Erika Giles January 21, 2021 Google Search Console is a free and powerful SEO tool that becomes even better when you integrate it with your marketing software. Your integration with Google Search Console makes it easy to adjust your content strategy by providing you with excellent insights into the most important engagements occurring on your site.
Conversions don’t just happen by themselves. Learn how to use Google Search Console to diagnose and fix the problems with your site using data and in-depth analytics.
Let’s review the basics of Google Search Console, describe the many things you can do with it, and walk through how to integrate it with HubSpot.
What Is Google Search Console?
Google Search Console (GSC) is a free platform that offers tools to help website owners monitor their sites and maintain a good presence on search engines. Essentially, GSC helps site owners understand why their site is either performing well or underperforming so they can work on maintaining a good standing with Google.
As you can imagine, this is an essential competitive edge that digital marketers all over the world can benefit from. But you need to know exactly how to use it.
What You Can Do With Google Search Console
Here are a few of the things you can do with Google Search Console to gain insight into your website performance:
Monitor and Troubleshoot Mobile Issues.
Monitoring your mobile pages is time consuming and difficult. Mobile traffic and search is the future, which means you must keep optimizing your mobile pages to make sure they work and fit properly across devices.
It is important to create a mobile-friendly site with little to no errors more now than ever. Search Console helps you do this by giving you access to a great mobile data section that helps you to spot errors that many analytics platforms can’t.
To do this, click on your Mobile Usability section on your dashboard and identify the usability problems that are impacting your site negatively.
From there, you can analyze text, content size, and clickable elements on mobile.
Submit Pages for Better Crawling.
With Google Search Console, you can index every new blog post. Sometimes Google can’t index your post, which means your hard work could be wasted. You should also re-index old blog posts when you update them.
All you have to do is enter the updated URL and hit Submit Request to have Google crawl or re-crawl the page.
Fix Your Site’s Speed.
Google Search Console allows you to minify your Javascript, CSS, and HTML to improve your site speed.
Most of the time, a slow site speed is due to large images, sloppy HTML, and coding issues. GSC helps you identify and solve the problems that might be slowing down your site.
Test How Google Crawls and Scans Your Website.
Use Google Search Console’s Fetch and Render tool to see how Google crawls and scans your site. The fetch tool allows you to see whether or not the web crawling bot, Googlebot, can gain access to some of your webpages. Then, see how it renders the page, and identify the scripts and images that may be blocking the crawlers.
Basically, this tool helps you simulate a crawl of your site that you can use for debugging and fixing other issues.
Implement and Monitor Rich Cards.
Rich cards were implemented by Google in 2016. They are similar to rich snippets that show a key snippet of your text in the Google search listing. Only the rich cards show content that appeals visually to searchers. For instance, if you Googled “banana bread recipe,” it may bring up a rich card with the steps of the recipe and a picture or video of banana bread.
GSC has an entire section and report that provides you with the performance of your rich cards. Rich cards are often able to boost your standing on search engines by providing better click-through rates.
Examine Backlinks.
Identify the best backlinks to your site with Search Console. GSC provides you with a thorough report on the other sites that are linking to yours the most often.
This provides you with the opportunity to create more backlinks to boost your site’s SEO. You can see which sites have a few links to your site, and you can reach out to them for solicit more link placement to develop your domain authority over time.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of what you can do with Google Search Console. These are only some of the great ways you can use it to make your site better. There are many benefits and uses for GSC when you use it with your marketing software as well.
4 Benefits of Connecting Google Search Console to Your Marketing Software
Here are the four main benefits you can take advantage of when you connect Google Search Console to your marketing software:
It Enhances Your Content Strategy.
Google Search Console allows you to identify opportunities to rank for content by tracking the progress of your content marketing efforts. You’ll learn the most commonly found keywords on your site as identified by Google’s web crawling, which content creators can use to assess the progress of their content strategy within the marketing software.
By having a better understanding of which content tactics work best, marketers can have better control over how their content performs and attracts qualified traffic and leads to their site.
It Provides You With Alerts When Google Encounters a Problem.
With the Google Search Console and HubSpot integration, you can see messages when your website is having issues. For instance, if your site isn’t crawling properly or if there are security threats detected.
Google messages you to allow you to address potential issues right away. Set up message forwarding on the platform so you are always aware of website fixes as soon as Google notifies you.
It Allows You to View Query Analytics.
Search Analytics in GSC gives you an inside look into how often your site shows up in Google’s search results. See how your traffic changes over time, where it is coming from, and which queries are likely to show your site.
This tool lets marketers get an in-depth assessment of their site’s performance on search so they can improve it as needed. When marketers understand which queries and pages gain the most clicks, they can easily focus their efforts on what works and stop putting effort into what isn’t working.
It Improves Your Site’s HTML.
GSC identifies issues with your HTML that may hurt your ability to rank on SERPs. Take advantage of Google Search Console by using it to improve your HTML. Change title tags, meta descriptions, and other HTML elements to ensure they are optimized properly for search.
How to Integrate Google Search Console With HubSpot
Before you integrate, make sure you set up Google Search Console in your own Google account.
To do this, you must:
Add Domain Properties.
Add all of the domains you want to track in your GSC account. Adding domain properties will cover all subdomains, such as blogs and each protocol (HTTPS, HTTP).
Verify Site Ownership With Google.
Google requires verification of site ownership. All websites hosted on HubSpot are verified automatically with GSC through a file verification method.
After you enable the integration, you’ll be able to see the data in HubSpot.
Set up the Google Search Console integration in HubSpot by following these steps:
- Click the Marketplace icon in your HubSpot account.
- Select Connected apps under Manage.
- Click Visit App Marketplace in the upper righthand corner.
- Look up Google Search Console in the search bar.
- Click the correct integration.
- Select Connect App.
- Enter your login information for Google, then click Allow to Grant HubSpot permission to connect to your Google account.
The goal of your Google Search Console integration with your marketing software should be to optimize your site for conversions. The more conversions you gain from your site, the simpler your job becomes. This is achievable when you make the best use out of Google Search Console by learning the ins and outs of this free Google tool.
Use the data GSC provides to your advantage and make the most out of your marketing strategy!
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