From Errors to Excellence: Fix SEO Issues Using Google Search Console
With the ever-changing digital landscape, it is essential to keep your website's SEO healthy. Small mistakes can balloon into lost rankings and traffic if not corrected immediately. In this digital landscape comes Google Search Console, GSC— a free and powerful tool that gives actionable insights to diagnose and fix SEO problems. And in this guide, we will walk you through how to use GSC to transform errors in SEO into opportunities for growth that take your site from errors to excellence.
Step-by-Step Guide: Fixing SEO Issues with Google Search Console
1. Verify Your Website on Google Search Console
You must verify ownership of your site before you can work on the issues.
Sign in to GSC and add your property.
Choose a verification method (HTML tag, file upload, DNS record, or Google Analytics).
Once verified, you will get access to the SEO data of your site.
2. Analyze Your Performance Report
The Performance Report provides data on clicks, impressions, CTR, and keyword rankings.
Identify pages that are being heavily crawled but lack any meaningful CTR.
Meta Title and Description Optimisation
Optimize the meta title and description to enhance their attractiveness.
Work on pages ranking on page 2 for searches and get them promoted to page 1.
3. Indexing Problems
Look at the Indexing Report to find pages which are not being indexed.
Error: Pages Excluded – Don't know which pages are not included in indexing because of "noindex" tags or robots.txt directives.
Error: Crawled But Not Indexed – Improve the page for quality to Google's quality guidelines
URL Inspection Tool – Request indexing for fixed pages.
4. Fix Mobile Usability Issues
With mobile-first indexation, mobile usability will now be very important to rankings.
Move to Mobile Usability Report to detect issues such as text that is too small to read or clickable elements are too close together.
Tune them in by making your site mobile-responsive and provides for a smooth user experience.
5. Core Web Vitals Issues
Core Web Vitals is a new ranking parameter that measures page experience. Use the Core Web Vitals Report to for solving :
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Image optimization and server response time reduction.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) : Images and videos to use fixed-width dimensions to be avoided from unexpected layout shifting
First Input Delay (FID) : Reduce JavaScript payloads to allow smooth interaction
6. Correct Coverage Errors
Coverage errors are pages that Google could not crawl or index. They include:
404 Errors (Not Found): Implement 301 redirects to send users to relevant pages for broken URLs.
Server Errors (5xx): Analyse the server log to solve the hosting or database-related issue.
Duplicate Content Use canonical tags to indicate a preferred version of a page.
7. Optimize Your Sitemap
A clean, updated sitemap makes sure Google can find all your important pages.
SUBMIT YOUR SITEMAP Submit your sitemap through the Sitemaps Report in GSC.-
Clean out unnecessary or irrelevant pages in your sitemap.
8. Track and Build Backlinks
The Links Report in GSC reveals sites that are linking to your domain.
Identify spammy or low-quality backlinks and disavow them with Google's Disavow Tool.
Create high-authority backlinks by guest posting and better content.
Further Info
1. Look for Critical Errors in the Coverage Report
Coverage report is the very first thing you look at in GSC to identify the problematic area; it lists any indexing errors, crawl errors, and non-indexed pages.
Main Steps
Go through the Error Status for issues like "404 Not Found" or server errors.
"Crawled - currently not indexed" pages: mark areas to be optimized
Missing pages: apply 301 redirects in order to maintain the link equity.
Pro Tip: Regenerate your sitemap every so often and resubmit it to GSC so Google's crawlers crawl all of your priority pages.
2. Mobile Usability
Over 60% of web traffic originates from mobile. This is, therefore a critical need. The Mobile Usability Report report in GSC will list areas that would be a ranking obstacle.
What to Fix:
Ensure no two clickables are too close to one another.
Ensure the contents fit in the screen.
Make the fonts high enough so that the written text will still be readable on smaller devices.
Quick Win: Run your site's mobile performance directly from GSC with Google's Mobile-Friendly Test.
3. Site Performance with Core Web Vitals
Page experience is now a ranking signal, and GSC's Page Experience Report gives insight into metrics such as LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), FID (First Input Delay), and CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift).
Steps to Improve:
Compress images which may occupy too much space and therefore prolong the time of loading.
Removes render-blocking resources such as large JavaScript or CSS.
Uses lazy loading for non-critical resources.
4. Utilize the URL Inspection Tool
The URL Inspection Tool is one of the most important diagnostic tools to discover specific problems on specific pages.
How to Use It:
Inspect pages to check on their indexing status and discover crawl errors.
After making some changes request reindexing to quicken updates
Use it to test if schema markup or structured data is live
5. Monitor Performance Data for Keyword Opportunities
A Performance Report enables you to understand what people are searching for on your site through the search engines.
Monitor the following metrics:
Queries That Show Frequent Traffic but Low CTR: Update titles and meta description to make them more click-worthy.
Pages Losing Traffic: Refresh older content to recover lost rankings.
Emerging Keywords: Discover new search phrases to create relevant content
6. Link Management and Optimization
For an efficient SEO strategy, a good link profile is crucial. GSC's Links Report will let you know whether your backlink strategy is working or if internal links are ailing.
What To Do
Identify the best of your linking domains, such that you can strengthen the relationships with those domains or replicate their strategies
Add interlinks from weak pages to powerful ones in your site
Disavow links that could harm rankings for your web page
7. Fix and Optimize Rich Results
Rich snippets give you more search visibility for higher CTRs. The Enhancements Report of GSC indicates schema markups errors.
Steps to Improvement
Fix the errors with structured data for product, FAQ, or review schemas.
Check your structured data using the Google's Rich Results Testing Tool.
Double-check that your changes are made in GSC once the errors are corrected.