Google Search Console (GSC), is a free and easy way to monitor the performance of your eCommerce SEO website. GSC is a website monitoring and tracking tool that can quickly help you gain an understanding of your website’s performance and areas for improvement.
What is Google Search Console?
Google’s GSC tool is free and focuses on tracking your organic search visibility. This tool is invaluable for any eCommerce website owner. It allows you to see crawl errors, and understand what information Google is indexing on your site.
How to set up Google Search Console
Start by gathering all information. This includes your login information as well as your domain name server.
- Go to the main Google Search Console page.
- Log in to Google with your Google Analytics credentials, or the Google Account you wish to associate with this account.
- You will need to create a Google account if you don’t already have one. Important: Do not tie it to an individual’s account, but rather to a general business account (e.g. To avoid data collection disruptions, please contact atexample.com
- After logging in, you can add a website property to your search console page by clicking on the property selector drop-down menu in the top left corner above the Overview menu. Select +add property to choose the type you wish to add. There are two options: a URL prefix or domain property.
5. Click Continue to enter the URL prefix or domain name if you are tracking one page.
6. Next, you will be asked to confirm that you are the owner of the site. Two options will be available to confirm ownership.
- It is possible to verify it immediately or pause it so that you can verify it later. If you want to verify it immediately, sign in to your domain name provider. Then copy the TEXT code to the DNS configurations.
- You can verify your site later if you are unable to verify it right away. When you are ready, you should be able to return to your site to verify it.
Do you need to add a property? It’s not a problem. As long as the property is still active and there’s at least one verified owner, you should be able to add it. You can add it to your property by following the same steps as if you were buying a new one.
How to set up Google Search Console on Shopify
You don’t have to register Shopify domains if you already use them.
- Register for your online store
- Go to Domains > Manage domains > DNS Setting > Add custom record > TXT Record
- Copy and paste the record into the text value
- Click Save to change the name of your TXT file
Google Search Console: Why use it for eCommerce SEO?
Most people who work in SEO are measured by how many site visitors they receive year-over-year, how many non-branded keywords rank the site for, and how much revenue they generate from organic search.
GSC is here to help. GSC provides daily insights and performance reports that allow you to make adjustments based on current data. Ranking reports are sometimes run weekly by some SEO tools, which can delay your response to ranking fluctuations. You can also compare and examine data from the past 16 months. This will enable you to see yearly trends to account for seasonality in search behavior.
Google will inform you about any major issues as it crawls your site. This is so you can be on top of any issues that might affect your ability to rank your site and drive traffic to it.
Let’s take a look at some of the key features that make this tool so useful for site owners and SEO marketers.
Let’s take a look at the key features and uses of GSC to get you familiar with the data you can gather and use to make decisions.
What are some features offered by Google Search Console?
Performance charts
It provides insight into your website’s performance by showing you how many organic clicks and impressions you are receiving, the average click-through rate (CTR), and your ranking position for a particular keyword.
This report will provide you with coverage information for the domain. This report will show you the number of valid pages on your site, and how many pages have errors.
Charts of Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals is another great tool. Core Web Vitals will provide reports that are based on URL performance. You can group them by metrics and status. It will give you useful insight into things such as mobile vs. tablet usage. This can help you to decide where you should focus your efforts when it comes to SEO and site optimization.
Sitemap Charts
Sitemaps are files on your website that tell Google which pages are worth indexing and crawling. GSC allows you to add your sitemaps and track any errors Google might have made. This is particularly important for eCommerce sites, as products are often replaced by newer products.
There are some situations in which your site will automatically generate your Sitemaps. Squarespace, Shopify Magento, Bigcommece, and Magento will most likely create a sitemap automatically for you. You won’t need a sitemap if you have less than 100 pages. This is because you can navigate to every page on your site easily.
Five Tips to Use Search Console To Gain Insights
We’ve now covered some of the features available on Google Search Console. Let’s discuss how to use it for insight into your eCommerce business.
1. Page Performance Insights. Insights on page performance.
You can determine if your click-through rate or visibility issues are affecting your website. Google Search Console allows you to see the performance of pages year-over-year (YOY). This will allow you to identify what is affecting their performance. You can view specific areas of your website in the Performance > Search Results report to compare their performance to last year.
To see how your CTR has changed or increased year over year, look at the top pages that bring in revenue.
When I look at the category pages on this eCommerce site, for example, I see pages that have not changed or been significantly improved relative to their average positioning. Their CTR has decreased significantly.
To understand which keywords are driving traffic to each page, you will have to dig into the pages. This will help you get started.
- Do you want to improve your SEO performance? Check out our Guide for SEO for eCommerce Sites
2. Crawl reports now offer more useful data to help solve crawl problems
Google has recently launched its new crawl report. This report is designed to assist developers and SEOs in finding issues with Google’s crawling and indexing of the site. This data is not as comprehensive as other reports, but it can still be useful.
You can view the main status report which shows total crawl requests, total downloaded size, and average response times for pages to load.
The report also contains data about crawl requests. It is broken down by the file type of the fetched URL and response.
This allows you to see which pages have been crawled most recently. As you can see, this is the case. Google has found a few 404 error pages in the past few days. If this is the case, you will need to create a plan to redirect these pages to other pages.
This report can also reveal hosting problems. This report will reveal why Google was unable to access your site. Google shared the “host status details” report that allows you to check the general availability of your site to Google within the last 90 days.
These reports are meant to help you understand:
- Can Google crawl your site?
- Google is indexing pages and content you request.
You may find that Google crawls a lot of pages that you don’t want to crawl (e.g. search pages, dynamic URLs with parameters like?=, filter pages, etc.). You will need to analyze those pages to determine what is making them crawled and indexable.
Some of the reasons for this include: a lack of proper canonical tags, no exclusions in your robots.txt file, and improper use of noindex/nofollow/index/follow tags. Auditing crawl reports can be a great starting point.
3. Optimize your backlinks for SEO
Your website’s rank is still influenced by backlinks. It can dramatically improve your website’s rankings if you can prove to Google that other websites with high rankings trust you enough to link back to it. When looking at backlinks to your site you will want to make sure to track both external and referring domains.
This will reveal which content on your website generates the most backlinks. In turn, this will let you know what content is most popular and what needs more attention.
- You may also enjoy our Backlink Analysis and Link Strategy resource.
A Miami digital marketing strategy that works is essential for your eCommerce website’s success. You will want to keep an eye on your backlinks and have a clear understanding of their status.
4. URL Testing Tool
Don’t worry if you find bugs that affect your site’s performance. These are common issues, but there are solutions. Search Console’s URL inspection software is one solution.
This will provide information about Google’s index version of any page on your site. Click the URL inspection button to the left of the page and then enter the URL in the search bar at the top of the page.
This tool can be used to check the core pages of your website. This is particularly important for large enterprise websites and sites with a lot of customization. If canonical tags, index, or any other tags are used to fix crawl issues in a custom website update, they can often hurt other pages. URL testing is a valuable tool to quickly assess important pages for indexability issues.
5. Optimize rich search results to improve search performance
Google’s search results now include rich results. Google constantly tests the rich results that are displayed for a particular search query to offer a better search experience. To stay ahead of the competition, it is important to understand how rich results adjust.
These are the steps to follow to optimize your efforts for rich results.
- You must set up your pages for indexing, as we discussed previously. This will enable you to verify that your structure data has been validated and will allow Google to inspect your site to provide more accurate results through Google Search Console.
- You can monitor your performance. Search Console allows you to track the number of people visiting your site from rich results. Here’s an example.
It can prove to be very beneficial in several ways. This will enable you to identify patterns in your reports, and it will also teach you a lot more about how people behave when they visit your site. You can also get insights into what information users are looking for and in what format.
You now have a better understanding of your performance. It’s time to dig deeper to find any potential issues that might be causing it to fall apart.
Account owners will be notified by email if errors or warnings are found. If the problem becomes more severe, you won’t receive an email. This is why you should regularly check your Google Search Console reports to make sure you are aware of any issues.
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