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Google Webmasters, currently referred to as Google Search Console (GSC) is instrumental when it comes to ensuring that your site is optimised for Google’s search engine visibility. Essentially, the Google search console helps identify issues with your site, which when addressed can help boost your site’s performance in search results. Optimising the Google webmaster tools enables you to view your site in a manner similar to how Google views it, which is significant in terms of receiving insights of pages that have been indexed from your site, identifying the keywords that your site ranks highly for, and receiving links, impressions and your average position (in terms of ranking on Google SERPs). Generally, Google webmasters through the webmasters tools helps improve the crawling and indexing of your site. This checklist is a comprehensive guide for the application of Google webmasters to optimise your niche site.
Step 1 – Setting up Google Webmaster
1 Sign in the Console website using your Google account.
2 On the upper left corner, click the add property button.
3 Select the URL prefix option.
4 Verify your site (Having a Google Analytics helps with verification too).
5 Submit a sitemap upon verification of your site.
6 Consider installing Google XML Sitemaps plugin.
7 Paste your link address in Google Search Console.
Step 2 – Navigating the GSC Overview
8 Leverage the GSC overview to identify the queries your site shows up for.
9 Analyse the Index Coverage Report to identify Google’s encountered issues on your site.
10 Analyse the URLs that have been indexed by Google on your site.
11 Use the Removal tool to identify the URLs that you have removed.
12 Update your sitemap to refresh the number of URLs submitted.
Step 3 – Core Website Vitals
13 Analyse the usability of your site in GSC.
14 Check the visual stability of your site.
15 Check the speed of your site under GSC’s core website vitals.
Step 4 – Links, Speed, Mobile Usability
16 Leverage GSC’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to optimise your site’s speed for slow connections.
17 Analyse GSC’S crawl stats for an in-depth of Googlebot’s view of your site.
18 Conduct URL inspection to analyse how Google presents URLs on your site.
19 Use the Manual Actions’ tab to check your pages’ compliance with webmaster quality guidelines.
20 Use GSC to see the domains that link to your site and the pages with the most links.
21 Check the ‘Mobile Usability’ tab to ensure alignment with Google’s best practice.
Notes:
• Use tools such as XML Sitemaps to create a sitemap if you do not have one.