Not Just Vanity Metrics — Let’s Make Most Out Of Google Search Console Reports

There are a plethora of insight tools which I’ve used in measuring sites’ performance, search traffic, and a lot more, but where all these insight tools fail, only one tool really prevails i.e. Google Search Console. The day I started using this tool, it gave me the perfect way to optimize web pages, improve organic visibility, and communicate with the bots, fix crawl errors, and more. Simply put, GSC is your control panel for monitoring how search engines see websites. Let me share one of my experiences: Few days ago I deleted one of my web pages and I forgot to redirect it to the right page. The next time when I opened my GSC account, a 404 error popped out in front of me. This 404 alert saved my website from sudden drop in traffic and it showed me exactly where to add a redirect. I must say this tool is insanely helpful and savior in your marketing journey.

What makes GSC stand out from the rest?

1. This platform creates a bridge between a website and Search engines.
2. It helps tremendously in monitoring, maintaining, and improving the website’s presence in search results.
3. It is the best tool that gives you freedom to manage website’s sitemaps.
4. It gives you room for improvements in website ranking.
5. No need to be afraid of cyber threats. It gives time to time updates on cyber threats.
6. This tool makes websites better equipped for Accelerate mobile pages
7. It gives real-time pace with those changes that happen within the website.
8. GSC makes websites more responsive to mobile users.

It’s not just clicks, impressions, conversions that gives you whole insights in order to improve website performance in search engines. I feel like almost everyone is using GSC just for vanity metrics. In this article, I will shed some light on GSC’ effective reporting features that you can use to generate effective insights. Let’s make the most out of it.

AMP Status Report: This GSC’s reporting feature allows you to fix those errors and warnings that stops your web pages from appearing on the search results and multimedia results respectively. Here in the below image 1.1, you can see Google has crawled 6 AMP web pages and showing null errors and warnings. But, In case you get any warnings on your AMP webpages, don’t ignore them. Warning will not let your web pages stop from indexing and appearing on search results but will definitely stop them from appearing on AMP multimedia results. Thus increases the chances of higher bounce rate and lower clicks.

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In Image 1.2, you can see a particular html code of a page which is free of errors. In case, you have errors on your AMP pages you can directly click on those AMP page links and check the error on their html codes. This is the best way to validate errors and make your web pages searchable on SERPS. Once your errors are fixed, make sure to recrawl those AMP pages to see the actual error resolutions. Fixing errors and warnings on your AMP pages gives a great experience to your mobile users.

Core Web Vitals Reports: This reporting feature of GSC will give you insights about when visitors are interacting with your web pages on both mobile and desktop devices, how fast they are able to load your web pages, how good the visual stability of your web page is. In simple words, this core web vital report will tell you how your web pages are performing in terms of speed, interactivity, and visual stability.

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In aforementioned image 1.3, here you can see 4 URLs are performing poor and 2 URLs need improvement on both devices mobile and desktop. On the basis of the above insights, I fixed those poor links and also those links that needed improvements. In the image 1.4, you can see this reporting feature gives me insights about my website’s speed, interactivity, and visual display. With the help of this report I was able to see how much my website’s LCP was affected. To fix this, I looked into various factors like cache assets, render-blocking JavaScript, minification of CSS files and finally fixed the issue. All thanks to the Web core vitals report.

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Security Issue Report: This reporting feature gives you a time to time alert if Google finds something suspicious behavior on your website. This suspicious behavior includes phishing attacks, malware installation and URL or code injection. Here in image 1.5, you can see, Google search console detected some threats on the website http://thedigitalinsights.in, which are quite different and helpful from the insights that you get from manual actions report in Google search console. The issues that you usually get from manual actions are not dangerous for your users, but if the issues that you get from security issues report, don’t overlook them. They need to be fixed in order to protect your website from any traffic loss.

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Here in image 1.6, you can see all aforementioned issues are resolved. I can say thedigitalinsights.in is on the safe side now.

Crawl Stats Report: Crawl errors can dramatically harm your website’s ranking and spoil user experience. This report tells you whether Google encountered any problem while crawling your website or not. Most importantly, it will provide you the total number of crawling requests, average response time, and total download data over a time period or by day. Here in image 1.7 you can see crawl data insights in depth. If your site is overloaded with Googlebot crawl requests, you can track issues in this report and request Google to reduce crawl requests. This reporting feature is great when trying to debug crawl issues and it’s great for improving SEO on your website.

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Now that you know how to make most out of Google search console reports, here are some action items that you should not overlook while checking your data.

1. Try to sort queries on the basis of impression count.
2. Find those webpages that have low click through rate, but have high PR.
3. Filter performance report(e.g. impressions, clicks, average CTR) by device to check whether there are any engagement issues.
4. Check for country wise data that is performing good in case you have ignored it.

So, next time when you use a search console for fetching insights to create an in-depth report of your website’s performance, try to make most out of it.