Google Webmaster Tools is a really powerful website analysis tool from which you can pull a lot of useful information from to help you with link building and also with wider SEO strategy elements. It’s one of the best free platforms around that you can use to help you understand how your website is performing.
In this article I am going to highlight 4 key features of Google Webmaster Tools that can really help you on your way when it comes to tracking and evaluating both on page SEO and off page SEO performance.
Top Search Queries:
It’s possible with Google Webmaster Tools to get a really clear indication of what search terms people are using to find your website online. In the Search Queries menu on Google Webmaster Tools dashboard you can analyse a wealth of really valuable information.
From here you can see search traffic data about the pages on your site that were seen most often in the search results first few pages. From an SEO point of view this is particularly helpful when you are engaged in a link building campaign. You can see how well your keywords are ranking, what position they are in, their movement over time and various other helpful metrics. It also highlights what search phrases people are clicking through to in order to get to your website. This type of information can be very helpful if you need to adjust or modify your link building strategy. You can identify those keywords that need more work in order to bring them up in the search engine rankings. You can also use Google Webmaster Tools to track the progress of your keywords performance over the course of any period of time.
Search Queries Tab
The image above shows a list of search queries that are relevant to a particular website. Alongside the search queries you can analyse the number of impressions, number of clicks to the website and the click through %. The figures highlighted in green, accompanied by the upwards arrow indicate an increase in movement while the figures in red show the opposite action. The graph at the top of the image shows a graphical representation of the movement over time.
Website Errors:
Webmaster Tools provides an excellent basis to examine features of your website that may require some fixing. In the diagnostics menu on the left hand side of the dashboard you can examine if your website has been affected by any suspicious malware, and you can find out if the website is being crawled and indexed by Google properly. Quite often you might find that not all the pages on your website are visible to Google and as a result do not get crawled and indexed. It’s important to fix theses crawl errors so that it is easy for Google to crawl and index your website. Minimizing the amount of crawl errors on your website as much as possible will help benefit your on page SEO.
Another great feature in the Diagnostics menu is the HTML Suggestions tab. In here you can see how Google views the structure of your On Page search engine optimisation elements such as how you have set up your meta descriptions and your title tags. For instance Google will tell you if you have any duplicate title tags or meta tags present on any number of pages on your website. This is really helpful with regards to on page SEO. By presenting this sort of information to you it can make your job much easier in ironing out any duplicate content that may be present on your website. By using Webmaster Tools for to isolate and correct such errors you can greatly enhance the performance of your on page search engine optimisation.
HTML Suggestions
Above you can see the analysis of a websites meta tag and title tag content. As you can see with this website Webmaster Tools shows us that there are 4 pages present on the website that have identical meta descriptions. It also flags the fact that there are 3 pages that contain the same title tag. Presenting you with this sort of information can be really helpful when it comes to getting your on- page SEO techniques in order. By clicking on either of these tags highlighted in purple Google will bring you to the individual pages that require attention.
In my next article I will take a close look at the finer details of analysis that Google performs on your website relating to the keywords present on your website. I will also examine what type of information it can tell you about your websites internal link structure and also what information it holds about your websites inbound links.
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