It often happens that you might rank for keywords that you did not target. And recovering Google ranking is your next actionable.
But how do you do this? The answer is Google Search Console for SEO.
What is Google Search Console?
Google Search Console is a free service. Indicative of the name, you might have guessed that Google offers it. This service helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence — and applies to a variety of Google Search results.
Google Search Console for SEO can help confirm that Google can find and crawl your site. Apart from this, it can also help fix indexing problems. And the best part, you can also request re-indexing of new or updated content.
How to Find Your Lost Rankings on Google?
Now, lets’ dig deeper into this
You need to find lost Google rankings, but do you know why you lost these rankings?
Inaccurate data
Rankings drop unexpectedly because the data you are accessing is inaccurate. It could be due to a bug or because you reset something. So do check your reporting is in order.
Changed algorithms
This is a primary cause of dropped rankings. Google likes keeping things hushed. So you will not hear about any algorithm updates. These are all rolled out quietly. Your only option is to find lost Google rankings reasons.
Competitors got better
Your competitors are doing something right, which they earlier were not. And that is a major cause for your rankings to dip.
Lost backlinks
Low or poor-quality links affect your performance in SERPs — resulting in the loss of high-quality backlinks you already have.
Changes to website
Before scouting for Google Search Console for SEO, check if you have made changes to your website. For example, you are redesigning, changing your CMS, or moving to HTTPS; all result in a measurable drop in rankings.
Modified used behavior
When the click-through rates drop, or there is a change in the user behavior, your rankings will automatically drop!
Now that you know why the rankings drop, it is time to fix it through Google Search Console for SEO. But before you start using the same, understand the necessary steps of setting it up.
How can you set up Google Search Console for SEO?
Step One – Set up your website.
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- • Sign in to Google using your business (not personal) account.
- • Then go to Google Webmaster Tools.
- • Click “Add a property.”
- • Select “Website” from the drop-down menu
- • Enter website URL
- • Click “Continue.”
- •Verify the website (Check for HTML file upload, domain name provider, HTML tag, GA tracking code, or GTM container snippet).
Step two – Verify
Next, verify your website on the Google search console. Do read instructions explicitly to avoid confusion.
Step three- Start using Google Search Console for SEO.
Once the above is sorted, you can start using Google Search Console for SEO. More importantly, try to update pages that are not getting organic traffic. Remember that rankings tend to drop once they are outdated.
How to find pages in Google Search Console for SEO?
Just go to the “Search Results” report. Here, you can add a date range comparison, get the required statistics for six months, and compare them. source –
How to recover your Lost SEO Ranking using Google Search Console?
1. Finding missing keywords & improve rankings
To find lost Google rankings because of missing keywords in Google Analytics, you first need to open both Google Search Console and Google Analytics. In Google Analytics, begin at Acquisition > Overview > Organic Search.
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- • Next, pick the Conversion Item from the drop-down.
- • Select and set the Secondary Dimension to Acquisition > Source.
- • It would show Google next to the pages. It is possible to filter by Google.
- • You can set the date range and do a comparison period.
- • Go to Google Search Console and navigate to performance> Pages.
- • Pick the required Landing Page at the center of your screen.
- • Align the same dates and comparison as above.
Why? Because visitors mostly click usually on the first two results. Being lower implies that you lose out on precious traffic.
For recovering Google ranking, try performing a separate analysis of this page.
You should try and check if you can boost the position by improving on-page SEO. Do add:
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- • More backlinks
- • Improve page speed
- • Relevant internal links
2. Search Appearance
This section will help visualize how your website appears in search results. Considering code snippets like rich cards, using Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), or HTML corrections could help your website stand out.
Here’s what you can do to use Google Search Console for SEO:
Structured data (rich snippets), when programmed into HTML code, helps Google serve up “rich” results.
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- • One of the newer inventions by Google — Rich Cards work like Structured Data but are visually more appealing.
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- • Substitute Structured Data with Data Highlighter — this way, you will not require a developer to write the code snippets in your HTML.
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- • The HTML improvements report helps identify problem areas that Google comes across while crawling/indexing your site.
- • Generated automatically by Google, Site-links are not changeable as Google uses its algorithm to decide when and how to display them. However, it helps web pages render quickly on mobile devices.
Optimize pages that have a high keyword ranking but low CTR.
Not every page that ranks #1 will get 30% of clicks. That’s just the average.
Some will perform better than average, and some will function worse. Try and find lost Google rankings of pages that perform worse than average. The next step here should be to analyze why that’s the case.
Finally, diagnose the problem and try to boost their CTR to get more traffic.
For this, you should go to the “Search results” report. Here, you have to toggle the average CTR along with the position data. Finally, filter for keywords (rankings below 3.1.) The results you get are keywords for that rank in the top 3.
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- • More backlinks
- • Improve page speed
- • Relevant internal links
#Tip: Add the average position by choosing the box for this page. Do the same for the comparison screen. This you can see which keywords fell on this page specifically.
3. Google Index for Google Search Console for SEO
Recovering Google ranking becomes more comfortable with Google Index, revealing how the search engine is crawling and indexing your website and keywords.
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- • Your index status gives the URLs indexed by Google. It also shows the blocked URLs or others which have been removed.
- • The content keywords section reports keywords in your content and why they are significant in search results.
- • The blocked resource is accessed to index and render your pages correctly. This section gives valid information on where the blocked resources are hosted.
- • To find lost Google rankings helps you analyze which parts of the website should be kept private. It also temporarily hides URLs, which can be made indexable later.
- • The crawl section helps you get crawl errors, stats, fetch as Google, and other relevant details.
It is essential to use the below tools along with Google Search Console to improve your rankings.
Pages-peed Insights
The above tools help boost site loading time. One can also make an instant improvement in SEO through the same.
Google My Business
It’s highly recommended for individuals who have a local brick-and-mortar shop — be it a restaurant or garments store.
Structured Data Testing Tool
Along with Structured Data Markup Helper, the above can be used once you’ve mastered the basics of SEO. This would further enhance your website.
Webmaster Academy
SEO is an ever-changing trend — and the above tools help you always be in the game.
4. Monitoring mobile issues
Google Search Console for SEO can monitor any mobile issues fast. There is no doubt that optimizing the mobile page of your website is a pain. It is rather time-consuming. But if you want to find SEO rankings fast, this is the way to go.
Along with ensuring that the standard page elements fit and function correctly, you also need to focus on mobile optimization. Mobiles are no longer “the wave of the future.” They are here to stay!
As per StatCounter and BGR, internet usage worldwide now mostly comes from mobile and tablet devices:
If you are worried about rankings, the desktop is not the way forward. People are finding your website through mobile traffic.
Creating a mobile-friendly site is more important than ever. It is here that the Google Search Console for SEO comes to the rescue. Google has an excellent mobile data section. Using the same, you identify or spot errors that typical Analytics platforms can’t.
In the dashboard, click “Mobile Usability” to highlight issues that could be impacting performance.
For instance, as you can see from the above image, you can now analyze clickable elements, text, and content size on mobile.
In short, just what you need to recover lost SEO rankings.How to diagnose SEO traffic loss or gain?
If you want to find lost Google rankings and diagnose an SEO traffic loss or gain, you need to address the questions below
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- • Have you run the site follow banner ads?
- • What is the quality of content for both old and new pages? Especially are the primary keywords showing up?
- • How is the user experience?
- • What is the page speed?
- • Does it imply that the page has other keywords sending traffic to it?
- • How much traffic was lost? Was this limited to an entire category or only the complete website or a single page?
- • Check the links pointing to your page/website. Did someone launch an attack?
- • Ensure that you double-check links that come to the page. Is it possible that someone intentionally hacked your site?
- • Were you getting traffic from Google News? Is it because of stale or outdated content that your rankings are getting affected?
Answer these questions, and you will note that Google Search Console for SEO is correctly working for you!
At the end of the day, do remember that optimizing your site for conversions is vital. The higher the conversion rate, the better traffic your site gets. However, a website that generates conversions without much effort is a dream.
And Google Search Console for SEO can get you there. Of course, it would still require hard work and dedication.
Using Google Search Console, you can diagnose problems — and also fix your site.
It gives you the option to scout new opportunities.
You can additionally find new search queries and fix issues that may impact your website negatively.
Do remember that Google Search Console for SEO is easy— but it requires a little patience to get an in-depth idea.
But once that happens, you can understand the areas that call for your focus and attention.
In a gist, set up your account and diagnose the problem using the available data. Head to the queries reports on Google Search Console. Remember that analytics won’t give you keyword data anymore, but the Search Console will.
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- • Examine backlinks
- • Check HTML performance and indexed pages.
- • Improve your website crawls
- • Make use of new queries to update blog posts
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And do implement and monitor both Rich Cards and Google AMP. At the end of the day, mobile analytics will make a world of difference!
So go ahead and use Google Search Console for SEO to fix your site and get higher — and better conversion rates!
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