Jet's Favorite Freesources: Google Search Console
It’s been a long time since we posted a Freesource! For the uninitiated, a “freesource” is a free, or almost free, resource that can improve your pet store’s marketing strategy or organization by bringing your pet store better ROI, saving you time, or improving on the structural processes of your business.
Take a moment to check out our other Freesources for pet stores - we cover a handful of different topics with tools and resources that can improve your pet store SEO, pet store social media, pet store websites, pet store email marketing, and pet store event marketing. You can also join our Facebook group: THE group for marketing help for pet businesses with the button below.
Today, let’s dig into Google Search Console and how that can improve your pet store’s website and pet store SEO efforts over time.
Google Search Console
For Pet Stores
Optimizing your pet store website for conversions and/or leads is one of the best investments (time and money) that you can make for your business. Your website is selling while you sleep, so ensuring that it runs smoothly and provides you with actionable data can be a lifesaver.
Google Search Console is a useful, although sometimes complicated tool that can help you address your pet store website’s needs. It can help you find what your site struggles with, and it can help you learn about how people are (or are not) finding your website.
benefits for pet store owners
Google Search Console is free, and it helps you monitor, maintain, and maximize your pet store website’s presence organically on search engines like Google and Bing
Google Search Console helps you maintain good standing with Google and can help you understand why your site performs well or poorly in search results
Google Search Console provides Google with access to your content and can help pet store owners monitor spam issues to keep your site clean, submit new content to be crawled and indexed by Google, and allows you to remove old and dated content from Google’s scans.
Google Search Console provides detailed data on website traffic, rankings, search results, site errors, redirect issues, and more that you won’t be able to find solely in Google Analytics.
If you can see the benefits of this, but don’t have the time or marketing department to set this up, that’s a sign that you’re reading to hire a pet store marketing team - you would benefit from a call with one of our Pet Engine Marketing specialists. We are able to offer you a free 30-minute consultation and marketing audit to start, so take advantage of the button below and schedule a call at your convenience.
Setting up
Setting up is easy and shouldn’t take more than a minute. Head over to https://search.google.com/search-console/welcome and enter your URL and add a property to start the process.
Once you’ve added the property, you’ll need to verify your URL - there are a few ways to do this, but it’s easiest if you’re already using Google products like domain ownership or GSuite or Gmail. Once you’ve linked or created your account, you can start learning the basics.
Using Google Search Console
The options menu on your left is your dashboard, and from there you can navigate into numerous detailed reports. Like any Google property, it takes some time to begin loading data, so the sooner you get GSC added to your pet store’s website, the better off you will be as you will have a deeper data pool to analyze from and make decisions with.
Here’s a quick list of some of the different data sets you can access:
Search traffic
Search rankings
Search queries
404 errors and broken links
Security issues
Indexed links
Web tools
The biggest issue for beginners is that Google Search Console is great at finding and notifying you of issues - but not great at providing actionable ways to fix these issues. That’s another area where having a marketing expert on your team can help your pet store SEO rankings. Contact Pet Engine Marketing when you’re reading to start growing your pet store! But for our free community members, we’re happy to share our knowledge and provide some Insider tips.
Google Search Console Best Practices
With Google Search Console, useful keyword data is easily available: clicks, impressions, CTR, and even ranking/positions for given search queries and pages. When it comes to pet store SEO, it’s great to know which search queries you are performing well or poorly in, and these can inform your pet store SEO strategy on where to focus growth in.
Instead of fumbling blindly in the dark when it comes to pet store search engine optimization, you can learn how your pages are performing for a specific keyword and use the data to inform future decisions or changes on your sites and pages.
And here’s the kicker: any paid SEO tool or service you use will ask (or they SHOULD) that you enable Google Search Console so that they can utilize and repackage this data to improve. This is data that you usually pay for, and instead, it’s free with Google Search Console if you have the time and interest to learn it yourself.
Use this data to help inform you about the keywords that are performing best and to track the efforts of some of your other SEO campaigns. You can even use this to create new content that people are interested in and searching for right now - we do this all the time! When we find new topics in search query data, it gets turned into an Insider post.
Google Search Console is a great tool if you want to gain more organic traffic, and therefore more top-of-the-funnel views and impressions on your pet business.
Google Search Console
For Pet Stores
Conclusion
We’ve really only scratched the surface here, but there are numerous ways that Google Search Console can improve your pet store’s marketing strategy and pet store SEO. When it comes to analyzing search data and website issues that need fixing to improve your website on Google’s rankings and algorithms, Search Console is a great free starting point and we highly recommend it.
Optimizing your site for conversions is key, and the more conversions your pet store website gets, the more new customers will come into the store. Having a website that generates conversions while you sleep is an achievable and realistic dream, but it does require some hard work and dedication. Using Google Search Console is one of the best methods and tools to find problems, improve your site, and become aware of new opportunities to grow in.
If you’re looking for a great pet store SEO service, Pet Engine Marketing can help improve your organic traffic and rankings. Contact us today to get started.
