On May 24, Google Search advocate Daniel Waisberg presented a live webinar where he gave insights into how to use Google Search Console to identify and fix issues that will help you optimize your website to succeed in Google Search. He also discussed how to leverage Google Trends to understand traffic patterns and benchmark your own data against industry trends.
Meet your hosts:
Daniel Waisberg, Search Advocate, Google
Daniel is a Search Advocate at Google, working on the Search Relations team. He educates and inspires the Search community, and works with the engineering team to develop new capabilities. Before joining Search, he spent 6 years in Google Analytics, focusing on data analysis and visualization.
Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO
Branding, Wix
Mordy is the Head of SEO Branding at Wix. Concurrently he also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is one of the organizers of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. He also hosts the SEO Rant Podcast and Edge of the Web’s news podcast.
Webinar highlights and learning resources
Optimize content with insights from Google
During the conversation, Daniel explained that SEOs should consider optimizing content using Google’s live data about the kinds of content that are in high demand across their networks. The top resources which were mentioned were Question Hub and Google Trends.
Question hub
Question Hub is a tool that provides a series of questions which are not answered on Google search results. It uses aggregated data from search results to provide content recommendations.
Google explains that the tool is designed, “to identify content gaps online” which can be instrumental in making SEO gains.
Google Trends
Google Trends shows the trending topics that people are searching for and gives anonymized data on the growth or decline of user interest in a given topic. The geographical filters and related queries function provide additional insights and inspiration.
Through Question Hub and Google Trends, Google gives you the opportunity to access their primary information to satisfy the needs of users. Creating content in this way is great for SEO and your business overall.
Increase visibility with structured data
Structured data is a means of giving Google and other search engines standardized information which can be used to create Rich Results in the SERP. Daniel shared two resources to help SEOs improve their visibility with structured data.
Rich Results Gallery
For those interested in using structured data to appear in Google’s Rich Results, the Rich Results Gallery is a fantastic tool. As well as showcasing all of the Rich Results which Google uses on the SERP, there are links to the the documentation for each result and examples of valid markup.
In the session, they explained how you can use the Wix SEO Tools to create and modify structured data and how Wix’s built-in SEO defaults are enabled to support rich results for all users.
Rich Results Testing Tool
With the Rich Results Testing Tool you can validate your code in real time to identify any issues with regards to your structured data implementation. This tool is specific to Google, so it will show you what is eligible for their Rich Results, and give you previews of what the content may look like in the SERP. Pairing this with the Google Search Console Enhancements report can help you address issues with structured data that is eligible for Rich Results.
Improve performance with Google Search Console
Daniel explained that Google identifies three drivers on the web: users, publishers, and Google. He explained that as Google sees it, the users are looking for information, publishers are making information, and Google is trying to organize the information from publishers for users. According to Daniel, Google Search Console sits between the publishers and Google to help publishers to create better content for users.
Google Search Console enables website owners and publishers to improve performance in a number of ways:
Alerts and checks
As a Google Search Console user, Google will send you an alert to let you know when there is a new issue on your website. These notifications can help you address issues as they arise and make changes before they cause disruption. Daniel reminded us that site owners should log in to GSC regularly to monitor overall performance because notifications will not continue if the issue gets worse. So having an SEO plan can help your overall performance.
Fixes and validation
If you have an issue you can make changes to your page by using tools for Coverage Status, Page Enhancements, View Crawled Page, and Test Live URL. Each of these elements will give you further details on how to address your errors.
Once you have corrected the issue, you can click Validate Fix, and GSC will update you when they have checked the page and registered the improvement.
Monitor and optimize
In the Performance Report you can understand your performance on topics, queries and more. This data can help you to create new content or improve content that you already have.
In the session, they discussed how Wix site owners can connect directly to Google Search Console to get indexed and access some of these tools for their sites.