SEO: Analyzing Your Search Engine Ranking with Google Search Console

In the first two articles of this series, we talked about the factors that impact a website's natural search engine optimization (SEO), and in particular the elements related to the domain name in the previous article.

However, while it is important to try to optimize your SEO, you must first be able to analyze the consequences of our choices in order to draw conclusions and adapt our strategy.

Beware, in order to observe the impact of changes on search engine ranking, you sometimes have to wait up to a full month (or more)!

And since in order to carry out an analysis you need to be able to rely on precise and reliable figures, the ideal solution is to have access to statistics provided directly by a search engine.

That's why today we're going to talk about the "Google Search Console", formerly known as "Google Webmaster Tools"

Google Search Console

The Google Search Console is a platform bringing together several analytics tools specific to natural search engine optimization on Google and very useful (if not essential) for website creators.

Among the tools you will find, for example, the number of indexed pages and its evolution, the number of appearances in search results, average positions, etc...

Once the platform is linked to your website, you will have access to all this data, for free!

The link to the platform: https://search.google.com/search-console/about

Adding a property

Once logged in with your Google account, the first step is to add a new property to the console, that is to say to authorize your domain to appear on the platform.

This validation prevents the possibility of spying on a competitor's SEO performance

You have a choice between several types of properties:

• The global domain, whose analysis will be valid regardless of the subdomain and protocol but whose validation can only be done via DNS
• A specific domain (prefix), whose analysis will only be valid on pages belonging to it, but for which several validation methods exist, including adding a simple file containing a code.

Once the validation steps have been followed, your property should be accessible a few minutes, or even a few seconds later.

Adding the sitemap.xml

Once your property is validated, you'll see that no data will be available, and worse, there's a chance that no page will yet be indexed if your site has been recently put online.

For all the pages of your site to be detected by the Google bot and available in the console, you need to add your sitemap.xml file.

A sitemap file is a representation of all the indexable pages of your site including their unique URL in XML. You can create this file by hand or use an automatic generator.

Your sitemap will be crawled and the pages found will be added to the console, but be careful, this can take time, which is why it's important to do this as early as possible.

A myriad of tools available

Once all the pages of your site have been indexed, you can then consult the performance of your natural search engine optimization.

On the screenshot below, you can for example see the evolution of the total number of clicks, the total number of impressions, your calculated average CTR as well as the average position of your site in the results pages.

These figures will be very useful for you to analyze, because for example a site with a rather high average position but a very low CTR rate will indicate that your site has a good reputation but that the titles and descriptions of the pages may not be catchy enough.

In the case of a blog (like this one, for example), you have a "Coverage" tab to get an overall view of the number of pages indexed as publications progress.

On the screenshot below, for example, you can see that there was a boost in search result appearances after the 100 indexed pages mark.

This may be due to the fact that the blog has reached a critical size, or that a particular article is very well ranked. For this second hypothesis, you can check this in the performance tab with the detailed list of pages and their appearance in the results.

There is a lot of other very interesting data to explore, but I'll let you navigate the platform on your own.

Good to know: Thanks to the Google Search Console, you can manually ask Google to reindex a specific page if its content has changed a lot recently!

I hope this article was useful to you, and see you soon on the blog!