count says you’re somewhere in the top 100 results.

so you might be getting loads and loads of impressions, but no clicks, but it’s a starting point to go with at least Google. We’re on Google’s radar somewhere. Perhaps we could drive a bit more effort and traffic because of that. So when it comes to reporting with clients, ultimately the idea is you’re reporting on revenue or leads depending on the website in question, but you, if you let’s say had just launched into SEO investment, it is going to be months, maybe years before that takes place.

So the, particularly the impressions are like your first early warning indicator that something is going on. You build that up, that translates into clicks, the clicks, traffic, conversions. So it’s all important. And as you say, you can carve it up in a lot of weird and wonderful ways. very top level for everything.

or as you say that within that, I should have said as well, the page report, it will actually give you a list of the most popular URLs, on your website. And that’s also quite eyeopening as to what is or isn’t ranking depending on what the client wants. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing that I find really valuable is you can use the performance data.

to uncover opportunities that perhaps most other people aren’t aware of. I’m thinking if I’m using data from Google ads or SEMrush, which I think probably uses the same data from Google ads anyway, about the number of searches for a particular keyword each month, it’s at best a rough estimate based on historic data.

Whereas actually if full well that if Google search console is telling you, you’ve got a thousand impressions for this particular keyword, SEMrush might be telling you it gets 50 searches a month, but you’ve got the real data that’s live in that moment that probably most people have missed.

And you know that’s an opportunity that you can then capitalize on. Yeah, exactly. We’ve been doing this for a client, over the last couple of years on a small scale content marketing. Picked off from Google Keyword Planner data. Oh, it’s either got a search, number of searches month 10 or zero.

Okay. it’s a niche topic, but it’s super relevant. So let’s go for it. The number of clicks you’re then getting per month. They’re not bad. Not ten, or certainly more than zero. so it’s everything but with a bit of a pinch of salt. But yeah, it’s, both super useful and then just starts to confuse you because everything is a bit of a mismatch between, what one data source says and what another data source says.

and when it comes to performance management, thankfully I haven’t had to see anything, in recent memory, but maybe going back to the, mid 20, I don’t know, 2014, 2015 ish time period, manual penalties and disavowing links. That’s, that’s available through GSE as well, isn’t it? Yes. so from a manual penalty perspective, aside from a very recent blip that I saw on Twitter, It’s, I wouldn’t say it’s not a thing, as in, there’s still an option in there which will say you have a manual penalty.

however, the chances of that happening, I think in my entire career, I’ve experienced it once, and that was a result of a website hack, that took place. I think if you had a business critical website and you had a manual pen, so that’s not something to Google and then read a blog post about that.

So just find an SEO consultant and yeah, let them dig into it. The, disavowal tool, now that is a different kettle of fish. if you have a look on Twitter or you have a look on various blog articles in the recent years, there is a lot of back and forth as to, first of all, should it still be there or should it not?

How effective is it should you want to use it? so sorry We should probably backtrack that the disavow tool Is essentially a how would you describe it? You have links coming in from other websites and some of those links are good and some of those links are bad and when I say bad that is you’ve been caught up in some kind of link building scheme or you just ended up on a lot of really weird directories It might be very old school SEO tactics that you shouldn’t be, no way should be using anymore.

There’s a variety of reasons, but, if suddenly you have an influx of bad websites coming into you, that can negatively affect your ranking on Google. What the disavow tool does is you can add those websites to it, and it says, hey, we’re getting links in from these, cancel any effect out of them. So it essentially blocks their impact.

At this point in time, the, on the one hand, the debate is Google is smart enough to know what these websites are and to cancel it out automatically. In my personal view, it’s it still exists. So if it’s a tool which Google is still running, then there must be some benefit to it. As in, if Google’s algorithms were that smart and they didn’t need it, then they’d make it redundant.

So I occasionally use it, but use it very sparingly. And actually in the instances just mentioned in the, over the last couple of years, they’re not website hacks, but whereby suddenly a client’s website just starts appearing across 100, 200, 300 really spammy things. And at that moment, it’s a case of, okay, just as a preventative, we want to add these websites in.

We’ll assume Google is taking care of it. But whilst the Addis Affair tool exists,