From the seller’s point of view, search engine ranking, especially Google’s ranking, is the most important, honest-to-say, desirable goal for every website. Everyone wants Google’s ranking but does not want to follow Google’s core updates or broad core updates. Google’s different algorithms help you get Google’s ranking. As well, Google provides us with many tools (free and paid) which help our website improve ranking. I will elaborate here on how Google’s free tools can help your website improve ranking. Those tools have a lot of usages, but I am just concerned about improving ranking. This article is both important for the website owner and SEO professionals.
Those free tools are:
- Google search console
- Google Analytics
- Google Tag Manager
- Google Page Speed Insights
- Google Mobile Friendly Test
- Google Rich Results Test
- Google Trends
- YouTube
Google Search Console:
Google Search Console is a free Google tool that assists website owners and webmasters in providing information about their sites. It gives information about the website’s health condition and detects errors while the website is indexing. It provides insight into the website’s performance in organic search. It also provides information about website traffic, like which queries are they using to find this website? What devices are they using? Or their country? And many more. This information is important for planning a strategy to improve your ranking.
Google Search Console includes tools such as the URL Inspect Tool, Removal Tool, and Robots.txt Checker to assist webmasters in fixing errors on their websites.URL Inspect tool is the most useful tool from my point of view. This tool gives us information about a particular URL on how it’s behaving during indexing. It also gives page experience reports, core web vitals reports, and mobile usability reports. These reports are the most important for website ranking. Google also sends messages to the website owner through the Google Search Console.
Visit Google Search Console tool.
Google Analytics:
Google Analytics is a free tool from Google that provides analytical data on your website visitors. Google Analytics always monitors your website’s visitors and collects data. It provides a lot of data on your website visitors. Like on which page did they land first? How long did they stay there? Did they visit another page? From which country? From which device? From which browser? What are their gender and age? What is the traffic source—paid advertisements or organic search or social media or direct URL? A lot of data From that data, your website’s data analyst can make good strategies to improve your website’s ranking.
It helps you improve your website content. It also provides data on a website’s bounce rate. If the bounce rate is high, then you can add more engaging content to your website, like adding appealing pictures or videos (of course, related). It provides data on which posts are getting more visitors and which are not. How long do visitors stay on a particular post (called “dwell time”)? With that data, you can optimize your content. Website ranking is a core aim, and Google Analytics data makes it easier.
Visit Google Analytics tool.
Google Tag Manager (GTM):
Google Tag Manager is a free product from Google that gives you many more insights into your website visitors. And it sends that data to your Google Analytics account. You can add many services like Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, Google Adwords, Facebook Conversion API, and many more through Google Tag Manager. If you can track your website’s visitors and what they do on your website, it’s much easier to improve content as well as rank. As Google said, “User experience and user behavior are one of the top-ranking factors for Google.”
Suppose you add a few tags like page view, link click, page scroll, and button click, which will trigger when a page is viewed, a link is clicked, a page is scrolled, and a button is clicked, respectively. Now, you can track your website’s visitors by which page they viewed. Did they scroll the page? Did they click on the link? Or did they click any buttons? According to the visitor’s actions, you can optimize your content.
Visit Google Tag Manager tool.
Google Page Speed Insights:
Google Page Speed Insight is a free tool from Google that examines your webpage and gives you a score out of 100 according to your webpage loading time. It gives you a score for both the mobile and desktop versions of your webpage. It measures your webpage’s FCP (First Contentful Paint), LCP (Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)), and CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) and gives a score. If Google finds your webpage loading speed is low, then Google will suggest where to change and how.
Statistics say that if any website takes more than 3 seconds to load, it will lose 50% of its visitors. So, your webpage needs to be fast for both mobile and desktop unless you want to lose visitors. It does not matter how much quality content your webpage has, visitors will close the tab before loading the webpage. You can easily beat your competitors if your site loads faster than theirs. Website loading speed is a direct ranking factor.
Visit Google Page Speed Insights tool.
Google Mobile-Friendly Test:
The Google mobile-friendly test is a free tool from Google that gives the performance report of a website while Google’s mobilebot indexes that website. Simply, you can say how a website performs on mobile devices. It is also a ranking factor. From July 1, 2019, Google first indexed mobile version websites, then desktop version websites. So you can understand how much it is important for a website to be mobile-friendly.
Statistics show some important facts. Mobile is the fastest-growing form of media in the U.S., with 92% of people conducting a search on their phone making a purchase. 78% of local searches result in a transaction within 24 hours. To improve your ranking or grow your business, you should focus on making your website mobile-friendly.
Visit Google Mobile-Friendly Test tool.
Google Rich Results Test:
Google Rich Results Test was previously known as Schema Data Test. Schema data, or structured data, is a form of data that helps search engines like Google better and easily understand your content. It helps search engines categorize your data accurately. Of course, Google can crawl, understand, and index your content, but if you provide data in Google’s preferred format, then there is no chance of margin of error. Structure data can affect the ranking of SERP. The Google schema test is a free tool from Google that shows results while crawling structure data, whether it finds any errors or warnings.
It’s good practice that structured data should be error and warning-free. Google does not crawl error data. If Google understands your content and what the webpage is about, it will help to improve your ranking. In some cases, structural data is important. As an example, consider person schema data or local business schema data. You need to submit a lot of data to Google. If you submit data in Google’s preferred data format (JSON-LD), then Google can provide accurate data to searchers. You can get more targeted visitors or customers.
Visit Google Rich Results Test tool.
Google Trends:
Google Trends is a free tool from Google that gives you an idea of which topics are trending now in which area or in which month. It’s a great tool for SEO professionals, website owners, and content writers. An SEO professional can do better keyword research, and a content writer can write a better article on a trending topic. You will get a lot of traffic from search engines if you quickly publish an article on a trending topic. Google trends are a good tool to attract new traffic and visitors. It can help you set a target country.
Unfortunately, cricket is popular in India but football is popular in the United States. If your website is about cricket, you have to set a target country in India, but if your website is about football, you have set a target country in the United States. You can get this type of idea from Google Trends. For India, “Daman and Diu” people search more for cricket. People in India search more on the topic of “IPL Cricket 2021 Live”. You can see how valuable that information is for the website owner and how you can attract visitors to your website easily.
Visit Google Trends.
YouTube:
YouTube is a video-sharing platform by Google where people watch and share videos. It is a video hosting platform. Video creators create and publish videos here. People usually search for any topic and watch videos according to their demands. Video has a huge impact on search engine rankings. Your search engine ranking will improve dramatically if you add a video to your content. Video will also increase dwell time, which is a good ranking signal. Embedding YouTube videos is a great way to do this. You know, hosting videos on your website can slow your website’s loading speed.
Visit YouTube.
Finally, improving search engine rankings is the most important and dispensable thing, but sometimes it is a difficult job. Google provided the abovementioned tools to help you in this matter. These are mandatory tools. Of course, everyone needs a Google ranking, not any other tool’s ranking.
