Google Search Console: One SEO tool to rule them all

Mordy Oberstein:

It's a new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by our wonderful Head of SEO Communications, the one, the only, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

It's me. Hello, internet people. Hi. Hello, Mordy.

Mordy Oberstein:

Hello. You just gave me a recommendation for a show. That's first time you've ever recommended anything to me to... Oh, scratch that. You've made many recommendations to me, not a watching recommendation. So I'm excited.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, it's good.

Mordy Oberstein:

How about telling what the audience is. I'm not telling you what it is.

Crystal Carter:

I really enjoyed it. It was a good show. It had a lot of interesting things and the pace was good. I like a show that moves along and has a lot of pace.

Mordy Oberstein:

There was a show I was watching with my wife and it was a good show, but they could have wrapped it up in one episode and it was nine.

Crystal Carter:

Honestly, honestly, when they drag it out. Also, I don't like it when people introduce too many characters at once and too much information. I'm like, "Give me one character and fan out from there." If you give me 12 characters and all of their details straight at once, I cannot cope. But I love an ensemble cast. That's all good. But you need somebody who's like-

Mordy Oberstein:

Slowly, but surely.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, they meet this person. Then you find out about them. Then they meet the next person, you find out about them. If they're like, "This person's here and that person." I'm like, "It's too much. I'm both bored and confused." I don't like it.

Mordy Oberstein:

I feel like marketers, there's a lot you can take away for your content strategy from what these shows do wrong so much.

Crystal Carter:

Honestly, do you know, I genuinely, when I'm doing deliverables for SEO projects, I structure them like soap operas.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh really? You have people who are in various scandals?

Crystal Carter:

No.

Mordy Oberstein:

Marrying other people.

Crystal Carter:

Basically, in a soap opera, what will happen is during the season, there'll be one long story that runs in the background, like, who did that mysterious thing, or whose glove was it that was found in wherever? And they'll give you a little bit of that story every time for every episode. But then on every episode, there's also little stories that happen as well, and they will conclude a story on every episode. So every month, you should have something that you definitely finish. And over the course of say, six months of your deliverables, you should have something that you're chipping away at as you go. So it's the big thing that you want to build up to, like building up a content portfolio, or maybe you want to be more competitive on a certain thing. So you chip away at that every month, and it might be a long term project, but you move it forward a little bit every month.

Mordy Oberstein:

And who says soap operas were worthless, other than me? My grandma used to love them. I'm like, "I don't know what this thing is. This is terrible." But anyway, the SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where traffic thresholds for core web vitals are a thing of the past. Google Search Console not giving you field data that you so desire? Use Wix's speed dashboard. Get field data built off user sessions from multiple browsers. No more guessing what your actual core web vitals are with Wix's site speed dashboard. That is absolutely novel, by the way. And I don't think people appreciate that.

Crystal Carter:

I love it so much because you want to do better. And with Google Search Console, we're going to talk loads about Google Search Console and you get some fantastic information from it. Don't get me wrong, it's fantastic and amazing and wonderful. However, if you are a smaller site, you don't get a lot of that core web vitals information until you reach a certain threshold of traffic. In the meantime, you're just sort of wondering.

Mordy Oberstein:

Guessing.

Crystal Carter:

Guessing.

Mordy Oberstein:

Because the lab data and the field data, the data that Google's giving you, that's simulated to what users actually experience, also known as lab data, is not very close to the actual user experience.

Crystal Carter:

It's very different. It's very different and it might include you as well. And if you're a small site, then you checking your blog 20 times, let's say you're only getting, I don't know, 70 people coming to that blog, then that's going to be a big portion of the traffic, for instance. So anyway, I'm just saying it's really, really useful if you're trying to make these improvements and also, if you're trying to make these improvements for maybe future traffic that you're going to get. Because if you're like, "We're going to be huge, this blog's going to be amazing, this shop's going to be incredible," you want to make sure that you're able to build and to get off on the right footing. And that report is a great place to start.

Mordy Oberstein:

And you don't need to use total blocking time is a really bad simulation for FID, which is amazing. They're not similar at all.

Anyway, on this show, one tool to rule them all, and it's not the speed dashboard we just mentioned, it's a different tool. Or conversely, you could say if you were stuck on a desert island and you can only bring one tool with you to do your SEO with, which would you bring? The answer of course is Search Console. But why? We'll get into the value of Google Search Console today and what it can provide you with, whether you're a business owner or an SEO or a marketer of any kind.

Also, Lazarina Stoy will stop by and share how she extracts value out of Google Search Console. Plus, we'll dive into a little tool from Screaming Frog to help you maximize your Google Search Console prowess. Of course, we'll get into some Snappy News and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness as episode 12 of the SERP's Up podcast is knocking on your audio doors.

So much to get into with Search Console. But I think maybe we should sort of explain Search Console a little bit if you're not so familiar with it. Because when you talk about SEO tools, it can get complicated quickly.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. So Google Search Console is sometimes abbreviated GSC. If you're on Twitter, if you're online, if you see SEOs chatting with each other, they will talk about Google Search Console like this.

Mordy Oberstein:

Or just SC.

Crystal Carter:

SC. Okay, yeah. For the in crowd.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

And essentially, what Google Search Console does is it gives you information on how Google is seeing your website. So it's not exactly the same as Google Analytics. Google Analytics will give you information about all of the traffic that's coming through to your website that they can track. So you add a tag to your website and then they will tell you about all of the different channels. So from a marketing point of view, it's absolutely crucial for you to have Google Analytics. Sometimes, SEOs will almost exclusively have access to Google Search Console. But what Google Search Console is really, really good for is understanding how Google is seeing your content, both which rich results you might get and which result is some of those cards. For instance, if you ever Google and you see a recipe card, that's a rich result.

If you see a job listing for instance, that's a rich result as well. Product listings, those are also rich results and they show at the top of the SERP. And Google Search Console will tell you about how many of them they are showing and will tell you about which pages they are pulling them from. Google Search Console will also tell you about ranking, where you're ranking on Google. They'll also tell you about which pages are actually in their index. And when we talk about indexing and crawling, Google Search Console will also tell you the difference. So they'll tell you, "We've crawled this page, but we have not put it in any index."

And if you don't know what the difference between those two things are, it's essentially like if you were trying to be a pop star musician and you wanted to be top of the charts, you would have to get played on the radio at some point probably. So what being index is like being played on the radio. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be top of the charts, that you're going to have a Billboard Award or that sort of thing, but it means you've been played on the radio, so you registered on their index. If you have not been played on the radio, you can't necessarily be top of the charts first. So you need to make sure that you're indexed and that you're crawled. So just because your crawled doesn't mean that you're indexed, just because your indexed doesn't mean that you rank.

Mordy Oberstein:

Just because your content doesn't mean you deserve to be indexed because some content shouldn't be indexed.

Crystal Carter:

Right, exactly. So there's a lot of different nuances within that. Google Search Console breaks down all of the different parts of it. We, at Wix, have recently released our Google Search Console URL inspection tool. And as part of that, we've got a great blog on the Wix SEO Learning Hub, which Mordy explains what the tool does. And one of the good things about that is we also put together a list of understanding, within our support tool documents, there's also a list of understanding what those things mean, what the different differentiations mean. So discovered in non-indexed and crawl, but non-indexed, that sort of thing. So dig into those as well. There's also lots of links in that documentation to lots of the Google details as well.

So yeah, it can be complicated, but it can also be fairly straightforward. So they try to make sure that the reports are really easy to access for people of all different knowledge abilities. And you can also see lots of things about your links. You can also see lots of things about whether or not you've got security things, whether or not you've had a glitch in your server. You can carry out a very detailed technical SEO audit using Google Search Console almost exclusively if you need to.

But one of the limitations of Google Search Consoles, it only tells you what's happening on Google, and it only tells you what's happening on Google organically. So you can't get information on your traffic from Facebook, you can't get information on your traffic from paid. You can't get information on your traffic from other search engines like say Bing or Baidu or whatever it is. So those are the limitations. Bing Webmaster Tools also has something very similar to Google Search Console and it can be interesting to compare the two to see how your site is being crawled. And yeah, it's a great tool. Publication called the State of Technical SEO asked over 800 SEOs, which tools they use for their technical SEO. And 93% of SEOs said they use Google Search Console. So if you want to do better with your SEO, getting into Google Search Console is really important.

Mordy Oberstein:

Which is what we kind of plan on doing today. But what we're kind of going to do is give you sort of an overview of some of the things that it can do and why it's so valuable. But I think the most important thing for you to do is after listening to this, if you are familiar with Search Console, to play around with it more. And if you're not familiar with Search Console, play around with it because it is kind of intuitive once you poke around a little bit and sort of experiment with what's going on in there.

Out of all the tools, I would say Google Analytics, like, whoa, okay, you got to take a step back, you got to really get into it, especially GA4. But Search Console's not that way. A lot of the reporting is pretty straightforward. Some of the more technical things around indexing are not, but you can find good documentation around it. But kind of what you said is really the value of Search Console, that it does everything. It's so comprehensive, it talks to you about how many clicks you're getting. It talks how your pages are performing on Google. It also gives you a more technical analysis. You can look at things like which Google bots are crawling your website and how often are they crawling your website? There's a lot of great data in there and there's data around links and it's all free.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, it's all free. I think we talk a lot about SEO generally. But if you are not familiar with Google Search Console and you are a Wix user, you have the ability to, within the SEO set of checklists, connect directly to Google Search Console as you set up your Wix website. And this is fantastic. You also have built into the CMS a URL inspection tool that allows you to see information about Google Search Console, about your index ability for individual pages. And that, I think, is testament to how important a team at Wix thinks Google Search Console is and I think it's a testament to how important we think it is for SEO success. So yeah, it's a great tool.

And I think that you mentioned that it's fairly accessible and I've had before where people are like, "Oh, Google Search Console, what's so great about that?" And I think sometimes people look at it and they go, "This is really basic information," and it's actually not. It's almost deceptively simple. The way it's presented is pretty straightforward. But you can also get very clear information about which keywords you're actually ranking for, which is really interesting because you might be trying to rank for one thing, but the keywords that you're actually ranking for might be very, very different. So it's worth looking at the keywords that you're ranking for and the keywords that different pages are ranking for.

You can also filter by region. So for instance, if you're seeing that you're getting a lot of traffic, but maybe it's not very relevant, you can filter by region and see maybe you're ranking really, really well in another country. I've seen this happen before. Maybe you're ranking it really, really well in a different country, but actually, you serve customers locally. And so you should be looking at the rankings for your country that you're in. So this can happen sometimes when countries share a similar language. So I've seen it where people based in England were ranking in the US and it wasn't that valuable to them because they could only serve clients in the UK. So we had to adjust our Search Console filters so that we were only looking at where we were ranking in the UK. And then we could make better, more actionable SEO strategies.

Mordy Oberstein:

You can definitely get super complicated with the filters. I implore you to look at the filters, but don't necessarily think it's super complicated either with the filters, there's just basic comparisons you can do. And again, you're seeing things like, okay, so three months ago, how many clicks did I get versus now, how many clicks am I getting? And that's also one of the things you can do great with Search Console. One of the unique things about Search Console is you can see the impressions that you're getting, meaning your pages are showing up on Google, but you're not getting any clicks. Why is that? Perhaps my title tags are just absolutely horrific and I don't know, they just say home for homepage.

Crystal Carter:

Right, right.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm ranking but no one's clicking.

Crystal Carter:

Right, exactly. So that's a really, really interesting one. So people sometimes show impressions. Impressions aren't always great. Sometimes if the impressions you have are for keywords that aren't relevant for your website, then you need to retune your content. And when you're looking at the performance report, you can see total clicks. Total clicks, that's pretty straightforward. Those are themes that people actually clicked on. And your impressions is when somebody entered a query and your content was shown. They might not have clicked on it, but your content was shown after somebody entered a query. The click through rate is essentially one divided by the other. So for every 10 times that your content was shown, one person clicked on it. Is that 10% click through rate? I don't know. That would be really, really high.

Mordy Oberstein:

Math. It's really high by the way, 10% click through rate.

Crystal Carter:

That's really high. 10% click through rate is very high. You might have that for one particular query, like maybe for your brand or something like that. And then your average position is the average place where you rank.

Mordy Oberstein:

You should be careful with that one because it's not exactly accurate and it should give you a general sense of things. By the way, data in general gives you a general sense of things. The numbers are never going to be actually exact, even in Search Console, even though it's Google data. But it does kind of bring up why you sometimes, or best practice would be to use a third party tool for various things. If a queue were to super important to you, you see that you're getting a lot of impression and clicks for it in Search Console, then that's something you might want to track in a rank tracking tool. Because the average rank studies have shown is less than accurate all the time.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. I almost never rely on a single data source for a particular bit of information because Google Search Console's obviously getting information from Google. Sometimes with Google Search Console, you don't get the information straight away. So sometimes, you might not see the data, like you might not see yesterday's data straight away. You might have to wait a couple of days before the data comes through, which sometimes if you've got a flash sale or if you've got some very important news that's dropping, then you might want to know where you were ranking on that day. So that can be tricky. But yeah, I would very rarely rely on a single source.

Also, this is one of the reasons why I bring up Bing. Bing also gives you information on those things. So for instance, if your ranking suddenly drop in Google Search Console, it's worthwhile checking what your rankings are like on Bing to see if they've changed as well or if they're the same. And again, the other thing about Bing and Google Search Console is that if you're like, "I don't spend a lot of time on Bing," that's okay. When you go to Bing to set up your analytics, you go to Bing Webmaster, I think it's Bing Webmaster Tools, and you can connect to Google Search Console with one click and they will pull through all of the information you have from there into their system. So again, if you see your ranking suddenly change in Google Search Console and they don't change in Bing, then it might be that there was an algorithm update that affected you in Google and didn't affect you in Bing. If you see that they both change really quickly, then it might be that there's a technical issue on your website.

Mordy Oberstein:

Which again, the tools can help you with because you can check out indexing issues which is by the way, I think it's really important these days. Because I think things that are changing around indexing. I think Google is being a little more choosier about what it decides to index. So a little bit of a myth that every page should be in. No, if there's a page that's not really helpful. Imagine had a page and all it was, was like a sign up button for subscribe to an email, a newsletter. That's not a very useful page. Google's probably not going to index that page and nor should it really be indexed. It's really meant for people who are already on your site to follow through and subscribe to your newsletter, whatever it is.

Crystal Carter:

Right, absolutely. And I think that you should be very, very much, it's all killer, no filler. You want to make sure that you've got your most important pages indexed. And sometimes, you look in the discover not indexed and you say, "There's a lot of URLs there." Well, look at which ones they are. Sometimes they're UTMs because sometimes those get indexed. Sometimes they're from different campaign ads, sometimes they are category pages that might not necessarily be-

Mordy Oberstein:

Archive pages.

Crystal Carter:

Archive pages. Sometimes they're old links from an old URL that Google knows about and they need to know about that so that they can manage the redirect so that they can pay attention to how that traffic flows and the value of those URLs. So for instance, if you had an old domain and you migrated it to, let's say it was HTTP and you migrated it to HTTPS, then those are two different URLs to Google. So they might very well still have in their record the old URL and that will be discovered but not indexed. That's something they know about, but they don't have that in the index because they're indexing the new one. They're doing you a favor. So that's something to think about as well. So look at which ones are discovered and not indexed. If you see something in there that you're like, "Wait a second, that should absolutely be indexed," then there's a couple of things that you can do, and we might talk about that on another podcast.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, and don't afraid because you're going to see all these different, crawl but not indexed, discovered but not indexed, all these different statuses. And they might seem confusing, but there's a lot of documentation Google has around them and there's a lot of great resources around what they mean and how to possibly fix them. So if you see them crawl but not indexed, it could be very much that you have a page that's very, very similar. And Google's like, "Well, we already have this page on the index so we're not going to put it there." But for you it's very different. And then a different intent or might be more of a commerce intent or transactional intent rather.

So definitely pay attention to what's happening in there because Google, again is getting a little bit choosier. The way I think about it is if Google's better understanding content, it's going to be choosier about what it decides to index or not to index. And as it gets better at doing that, which it has been in more recent times is getting better that, it's going to get choosier and choosier about what gets indexed, which means there could be real issues for you. So don't be afraid of putting your toe into that index kind of stuff and to the page's reports that you have in there inside of Search Console. Research, ask questions, dig into it because it's super important, even though it might seem a little bit daunting to deal with it.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, don't be afraid of it and ask for help. The SEO community can be really helpful and there's absolutely opportunities for that. And I think the more signals you can give Google about which pages are most important to you, the better. We've talked about internal linking, for instance. Internal linking is a great signal for telling Google that something is an important page. It's like people sending lots of referrals to someone. If they're getting lots of referrals, then that's going to tell Google that it's an important page. So show them that it's important, don't just assume that they'll figure it out. Show them with links internally, externally, with relevant content, additional schema, lots of things like that.

Mordy Oberstein:

And we'll put some resource into the show notes that'll help you. If you see a certain status in your Search Console reporting, we'll give you some information and resources that you can use to come up some possible solutions to fix those problems. So check out the show notes.

With that, we have a fabulous SEO who's going to share with you how she uses Google Search Console to make well informed SEO decisions, keyword well inform SEO decisions. Here's Lazarina Stoy and how she uses Search Console.

Lazarina Stoy:

I love Google Search Consult and use it daily. There are so many useful reports there and it's ever changing. From the more recent reports, the video indexing feature is something I use to quickly troubleshoot performance of no indexed videos and ensure that the companies I'm working with appear as expected in all the different search types that they're targeting.

I frequently use the page indexation reports as well as the crawl data to identify any changes to crawling behavior and quick fix errors that might be prohibiting pages to appear as expected. These reports can also help signal content issues as well. The enhancements reports are amazing for websites that have structured data implemented because at a glance, I can identify errors as well as the overall effort and strategy implemented, which in turn enables me to better identify opportunities on what can be implemented to enhance the search appearance of websites via featured snippets. Often, not very much used by SEOs, but still a super useful report for anyone that does not have access to SEO tooling is the links report, which can help troubleshoot internal linking strategies and improper use of anchor text. I always recommend this to small website owners to take advantage of.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you, Lazarina. A great point, by the way. She brings up the video reporting in there. That's relatively new. And one thing to keep in mind when you're looking at Search Console and using Search Console is that Google's put a lot of emphasis on dev inside of Search Console and they're constantly refining and bringing in new reporting. So keep an eye for new things inside a Search Console, that'll be really helpful. In this case, the video is absolutely super cool if you have a very, very video intensive website. So keep an eye out for what Google's doing. They're doing a great job over there with their development around Search Console.

Crystal Carter:

And I think particularly, you mentioned the video and she mentions it as well, and I think that one of the other things that's great about Search Console's it tells you what Google cares about. So they add all these features when it's something that they say, if it's not measured, it doesn't matter. That's a thing people say. And if they're measuring it, it means that it matters. So if they've got a whole report all about video, then that tells you that maybe you should have some video on your website. And if you don't have any, then maybe you should consider making some or including some, because with the video report, for instance, it doesn't have to be your YouTube video, it doesn't have to be a YouTube video at all.

But if you have a video that's embedded on your page, then Google is able to see it and it can help your content to perform better and it can help you to track better. Google Search Console also lets you filter by the types of media so you can see where images are ranking and things like that, for instance. And Lazarina, one of the reasons why I was really pleased to have her along here is because she does a lot of really interesting things with Google Search Console. Not just the things she talked about, but also some of the reports that she's able to create by combining Google Search Console data with what was Google Data Studio and is now Looker.

Mordy Oberstein:

Looker, yeah, that's a weird name. Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Huh?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. We'll link to the Google Looker dashboard thing, I don't know what you call it now, in the show notes.

Crystal Carter:

I'm going to look at the Looker.

Mordy Oberstein:

Let's not get into the branding names. That was bizarre to me. But anyway, hey, who are we to judge, right? It works for them. I'm sure they've done their research for it. Looker is definitely a better name than Google Beta Studio.

Crystal Carter:

Are you sure? Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

I kind of like names that where in the name, you can sort of understand what you're going to get out of it.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

With Looker, I kind of feel like, I'm not even going to go there.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Now with that, there are so many, just got to pivot it right out that, there are so many tools that pull in Search Console data. Every SEO tool really does. A few years go ranking tracking tool. Oftentimes, they will let you integrate with Google Search Console through Google Search Console's APIs. You can compare all sorts of ranking data and Search Console data to this data, to that data and to other sorts of the data. As I mentioned before, we integrated with Google's URL inspection tool API to create our site inspection dashboard. So Google's Search Consoles, because it is foundational SEO information, will often be used by various third party SEO tools, which is why we're proud to bring you Tool time by the SERP's UP podcast. This time we're going to Screaming Frog, which itself is a seminal SEO tool and how they pull in Google Search Console's URL inspection API, and what you can do with Screaming Frog.

Crystal Carter:

Screaming Frog, as you mentioned, is a foundational tool. It's used for technical SEO and it allows you... You can also use it for content as well. But it allows you to do a crawl of your website. It allows you to assess your site map and lots of information like that. I use it with Google Search Console to corroborate data to prioritize what things you need to do, for instance. So within Google Search Console, you can submit your site map and that should form the bulk of what gets crawled and what gets indexed. There are sometimes bits of your website that are not in your site map and they sometimes end up being indexed as well. So one of the things you can do with Screening Frog is you can do a different mode, not the standard crawl, but you can do a list, for instance, and you can submit your site map list and then you can crawl that with the Google Search Console API.

And then you can see which things are being indexed from your site map and which things are not being indexed from your site map. And if they're not being indexed, then you can go, "Why isn't this indexed? Should it be in the site map? Should it be indexed? What should we do here?" And so essentially, you can take those little bits of information and you can compare them. Then again, as I say, I very rarely rely on a single thing.

But if you're comparing this with the information you get in, say like the Wix URL inspection tool, then you can also see which part of the site it's in, which site map it's in, which folder it's in, and see if there's some commonalities across URLs that are within the same site map or have the same configuration, for instance. But Screaming Frog, like Google Search Console, is something that it can seem both simple and complicated at the same time. Essentially, if you use Screaming Frog, which you can on a free version, you can see 500 URLs. So you can crawl your website, you pump the URL and you press crawl, and then you can get lots of information on your website.

And it kind of just looks like a spreadsheet and you really need to click around and dig around. I tweeted ages ago, "Has anyone ever completed Screaming Frog? Because I just keep finding more levels." And it's absolutely true because people do incredible things. And you can also export it to different things. So you can export the data from your from Screening Frog as a CSV, and then you can use it in whatever kind of data, whether you're using Excel or whether you're using Google Sheets, or you can connect it directly to Google Sheets and you can export your data there. And then you can do more SEO analysis or more bulk updates from that. But you can see lots of information about both crawl information and also different parts of your site. So your images, your meta descriptions, whether things are indexable, what status could they have, lots of things like that.

Mordy Oberstein:

If you're looking at all the pages that Google has actually crawl but not indexed, and you're able to combine them with all the headers are on those pages, you're like, "Wow, okay, there's a pattern here. There's something going," that's good information. Because you could see there's a content issue with those pages. That's probably the reason why Google's crawled them but hasn't decided to index them. So combining information that these tools allow you to do with Search Console data in all sorts of ways can be super helpful to you.

Crystal Carter:

Super helpful. And I've had it before where I looked at a site and we had a site map, that was fine, and that had loads of URLs in it. And then I ran it through a Screaming Frog with the Spider tool and it only pulled up two URLs. And I was like, "What? What's going on?" And when I ran it through the site map, it was like, "Yeah, you've got all these URLs and they're all 200s," and all that stuff. And I was like, "How come we can't find? Why isn't this?" And essentially, the Spider one is interesting because essentially, it bounces and bounces and bounces and bounces and bounces. If all of your pages are orphans, which is what I found with this one, I did this crawl-

Mordy Oberstein:

Or maybe there's no link to any other page.

Crystal Carter:

There's no link to any of the pages. Then basically the crawler won't crawl.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yep.

Crystal Carter:

It goes to that one page and goes, "Cool. Awesome." So you need to make sure, so it's worth comparing. And within Screaming Frog, you can compare the two. You can compare your site map and your crawl and you can see where the things are missing, and that's worth thinking about as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

And again, all these kind of things, it can be a little bit overwhelming. But again, there's a free version of Screaming Frog. It's really simple to run the site. Just play around. Whatever you get out of it, you get out of it and you go back again. And whatever you get of it next time, you get out of it the next time. Slow and steady runs a race, baby steps.

Crystal Carter:

One thing I will also say about Screaming Frog is that because it's so foundational, there's lots of documentation and lots of SEOs have gone through Screaming Frog and done this, this, that, that and the other. So if there's ever anything you want to find on Screaming Frog and you are not sure, you can Google how to find this on Screaming Frog. There was a blog that I found recently that was like how to do almost everything on Screaming Frog. Their documentation is also very good. And I would say that yeah, if you're stuck on anything, literally just Google it. Don't flounder around for ages. Just Google it and somebody's almost already figured it out.

Mordy Oberstein:

Exactly. You know what else you should be diving into other than Screaming Frog and Google's Search Console, it's the latest and greatest news coming out of the SEO world. Here's this week's Snappy News.

Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News, more reasons to keep an eye on what Google is doing in the e-comm space. If you have to pay attention to one area of Google and what it's up to, e-comm would be it in my honest opinion.

Per Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal. Google introduces new search labels for coupons and promo. So in a nutshell, Google made a bunch of announcements related to their on the SERP shopping experience. For example, the zoo functionality to copy a coupon code from a shopping listing, as well as Google's price insights coming to the search results, which by the way is a nifty little feature that lets you see how much the product typically costs. And the product that you're buying, how much does it typically cost? So in other words, you're getting a good idea if you're getting a good deal or not. To me, by the way, this is where Google's shopping experience really shines. They have the power to give you so much data. And for whatever reason ,Amazon just doesn't. So Google making price data insights accessible to me is basically their way of moving in on Amazon's eCommerce dominance.

Okay, next up from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land. Check this out. Links may be less important to the Google search ranking algorithm in the future. I've been saying this for a long time and thank God. Here's what Google said directly. Here's a direct quote from Google's John Mueller, "Well, it's something where I imagine over time the weight on the links at some point will drop off a little bit as we can't figure out a little bit better how the content fits in within the context of the whole web. And to some extent, links will always be something that we care about because we have to find pages somehow. It's like how do you find a page on the web without some reference to it? But my guess is over time, it won't be such a big factor. Sometimes it is today. I think already, that's something that's been changing quite a bit."

That again, was Google's direct words, John Mueller's direct words, not mine. Just to give you a kind of conceptual understanding of what he's saying. Links are a secondary signal. Links don't tell you whether the content is actually good or not, or it actually answers a question or it's actually usable, digestible, and awesome for the user. Links are a signal that basically say, "Well, so many people keep linking to this page. It must be awesome. We don't really know, but it must be." The better Google gets actually understanding the content, I put a tweet out about this and it got a lot of comments and controversy because people are still really hung up on links, too hung up on links. We spoke about it on a previous episode of the podcast. I think it was episode 10, so check that out. We'll link to it in the show notes.

Links don't tell you how good the actual content is. So if Google's getting better at actually understanding the content, why would they keep so heavily relying on links when they actually understand what the content is saying and therefore, know if it's relevant or awesome, or answers to question is usable and digestible and so forth. So kind of makes sense logically when you think about it. Sorry, link Builders. Anyway, that's been the Snappy News for this week. It's been snappy and it's been news.

Anyway, as we wrap this show up, we were wondering who should we have as a follow of the week. Every week we like to bring somebody else for you to follow on social media, typically on Twitter, because the SEO world's core people live on Twitter. And we're wondering who could it be? Who could it be? Who could it be? We really racked our brains on this one and it was hard to find someone who you should follow. We're talking about Search Console and who could it be?

Crystal Carter:

Oh, man.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's all about Search Console on Twitter.

Crystal Carter:

Somebody who talks about-

Mordy Oberstein:

Somebody who talks about. So maybe somebody who works on the Search Console product over at Google?

Crystal Carter:

They maybe done some videos on it or something.

Mordy Oberstein:

Maybe they have done a few videos, maybe even a webinar or an actual live event actually over at Wix, about Search Console.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, I don't know. I can't think of anyone like that.

Mordy Oberstein:

I know, John Mueller.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, no. I mean, you should follow John. He was our follow of the week, I think two weeks ago, three weeks ago. This week, we're talking about Daniel Waisberg.

Crystal Carter:

The fantastic.

Mordy Oberstein:

The fantastic Daniel Waisberg, Search Advocate over a Google who works on Google's own Search Console team. Who better to follow than the search advocate who works on the Search Console team over at Google? It's Daniel Waisberg.

Crystal Carter:

Daniel Waisberg, who has been at Google for ages working first with the Analytics team and now with Google Search Console. I had a good chat with him at Brighton about all of the new reports and things they keep adding to Google Search Console because they've been refining it a lot this year and it's been really, really great to see all of that.

We have some show notes from the Google Search Console webinar that he did with us in the summer, and he talked about some great things there. And yeah, he's a great advocate and he also talked about a few things that I hadn't heard of. There was one that was new to me, which was the question hub from Google, which is actually new to me. He's extremely knowledgeable about search and very much into his data and a great person to follow if you want to know things about Google Search Console.

Mordy Oberstein:

And a great person overall.

Crystal Carter:

Yes, he's lovely. We love Daniel.

Mordy Oberstein:

We do love Daniel. He's family. So check out Daniel Waisberg, @DanielWaisberg on Twitter. That's D-A-N-I-E-L W-A-I-S-B-E-R-G. It's the W-A-I that might confuse you.

Crystal Carter:

And tell him we sent you.

Mordy Oberstein:

And tell him you followed him because Crystal and Mordy sent you over.

Crystal Carter:

Sure he'll love that.

Mordy Oberstein:

I want keep track. We'll ask him.

Anyway. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with an all new episode, as we satisfy our need for speed with a look at site performance and SEO. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts, or on our learning hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.