As an experienced digital marketer, you will no doubt have heard of Webmaster Tools (now Google Search Console). This indispensable tool is used by many marketers.
GWT helps websites stay healthy, error-free and secure - helping attract visitors while keeping them coming back for more. This way, businesses are sure to attract and keep returning customers.
Traffic Statistics
An understanding of how Google views a site can have a dramatic impact on their SEO, which makes Webmaster Tools an invaluable source of information for any business looking to increase SERP positioning.
Search Query Reports provide an inside view into Google searches that have led to your website, providing insights into what competitors are doing well while pinpointing areas in need of improvement on both content and keywords. Image and Video Sitemaps can also provide valuable tools that ensure all pages can be located and indexed efficiently.
Sitemaps
Sitemaps provide an XML file listing all the pages on your website, which can be useful both to visitors and search engines as it helps their crawler to identify new content, while tracking updates to existing pages.
Webmaster Tools' Sitemaps tab displays a comprehensive list of all XML sitemaps, sitemap indexes and feeds known by Bing for your domain - these may have been submitted directly by you or imported via Google Search Console; Bing also may have discovered new ones itself organically.
A good sitemap must include all relevant URLs in an organized manner and contain accurate tags.
Crawl Errors
Webmaster Tools' Crawl Errors section helps you understand how Google views your website by showing all errors that prevent Google from crawling and indexing pages on it.
Crawl errors can be divided into site errors and URL errors, with site errors including issues like 404 errors and 500 server responses which affect an entire website while URL errors include broken redirects or canonical issues that need addressing.
Correcting these errors will keep visitors on your site longer, creating a superior user experience and increasing conversions. Without taking action to address them, your site could risk losing traffic and revenue.
Site Speed
Digital marketers have access to various tools in the digital space to help optimize websites and climb search engine results pages; one such essential tool is Google Webmaster Tools.
Webmaster Tools provides users with various utilities that allow them to detect and fix issues preventing their website from ranking well in Google searches. Error reports provide valuable insight into keywords ranking poorly along with any domains linking back to them. Click here or check out our website to learn more about Digital Marketing.
Website owners gain insight into the speed of their websites. This is crucial because fast sites tend to provide better user experiences and rank higher in search engine results pages.
Sitelinks
Sitelinks allow your audience to navigate seamlessly across your site through search engine results pages (SERPs). They can include anything from product or 'about' pages to sections of your blog.
To maximize your chances of attracting these links, create unique content that satisfies user intent. For instance, an online bookstore could benefit from providing user with author and genre spotlights to provide information they require.
As well as clear internal linking that emphasizes important pages, breadcrumb navigation helps Google better understand what your page is about and schema markup can add a search box on SERP results if desired.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is an increasingly prevalent SEO issue that can weaken search engine visibility, both internally (internal duplicate content) and across domains (cross domain duplicate content).
Duplicate content has various meanings, but generally refers to blocks of identical or highly similar text created unknowingly by webmasters or technical issues; examples could include articles written again with minor edits made between editions; boilerplate text; product pages with separate URLs generated for every color or size option (common problem on e-commerce sites); rewritten articles or boilerplate text generated for every color option or size option (this issue often arises on e-commerce websites); product pages that generate unique URLs per variant (common on e-commerce websites).
Google rarely penalises for duplicate content; however, it can reduce site visibility and traffic significantly. Therefore, be on the lookout for duplicates and be sure to fix it if found.