Introduction to Google Search Console

A lot of our clients come to speak to us because we’re really good at SEO for the furniture industry, but there are so few people within the furniture world specialising in this field that we are often starting from scratch with every website we work on.

One question we ask every single time we start working with a new client is “Have you got Google Search Console setup for your website?” and are often faced with a blank face or a response relating to Google Analytics.

I wanted to make this really simple for everyone – Google Analytics is amazing and should be setup for every website but also Google Search Console. Generally speaking, I distinguish the two as:

1. Google Analytics helps you understand what visitors to your website are doing.
2. Google Search Console helps you understand how people see your website in Google search results.

We need both of these to understand how to increase traffic because we can’t just look at your own website visitors.

Now, relating this to furniture specifically, the way in which we use this is to understand the terms that are being searched for by consumers, such as ‘contemporary sofas’ or ‘ceiling lights’. Consumers don’t use our industry language such as ‘upholstery’ or ‘pendant lights’ so we need to work their own language in to our content to appear higher for those terms.

Google Search Console helps us to understand what position our website is for those terms and what the clickthrough-rate is for each term. We can then work each month on improving that and building more traffic for generic terms.

If you haven’t already setup Google Search Console, I implore you to do so at www.google.com/webmasters/tools. You will start getting some great insights soon after.

An overview of how Google Search Console works

Transcript

The Internet is amazing. It’s so easy to share anything you create with the entire world. Like Alice, she just opened an online store for her custom jewellery. But now she is wondering, can people find her site and mobile app on Google? With Search Console, Alice can make sure that Google finds her store, and shows it for the correct search queries. Search Console also displays the errors that Google found when reading her site and app.

Alice can check those errors and fix them so all her pages can appear in search results. Every time Alice creates a new product page, she can use Search Console to see which terms lead people to her Google search results pages. And she can use that data to discover the most successful pages and products in her store, so she can focus on that, and increase traffic to her business.

Also, Search Console regularly checks her site for errors and even sends an email alert if it finds any important issues. Now Alice can be sure that everything is OK with her site and app using Google Search Console.