Four States Small Business Blog

How to Interpret Your Website Data in Google Search Console: Troubleshooting

Posted by Jason Dittmer on September 5, 2023 at 7:30 AM
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Using Google Search Console
Last week, we covered the basics of utilizing Google Search Console to create and maintain your website's search engine optimization strategy. Now, we will offer some more detailed tips to help you address SEO problems as they arise, keeping your website competitive online.

Understanding the Coverage Report in GSC

Now that you have a solid understanding of improving your overall SEO performance, let's talk about GSC's coverage report, which provides valuable insights into page indexing issues. This report enables you to understand how well your site is being crawled and indexed by Googlebot, which stops after it's fetched 15MB of HTML or any supported text-based file.

The coverage report gives you an overview of the different categories of pages on your site, including:
  • Page Validation
  • Indexed Pages
  • Excluded Pages
  • Error Pages

By analyzing these categories, GSC will report any potential issues affecting your website's visibility in search results. But, one vital aspect of the coverage report is its ability to highlight crawl errors and warnings.

These errors could be due to various reasons, such as server errors, broken links, or inaccessible content. Careful analysis of crawl errors and warnings can help you take the necessary action to resolve indexing issues to ensure Google correctly indexes each page on your website. That helps improve your website's visibility in search results and enhances its overall performance.

Utilizing the URL Inspection Tool

Another powerful aspect of GSC is its ability to inspect specific URLs using the URL Inspection tool. That operation allows you to conduct a detailed analysis of a particular page on your website, giving you powerful insight into the indexing status and coverage details of your pages, helping you identify and resolve any issues affecting that specific web page's performance.

Properly utilizing and analyzing this tool ensures that web pages are adequately recognized and included in search engine results.

The URL Inspection Tool checks the indexing status for specific page URLs. It provides information about whether a page is successfully indexing across search engines. That's critically important to know as it determines whether your content is visible to users when they perform relevant searches.

Additionally, this tool helps identify any issues preventing certain pages from being indexed or affecting their visibility in search results. It provides coverage details that highlight errors or warnings that need attention. Addressing these issues can improve your website's performance and visibility.

Monitoring Mobile Usability and Enhancing User Experience Across Devices

Another vital aspect of GSC is its ability to monitor a user's experience across different devices, like desktop computers, mobile devices, and even personal tablets. The increased usage of these devices means websites must provide a seamless experience for these users, too.

One way to monitor mobile usability is through the Mobile Usability Analysis feature in the Search Console. The information provided here helps identify any issues affecting a user's experience on a mobile device. It provides insights into mobile screen problems, such as font sizes, touch elements, or content size.

To enhance a user's experience on mobile devices, optimizing your website with a mobile-friendly design caters to a growing number of mobile users in today's changing market.

Utilizing the Enhancements Report to Improve Structured Data

When optimizing your website for search engines, utilizing structured data markup is crucial. Because it helps those search engines understand the content on your site and display rich results in the SERPs. Analyzing the GSC Enhancements is essential to ensure structured data is error-free and optimized for maximum visibility.

The enhancements report provides valuable insights into breadcrumbs and sitelink search boxes. Within the enhancements report, you'll find a breakdown of different structured data types on your site, such as articles, events, products, recipes, and more. Each category will display information about any errors or warnings detected by Google's algorithms.

It's essential to pay close attention to these errors or warnings as they indicate areas of improvement. For example, suppose you notice errors related to incorrect formatting of some aspects of your structured data markup. In that case, this could impact your website's appearance in search results by as much as 25%.

So, regular monitoring and acting upon the information provided in the enhancements report will help improve your website's structured data markup so it's error-free and optimized for search results.

GSC for Better Performance and Improved Search Engine Optimization

In conclusion, leveraging the data from GSC greatly benefits your website's performance and SEO efforts. By analyzing and understanding the data, you can improve your website's visibility, user experience, and overall performance in search engine rankings.

It offers vital metrics into your website's clicks, impressions, click-through rates, and average position for specific keywords. By analyzing all this data, you can build better SEO strategies that improve your website's visibility in search results.

Get Support for Your Website's SEO

The digital marketing team at Zimmer Marketing utilizes GSC to monitor and enhance client website performance and advance SEO strategies. Through regularly monitoring and analyzing this data, the Zimmer web team can make informed decisions to optimize your content strategy, improve your user experience, and increase the organic traffic to your website. Contact Zimmer Marketing today at 417-624-1025 to speak with a Marketing Consultant.