by Trevor Waddington, Founder & President, Truth Tree
Google Search Console is an invaluable resource for school marketers because it helps measure your school’s website traffic, fix issues, monitor keyword performance, and receive messages related to your website directly from Google.
In addition, it provides valuable insights on how a site is doing in organic search and ways to make adjustments to your school’s website in the Google index.
Unlike Google Analytics, Google Search Console only provides information on traffic from a web search, not other segments like direct traffic, traffic from site referrals, or ads.
In which areas can Google Console help guide your school’s marketing efforts?
- Google Search Console helps in viewing Google search traffic data to determine how often the website appears in Google searches, how often the audience clicks through the website, and which search queries show the website. This helps determine what content should be posted or updated to wrangle more users.
- It helps in reviewing alerts when Google encounters spam, indexing issues, or other issues websites may be having.
- Show which websites are linked to web properties. This is useful for knowing the potential audience’s demographic inside and out.
- It assists in troubleshooting page experience issues for AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) and mobile usability.
Google Search Console’s top benefits
- HTML improvements
Google Search Console can help enhance HTML. For instance, if you forgot to add a meta description, you can add it and optimize it for the right keywords with the help of Google Search Console. You can also evaluate the title tags and ensure the page contains only one H1 or title tag (other headings must be labeled as H2 to H6).
- Helps in understanding link reports
Google Search Console represents the details about links to the website, including the anchor text and most linked-to pages. This will help in improving your school’s link-building strategy. Consequently, increasing external and internal links will improve your SEO rankings. Those improvements can be tracked through Google Search Console.
- Better understanding of Google’s index
Google Search Console helps to monitor and track the number of website pages that appear in Google’s search results. It can also monitor URLs that you do not want to be indexed. The information in the Google Index report will help you maximize specific keyword usage and fix unintentionally blocked resources on your school’s website.
How to get started with Google Console
- Ensure Google can find the website’s pages. Check out the index coverage report to overview the pages Google indexed. Review the list and fix page errors and warnings.
- Review mobile usability errors. Check out the Mobile usability report to understand the issues that might affect the user experiences when someone browses your school’s website on a mobile device.
- Submit a sitemap to Google Search Console. Submitting a sitemap to Google Search Console helps speed up the website’s discovery.
- Monitor the website performance. Review the search performance report to determine how much traffic the website is getting from Google searches, including breakdowns by pages, queries, and countries.
Why is Google Search Console an excellent tool for schools?
If you consistently use Google Search Console, it will help your school website appear in front of more prospective families. It ensures you have the opportunity to provide them with the information they’re seeking.
If they are new to school searching, they will likely perform broad searches to find schools in their area that suit their needs. Therefore, your school will need to appear for all the relevant local search queries, for instance, “best private schools near me.”
Moreover, families in the decision stage of the enrollment journey expect to find all the information they need to evaluate the school. If they have to search repeatedly only to find the school’s website, you’re will miss an incredible opportunity to showcase the different personas of your school.
Google Search Console can boost your school’s website’s rank in Google search results and resolve site loading problems, server issues, and security hazards like hacking and malware. When web developers develop your website’s code, the Google Search Console can help them find and solve markup/code issues, data structure, and technical SEO problems.
Wrapping Up
Using Google Search Console for your school’s marketing helps you discover and identify problems on your site, fix them, and even uncover new opportunities for conversion rate growth. The more visible the website is on Google, the more clicks it’ll get, and you’ll be more likely to maximize conversions!
Do you want help learning more about how Google Search Console? Contact Truth Tree for this and more information from our school digital marketing experts.
