As a small business owner, it is essential to have a solid web presence. Your digital storefront is your online calling card, and ensuring your site is designed well and optimized for maximum exposure is integral to people finding (and hiring!) you and your services.
But, as we all know, running a business is time consuming and often expensive. And, some small business owners may cut corners to save a little extra time and money, by standing up a quick-and-easy DIY website to get their business online.
Although this may seem like a good way to go, if you’re feeling a little strapped for cash and time, unfortunately it isn’t. By going this route, your chances of finding success are rather slim. You may have a shot if you’re in a smaller town and you’re one of only a handful of businesses. But, if you’re in a mid-to major market with 250,000 people or more, you’ll be competing with multiple businesses—with stronger web presences. And amplifying your business with a free Wix site, for example, just isn’t going to cut it. You’ll likely get lost under far more successful sites.
That’s where Google Search Console can be a real lifesaver.
What is Google Search Console?
Google Search Console is a free service that can help you and your business monitor and maintain your site’s presence and performance. Focusing on Google search results, this valuable tool can help you troubleshoot–by seeing what’s working well and what’s not.
What does signing up for Google Search Console do for you specifically? It gives you a line of sight into any issues your site may be having, your top pages and keywords, and where your site needs improvement. Email alerts help you easily stay on top of it all, so you can identify and fix these problems quickly.
The following are a few additional examples of what the Console can do for you:
- Confirm that Google can find your website and successfully crawl your content.
- Identify any indexing problems—and fix them or request re-indexing of new and/or updated content.
- See your website’s Google Search traffic data. Including how often your site pops up in Google search, what queries pull up your site pages, and how often people are clicking on those queries and into your site.
- Receive email alerts regarding site issues, to help you identify and fix problems quickly.
- See what other sites are linking to your website and it’s pages.
Why do you need Google Search Console?
If you’re a business owner with a website, Search Console is essential to maximizing your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) potential, so that internet users can successfully find your site.
Plus, the Console can help you better manage your site, review and understand your site analytics, and track your traffic. Having this important visibility into your site’s key analytics, like the four metrics below, can be the difference between making or breaking your site’s successful web performance:
- Impressions: How often your pages surface in Google search results
- Clicks: The number of folks clicking into your site from Google search
- Average CTR: CTR or clickthrough rate measures how many people see your site pop up in search, and then actually click through to your site’s pages.
- Average position: The ranking of your site’s keywords and/or pages on Google search pages
Having access to these tools can help you better identify and fix maintenance problems and server errors, site loading issues, and also help you boost your security.
Google Search Console is indeed a valuable business asset, but unpacking and understanding everything the tool offers can sometimes be complicated.
How can we help you and your business?
Building and maintaining a website that adheres to Google Best Practices and configures to the Google Search Console is a sure-fire way to be successful online. But it is time consuming and can be confusing, too.
Working with a pro, like our team at The Branding Agency, takes the guesswork out of making your site shine. And, having someone in your corner who knows how to monitor and interpret Google Search Console results offers you a huge advantage over competitors that aren’t leverage this tool.
We can help you identify the baseline data your SEO needs to bring site success. And, our affordable SEO packages can quickly launch positive search results. (Many of our clients find the additional traffic they see coming to their site practically pays for the service itself.)
Ready to get started? Contact us to learn more about how we can help you improve your website performance and achieve success by leveraging Google Search Console.
