When taking on new SEO clients, we often find Google Search Console is one area that has been overlooked. Frequently, their Google Search Console account has not been set up, sometimes set up incorrectly or hasn’t been looked at for a very long time. This is unfortunate as the Google Search Console is one of the best sources of SEO information.
If you haven’t set up a Google Search Console account for your website yet, Google themselves provide instructions on how to do so. If you haven’t looked at your account for a while, below are some specific areas to check as part of a regular review:
- Structured Data – this area will flag up any errors in your website markup.
- HTML Improvements – check this area to find any recommendations on how to improve elements such as duplicate page titles.
- Mobile Usability – with Google’s recent shift to a mobile first index, ensuring that your website is mobile friendly is essential.
- Blocked resources – this section will highlight blocked assets on your site that Google may require to render your web pages properly. This can sometimes be due to an over-zealous robots.txt file.
- Crawl errors – this section of the Google Search Console will report any errors when crawling your site such as 404s or 502s. This is often a good place to check for any pages that need redirects adding.
While this list is not exhaustive by any measure, it provides a summary of the key sections of the console you should be checking on a regular basis.