How To Do SEO Audit Using Google Search Console?

In this blog, there is a step-by-step guide on using a free and trendy tool for conducting SEO audit using Google Search Console.
You can do a complete audit by adding your website in GSC to find indexing issues, submitted URL errors, confirming XML sitemap, URL blocked by Robot.txt, redirect errors, underperforming keywords, underperforming snippets, finding pages ready for an update, auditing backlink profiles, content gaps, internal linking issues, and many more.
Let’s explore in detail what GSC is, how it works, and how we can use it for conducting audits.

Understanding Google Search Console?

It is a free and most used tool for conducting the audit of your website. You may boost your website’s visibility in search results and identify areas for development through conducting a thorough analysis. It is the greatest tool for technical, off-page, and on-page site analysis. Currently, you can evaluate the areas that need development for your website’s improved performance without hiring a specialist. To begin the audit, you can easily set up Google Search Console. Here are some steps:

Use your Google account to sign in to GSC.
Enter your website’s domain and add property type, URL, Domain, and Subdomain.
Verify your website here. Verification of a URL prefix and domain property are both included.
Once your profile on GSC is created and verified, you can easily do an SEO audit using Google search console.

Detailed Steps For SEO Audit Using Google Search Console

List of SEO audits using Google search console.

XML Sitemap Confirmation
Indexing Issues analysis
On-Page Performance Optimization
Improve User Experience
Identifying underperforming keywords
Check the crawl health
Pages needing update
Backlinks audit

1. Confirming XML Sitemap

First, ensure you have submitted the XML sitemap to Google. It will help Google analyze the website faster and enhance crawling efficiency. It makes search engines understand which pages should be indexed.

You’ll notice various options on the left-hand side, with the sitemap appearing under the index tab. To confirm the submission of the sitemap, click that tab.
Here are some important things to remember.
One sitemap must be submitted in the tool.
You should keep the submitted date in mind. The date last read by the crawler should be recent.
Ensure that the status shown by the sitemap submission indicates success in Green.
You can add a new sitemap here if your website hasn’t yet submitted it.
If you are unsure how to find the site URL, try to enter the domain name followed by this: /sitemap.XML. For Example: “https://muxtechdigital.com/sitemap.xml”

You are done with the first step of the SEO audit using Google Search Console.

2. Analyze Indexing Issues

Page indexing issues are what most websites face, and in return, they bring zero traffic, so your SEO practice doesn’t pay off. Sometimes, your website pages are inaccessible to Google; therefore, these pages don’t appear in search engines and stay useless.

To check your page status, all you need to do is go to Index and tap on Pages to check the page status.

Error Reports & validation With Warning:

The error report indicates the issues the search engine faced while indexing the pages, whether the submitted URL is marked as no-index or has any other server errors. Besides this, you can click on each error to analyze the affected URL.

Whenever the submitted URL of a website can not be indexed, the issues it faces include the page being inaccessible.
When the submitted URL has marked no index, you only need to remove the no-index tag from the HTML code.
404 Error is also a reason for the page not indexing. Whenever a website’s page is not found, it shows a 404 error. Here, 301 redirects should be set up in a new location.
URLs blocked by a robot.txt error can be fixed by updating the file and running the robot.txt tester.
Sometimes, Google indexes a website page, but it is unsure whether the page is necessary. It results in a valid warning, which harms a website more than the error.

When conducting an SEO audit with the Google Search Console, this is a crucial step.

3. On-Page Performance Optimization

GSC also offers performance reports to analyze your site’s organic search performance.

Clicking on the performance section will allow you to obtain this report. To improve your SEO audit, you must become familiar with this report. This report includes details of your site, including total clicks, total impressions, average CTR, and ranking position. Analyze the previous 12 months‘ data for better audit. You can also export this file in CSV, Excel, or Google Sheets.

4. Improving User Experience

In SEO audits, user experience is a crucial ranking component that cannot be ignored. Whenever user engagement gets lower, it shows the search engine that the page is irrelevant and its ranking drops. Here, SEO audit using Google Search Console helps us by providing user experience reports.

Firstly, core web vital reports show a web page’s speed, loading time, and visual importance. Your site must load faster, approximately in 2 seconds, for better UX.
All you have to do is click on the problems. Go to the URL and select detailed page speed insight.
There is also a mobile usability report which indicates the issues experienced by mobile website users.

The custom enhancement reports help you identify the structure data you use for a specific website.

5. Identifying Underperforming Keywords

It is the most important factor in an SEO audit using the Google search console. You can analyze the Keywords with higher potential to gain more traffic on SERP.

Tap on the search results under the performance tab. Now enable average position and total impression.
Now, scroll and analyze the table of queries. You can also set up filters to find the underperforming keywords.
Tap on Filter → Select Position → Greater Than. Besides this, identifying keywords by impressions is also possible.
For instance, If a keyword is positioned at the number 6 but gains only 15 impressions per month, you can gain more by moving it to a better position.
All you need to do is tap on the filter → impressions → greater than. Now, eliminate the keywords with lower impression count.

In such a way, you can get underperforming keywords with the highest potential. It makes SEO audits using Google Search Console better.

6. Check The Crawl Health Of Your Site

It is possible to find the crawl health of your site using the search console. Whenever Google finds it difficult to crawl your site, it impacts your website’s SEO. Whether your site has more than a thousand pages or less, you should have to know how search engines crawl your site.

Analyze the crawl stats reports by clicking on the setting options on the bottom left of GSC.
Now in the crawling section, select the open report. It will show important information about the crawling method of search engines. Here, it will show total crawl requests, total download size, and average response time.

There is a host section when you scroll down. The site will split into different hosts if it has subdomains. After choosing the main host, click on the host status; it will show if the host had problems in the past. There would be details here, including the robot. Text fetch, DNS resolution, or server connectivity.

7. Identify Pages That Need Update

It is normal, sometimes your site’s pages lose traffic when they get outdated. To keep your pages updated with the latest results and find out which page needs updating, you can use GSC. To identify such pages, go on the Performance of GSC, tap on the date, now compare, and compare it with the last 6 months.

Now, see the pages that have lost traffic previously. It is a sign that your site needs an instant update. Analyze the page, look out if the content is outdated, analyze your competitors, and check the keywords, titles, and topics. This SEO audit using Google Search Console will improve your page traffic.

8. Audit Your Site’s Backlinks

Backlinks are also an important ranking factor that matters. To check the number of backlinks and website types that link to you, click on the links on the left side of the GSC menu.
In the external links section, tap on the Top linked pages section. Let’s be honest to tell you that there is too little information on GSC for a site’s audit. To analyze in depth the backlinks, including do-follow or no-follow, you can use different tools like Ahrefs, MOZ, Semrush and many more.

Besides this, internal links are also an important factor for ranking. It would help if you analyzed which pages lack internal links and need attention; go to the Top linked pages and select the internal links report. Now, sort the links in an ascending order.
This information is not only limited to these points given above; there are many more things that you can do to improve your SEO audit using the Google Search Console.

Final Verdict!

It is undeniable that GSC is a helpful tool that different auditors use to make their websites better. It has introduced different features in the previous years that have helped us in improving website traffic, authority, and credibility. No doubt, it is a free tool for SEO audit that still provides vast data. Besides the steps given above, there are many more things that you can check in the SEO audit using the Google search console.This information is not only limited to these points given above; there are many more things that you can do to improve your SEO audit using the Google Search Console.

Grow Your Business With Us

At MuxTech Digital, we provide customized solutions for digital marketing, graphic designing, and software/website/portal design and development. We help you grow your business, increase your online presence, and reach your goals.

How To Do SEO Audit Using Google Search Console?

Understanding Google Search Console?