SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is the practice of improving a website’s visibility and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). SEO covers a whole range of elements, from the words that you choose to put down on each page (which is how most people think of SEO), to technical elements such as metadata and how fast your site is.
While it can be a complex field, there are several quick and easy steps you can take to improve your website’s performance. In this blog post, we’ll explore three free Google tools that can help you achieve significant SEO gains – and they’re free. Let’s jump in!
1. Google Search Console: Your SEO dashboard
Get Google Search Console set up ASAP. Google Search Console (GSC) is a powerful tool that provides valuable insights into your website’s performance in Google Search, telling you when different kinds of on-site SEO issues come up so you don’t even need to do the legwork.
By setting up Google Search Console, you can:
- Submit sitemaps: Help Google discover and index your website’s pages more efficiently.
- Monitor website health: Identify and address technical issues that may be affecting your website’s indexing and ranking.
- View search performance: Track your website’s organic search traffic, impressions, clicks, and average position.
- Identify crawl errors: Diagnose and fix issues that may be preventing Google’s search bots from crawling your website effectively.
If you already have Analytics running on your website, you can simply link the two when you set up GSC and don’t even need to put any additional code on your site.
We’d recommend starting by submitting your sitemap (under ‘Indexing’) to speed up the process of Google identifying pages – it can identify them in other ways though. If you have a WordPress website, you usually just have to paste “sitemap_index.xml” into the URL box and click submit.
Then the Pages report (also under ‘Indexing’), which will quickly tell you if you have pages that aren’t being indexed, and why, so you can fix it.
2. Google My Business: Optimise for local SEO
If your business has a physical location, Google My Business is essential for local SEO. By creating a Google My Business profile, you can:
- Improve local visibility: Increase your chances of appearing in local search results and on maps.
- Provide valuable information: Share your business’s address, phone number, website, hours of operation, and services.
- Encourage customer engagement: Respond to customer reviews and post updates about your business.
- Enhance your Google Maps listing: Add photos, videos, and other relevant information to your Google Maps listing.
This all helps towards your SEO – plus you gain a bigger footprint on Google in local searches as your business can appear in different ways..
If you do already have it set up, take the time to check it’s up to date and everything’s still relevant.
3. Google PageSpeed Insights: Boost website speed
Website speed is a critical factor in both user experience and SEO. Google PageSpeed Insights can help you assess your website’s performance and identify areas for improvement. The tool provides insights into factors such as:
- Page load time: Measure how quickly your website loads.
- Mobile optimisation: Evaluate your website’s performance on mobile devices.
- Performance recommendations: Receive specific suggestions for improving your website’s speed, including optimising images, reducing CSS and JavaScript, and enabling compression.
Enter your URL, and the software will diagnose performance issues that will affect your speed… and speed affects your search rankings. We want to see green! Pay particular attention to mobile results. This one could require a developer to fix issues if you find any.
It could be that some images on your website are too large and stopping pages from loading quickly, or some kind of technical issue – either way, Google will tell you what’s causing the issue.
Everyone loves a quick win!
Obviously, SEO is a much bigger issue than these three tools can manage, but by leveraging these free tools, you can significantly improve your website’s SEO and attract more organic traffic. We hope this helps you make a start – all incremental improvement counts!
Remember, SEO is an ongoing process, so it’s important to regularly monitor your website’s performance and make necessary adjustments. And of course, if you need any support, from reports to technical support to content writing, we’re here to help.
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