Your site is among an essential tool for running your business and reaching your target audience. After all, it represents what your brand is all about and what it offers. Moreover, it’s a primary channel for communicating and sharing information with potential leads, business partners, and customers. As a result, it’s vital to continually improve the performance of your WordPress website and ensure that you are using responsive web design principles.
The good news is that Google, the number one search engine globally, offers Google Webmaster Tools, also known as Google Search Console. This is a free tool with a lot of features to help improve your site for search engines and your visitors. This tool enables you to keep track of your site’s performance in Google Search as well as what you can do to maintain or improve the performance.
Consider the fact that Google has been collecting data about WordPress websites for a long time. This data is used to index WordPress websites for the best possible experience for users using the search engine. So, if you’re not using the Google Webmaster Tools, then you are certainly missing out on a lot of features that can improve your site’s performance and user experience. Below we will look at this tool’s toolbox to help you get started.
What is Google Search Console?
Previously known as Google Webmaster Tools (GWT), this free resource from Google demonstrates how the search engine giant crawls and indexes sites as well as how they appear in search results. Additionally, the tool helps you track, maintain, and improve your ranking in those search results.
Google Search Console consists of several features that provide you with insight into how your search results appear, factors that affect its rise or decline in rankings, and how to fix these issues. The truth is, Google Search Console is invaluable if you need to monitor:
- Your site’s performance
- Content accessibility
- Malware and spam issues
Generally, Google penalizes sites that violate their guidelines for what they consider good content. Yet with Google Search Console, you get the insight of these violations and guidance on how to fix them. Some of these penalties include:
- General spam problems such as thin content and doorway pages
- User-generated spam problems such as spammy links in the comments section
- Hacked content
- Incorrectly structured data
- Unnatural outbound and inbound links
How to Use Google Webmaster Tools
- Improving HTML
Your WordPress website’s meta descriptions and title tags play a crucial role in the way you rank on search engines such as Google and how your visitors find you. While HTML issues are prevalent, GWT can offer you insight into your HTML issues as well as provide an overview of the things you can do to improve.
Generally, the GWT shows critical issues, including:
- Missing title tags
- Duplicate meta descriptions
- Short/long meta descriptions
- Non-information title tags
To find HTML improvements for your site, check the reports under “Search Appearance.” All the issues will be marked in yellow, and all you’ll need to do is select the issue you want to work on first to improve your WordPress website’s performance and user experience.
- Content and keyword improvement
It’s no secret that keywords play an integral role in your overall SEO strategy. However, it’s essential to know how to use them, how to place them, and how well they are working for your marketing efforts. This is where GWT becomes a game changer since it provides insight into your site’s current keyword status. This tool will show you how Google sees your content keywords in terms of:
- Which search terms you are using
- How often
- Which pages you are using them on
- How significant they are
From there, you can determine if your SEO strategy is excellent or needs improvement.
- Fix crawl errors
There’s nothing worse than trying to reach a particular site only to learn an error of some kind occurred. This automatically pushes you away from the site, and you may never want to revisit the WordPress website, right? Yet, GWT allows you and your brand to detect any mistakes or errors, such as the one mentioned and others that users may be experiencing.
To determine if users are experiencing issues with your site, check under the “Health Menu,” where there’s a section about errors. From here, you’ll see a report on any of the following errors and how to fix them:
- Access denied errors
- Server errors
- Not found (404 errors)
- Adding sitemaps
Sitemaps act as a means of communication between Google and your WordPress website. Generally, the sitemap allows Google to know about the structure of your site. Instead of manually creating a sitemap, it’s better to use a tool that can do it for you, such as some WordPress plugins.
Once you’ve created your sitemap, you can paste it’s link to Google Webmaster Tools. After this is done, you’ll wait for GWT to process the new information and start providing stats. Generally, you’ll be notified about:
- Number of URLs submitted through the sitemap
- Number of URLs that are indexed on Google
The statistics you’ll get can be divided by the type of content, such as web, news, images, and videos.
- Audience targeting
All successful businesses create products or services that target a specific demographic. Thus, it is vital to ensure that your WordPress website is reaching its intended audience. GWT allows your WordPress website’s content to focus and reach your desired group.
All you have to do is, go to settings, select site settings, and choose target users in the country of your choice. This way, Google will treat your content well and ensure that it reaches your target audience.
- Incoming links data
Your site is connected to other web addresses through inbound links. Thus, it’s essential to keep track of these links and be aware of the different sources redirecting to you. You can get more information under the “links to your site,” where you’ll see all the domains your site is connected to. The report here will provide insight on the WordPress websites that link to you, how these sites link to you, and the number of links that point to each page on your site.
- Malware protection
You want your visitors to have the best possible experience when they navigate through your site. You wouldn’t want them to see pop-up ads as well as other annoying advertisements, which is why you need to ensure your WordPress website is protected.
Generally, if your WordPress website is not secure enough, malware may be introduced. Consequently, this will lead to an unpleasant experience for your users. Nonetheless, GWT will detect the issue and inform you so that you can fix the problem.
There’s no excuse when it comes to maintaining your site, especially, today where there are numerous free resources such as Google Webmaster Tools at the tips of your fingers. Improve the performance of your WordPress website and learn about errors, issues, and problems fast using the tips above.
