How to Use Google Search Console Daily, Weekly, Monthly & Quarterly

Google Search Console (GSC) is a great tool to check up on your SEO and site performance, but the amount of available data can be overwhelming. SEO success doesn’t happen overnight and needs to be tweaked from time to time, and GSC can help you stay on the right track. It would be impossible (and unnecessary) to look through every statistic on GSC every day so we’ve made a checklist for your daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly GSC chores. 

Daily To-Dos ✅

1. Sit back and relax

Take a deep breath. Google Search Console isn’t something you should check in on daily. Instead of having to log in every morning, Google will email you to let you know if something unusual needs your attention immediately. For example, if your site was hacked or if your site violates search guidelines, Google will send you an email to let you know something’s up.

If you’ve just got your site set up on GSC, it’ll also take some time for Google to start indexing your site and for the data to start trickling in. So, don’t keep checking back in constantly, just let Google do it’s thing.

Weekly To-Dos ✅

1. Add Fresh Content

You won’t see much movement in Google Search Console reports if your site is completely stagnant. In order to improve your results, you need to continue adding fresh, new content to your site. The more content you put on your site, the more Google has to crawl and index. Overtime, you’ll see this boost your rankings.

New content can be in the form of blogs posts or additions to the actual pages of your website. As a busy advisor, we understand it can be hard to set aside time to write content. But if you want to see any growth from your site, it’s absolutely crucial to keep it as fresh as you can. Writing a few blogs a month for your niche or adding helpful tips on a section of your website doesn’t take as long as you’d think! If you’re never publishing new content on your site, dust will collect and your search rankings will suffer.

If you can’t keep up with a consistent schedule, we’re here to help. We created Content Assist to make it as easy as possible for advisors to publish unique blog posts that are tailored for their firm’s voice that also speak to their unique niche. See Content Assist in action or get started here.

If you’re adding a completely new page to your site, you should first use the URL inspection tool to make sure Google can access the page. It’s also a good idea to also tell Google which new pages are available to crawl by resubmitting your sitemap.

At Twenty Over Ten, every website on our platform, whether you’ve decided to use our self builder package or are working with our internal team of copywriters and designers, has an XML sitemap. Our platform continuously generates updated XML sitemaps for your website so as you add or remove information and pages, search engines will be notified if these changes.

If you’re a current Twenty Over Ten user, you can access your sitemap at anytime by typing the following into your web browser: yourwebsitedomainhere.com/sitemap.xml. Within GSC, you can navigate to “Sitemaps” under the “Index” section and submit your new sitemap at any time.

2. Optimize Old Blogs

In addition to creating fresh content, it’s also important to go back and touch up old content you’ve created. Peruse through your old blog posts to compile a list of potential posts that you can beef up with some new facts, information, links, and images. At Twenty Over Ten, our team goes through once a week to optimize and fix any issues to help with our SEO juice.

Check up on any statistics that might have changed, add relevant links to new content you’ve created, and make sure all of the old links still work. This will help keep your SEO strategy on track and fix any broken pieces that can be frustrating for Google and site visitors. If you re-publish the blog on the day you optimize it, it will even look like brand new content for Google to crawl through!

Monthly To-Dos ✅

1. Do An Overall Health Check

Now we’re getting to the good stuff – the numbers. Comparing data from month to month can help show you when something’s not quite right with your website. Are there any unusual dips in your clicks? Is your click-through rate suffering? Are there problems with your internal links?

Here are a few factors that should be growing:

• Clicks: The count of clicks from a Google search results page that landed the user on your property.
• Impressions: The amount of links to your site a user saw on Google search results.
• Click-through-rate (CTR): The click count divided by the impression count.
• Position: The average position of the topmost result from your site.  
• External links:This is when someone else is linking to your site from their content.

Here are a few things you want to keep to a minimum:

• Internal link errors
• Problems with mobile usability
• Problems in your index coverage report

2. Review Keywords and Position Rankings on the Performance Report

Through the performance report in GSC, you can easily look at your keyword and position rankings. Your position ranking is the average position of the topmost result from your site. The performance report lists the most significant keyword queries typed into Google by searchers. It also shows you your current position ranking for each keyword and the number of clicks, impressions and click-through rate your site received for each keyword query.

These keywords show what visitors are searching for when they find your website, so you should be incorporating them into your content as much as you can. Try to use these keywords in your blog post titles, header tags, meta descriptions, and other tags.

Quarterly To-Dos ✅

SEO is a long-term campaign, so you have to be patient when measuring its results. You can’t get an accurate picture of your traffic growth after just a few days or weeks, so you’ll have to wait a few months to check on its overall success. And only after a year will you have a stable, reliable figure for your SEO strategy’s ROI. Every few months, check your GSC for the following important data:

1. Check Your Site Errors

Since the internet is constantly changing, things can stop working. If you change your website address or the name of a page on your site, Google can get confused. The site errors section of GSC shows the main issues for the past 90 days that prevented Googlebot from accessing your entire site. You can also check on the URL errors section, which lists specific errors Google encountered when trying to crawl specific desktop or phone pages.

In a well-operating site, the site errors section of the crawl errors report should show no errors. If you have a few errors in the 3 months this section overviews, you’ll need to look into the configuration of your site.

2. Check on Your Links Report

Google makes sense of the web through links, which are a primary factor in Google’s search algorithm. This means the amount of times your content is externally linked (or linked by others) impacts your SEO and rankings, so you’ll want to pay close attention to this metric overtime.

You can’t expect to get linked externally every single day, but you should be seeing at least a few each quarter. If you aren’t getting any external traction with your content, you’ll need to push harder for attention with efforts like a newsletter or posting your content on social media.

The links report will also show you who links to you the most, what your most linked page is, and top linking text that can help steer your content creation. If your content is linked a lot, your audience obviously found it valuable.

3. Look at Your Keywords Again

Keywords are something you should be looking at pretty frequently to steer your content creation and editorial calendar, but you should also be using your keyword position rankings to update your site every so often. Use the keywords on your report to update meta descriptions, title tags, and the copy on each page of your site.

Optimize your highest-performing pages for the keywords on this report by updating your meta descriptions, title tags, and copy in your content. For example, if the #1 keyword associated with your site is “financial advisor Boston,” you should be incorporating that keyword as much as you can on your site. That way, when people do a search for that keyword, you’ll be more likely to pop up closer to the top of the results in Google.