GSC Google Search Console

GSC Google Search Console Primer

We spend a lot of time with Google and GSC on our websites. Reasons we use include:

identifying what topics are of interest – our top topic for last three months is “Walmart Replacing Self-Checkout”.
We generally use several sources for this including Adwords and Trends
Updated content (pages and posts) should be reindexed once you modify the. If there is an error or new additional info then you want Google to have the latest copy.
Performance – Google prefers faster sites — you can check your Core Web Vitals here.
Accessibility – pagespeed dev is a quick check of how your site measures in desktop and in mobile iteration as far as Google’s baselines for accessibility (not a bad standard to keep in mind). We also like Accessibility Insights built-in free function that Microsoft includes with Edge
Another tip is to use Google programmable search engine. You can see that on our hopepage and it is ad-free Google search to see what Google sees when it looks at your site(s).

Google Search Console: What is GSC & How to Use it to Improve SEO:

Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool that helps website owners and marketers track, analyze, maintain, and fix their websites.
It provides data on how your website performs in search engine results pages (SERPs), customer experience, ROI, and organic traffic.
Key features include tracking impressions, average ranking, highest-traffic pages, CTR, indexing, backlinks, and usability issues.
To get started, add and verify your website in GSC, explore different sections, and use the data to optimize your site for better performance.

Good reference article

GSC Google Search Console

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Google Search Tip

Try this for searching google — https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14&tbs=li:1

The &s is your search term

On both browsers, you probably can’t edit the existing Google listing, so you’ll need to create a new search shortcut, call it Google Web, and use https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 as the URL.

Our method for killing AI search is defaulting to the new “web” search filter, which Google recently launched as a way to search the web without Google’s alpha-quality AI junk. It’s actually pretty nice, showing only the traditional 10 blue links, giving you a clean (well, other than the ads), uncluttered results page that looks like it’s from 2011. Sadly, Google’s UI doesn’t have a way to make “web” search the default, and switching to it means digging through the “more” options drop-down after you do a search, so it’s a few clicks deep.

While you’re in here messing around with Google’s URL parameters, another one you might want to add is “&tbs=li:1”. This will automatically trigger “verbatim” search, which makes Google use your exact search inputs instead of fuzzy searching everything, ignoring some words, replacing words with synonyms, and generally doing whatever it can to water down your search input. If you’re a Google novice, the default fuzzy search is fine, but if you’re an expert that has honed your Google Fu skills since the good old days, the fuzzy search is just annoying. It’s just a default, so if you ever find yourself with zero results, hitting the “tools” button will still let you switch between “verbatim” and “all results.”

Defaulting to “web” search will let you use Google with only the 10 blue links, and while that feels like rolling the interface back to 2011, keep in mind you’re still not rolling back Google’s search results quality to 2011. You’re still going to be using a search engine that feels like it has completely surrendered to SEO spammers. So, while this Band-Aid solution is interesting, things are getting so bad that the real recommendation is probably to switch to something other than Google at this point. We all need to find another search engine that values the web and tries to search it. As opposed to Google, which increasingly seems like it’s trying to sacrifice the web at the altar of AI.

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