It is a well-known fact that a better website can help you to get loyal traffic who will always want to visit your website again and again. There are several things to consider in the process of making your website loveable by both search engines and users and at the same time, there are lots of online tools available to help you achieve this goal.
One of the most useful, popular, and free tools available is Google Webmaster Tool. In this blog, you will learn why Google Webmaster Tool is important for your website and what you can do with it.
Importance of Google Webmaster Tool
Believe it or not, Google Webmaster Tool can be used as a lighthouse for your website which can help you to maintain a website that is liked by not only search engines but also by users. The reason is simple: Google Webmaster Tool can help you to get an insight into your website not from your own point of view; but from the eyes of search engines and users.
Advantages of Google Webmaster Tool
- No Cost: Google Webmaster Tool is available free of cost. Being a web designer and website consultant, I always encourage my clients to know the usage of Google Webmaster Tools to understand the behavior of search engines and users when they arrive on their websites until they exit.
- Finding Website Errors: Google Webmaster Tool can help you to extract a report that provides you with a detailed summary of errors that exist on your website. You may get these errors fixed by your website designer and ensure a smooth experience for your visitors and search engine crawlers as well.
- SEO Help: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is no more a new concept in the internet world. We all know that having an SEO-optimized website can help you to get more revenue for your business. Google Webmaster Tool helps you to achieve higher search engine rankings for your website by performing various SEO tasks like uploading a sitemap for your website, diagnosing the website issues related to search engine optimization, identifying problems in meta tags & content optimization, disavowing the bad links, finding out your website’s loading time and other important checks like malicious codes, etc.
Using Google Webmaster Tool
Once you set up Google Webmaster Tools with your website, you can easily access all the important information that is required to have a better website. Below are some of the important areas which you can access with this tool.
- Search Queries: ‘Search Queries’ in your Google Webmaster Tools refer to the list of keywords/key phrases on which your website is being found on search engines. As an SEO consultant, I know the importance of having your website in the top positions of search engines for the competitive/profitable keywords that help you to get ahead of your competitors, always. Therefore, it is important to monitor that your website is being found by the users who are indeed searching for your targeted keywords.’Search Queries’ can reveal such insights for you.
- Click-Through Rate: CTR is also one of the important pieces of information that you can get from Webmaster Tools which can help you to decide if you need to change the meta description for your web pages. A higher CTR means that your website gets a good number of clicks according to the total number of impressions that your website gets. However, if you observe your website’s CTR ratio to be lower (less than 40%), then you must seek the advice of your SEO consultant to improve the meta tags of your website in order to get more clicks.
- Disavow Bad Links: As I mentioned above in the “Advantages of Google Webmaster Tools” you can request Google to disavow the bad links or irrelevant links from your website’s backlink profile. Such practice can help your website to regain credibility and get into top positions in search engines.
- Sitemap: Google Webmaster Tools has a section ‘Sitemap’ through which you can submit an HTML/XML sitemap of your website to the Google index. The sitemaps make search engine crawlers’ job easier to find all important links from your website which can again be helpful to get your website in noticeable positions of search engines.
- Crawl Errors: An important section of Google Webmaster Tool that can help you to analyze the crawl errors that your website executes while search engine crawlers run through your webpages. In my SEO consultancy experience, I have found several (I would say hundreds) websites that were affected badly due to crawling errors and by fixing them instantly, I observed that the search engine rankings improved drastically each time.
If you keep an eye on the above data for your website regularly, I am sure that your website will always be ahead of your competition and it will definitely add more revenue to your business by getting more clicks and business from your website.
