1 - Visibility indicators
The first thing that is very helpful to me on this
tool, it is the information on the site visibility on search engines. One can
indeed use Google Webmaster Tools to complement Google Analytics, in particular
to obtain information that is hidden on
Analytic (via not provided).
Search traffic
> Search Queries
This section of the tool shown above provides
extensive information on the visibility of the site and more specifically on
the number of impressions and click through rates and all this on an exhaustive
list of keywords that have been used by Internet users. Here, no not provided,
allowing for a more accurate diagnosis of keywords that lead to the site.
Information on the click rate is very useful to know about what keywords list
your site generates more visits and thus see its strengths and weaknesses.
The tab "popular pages" present on the
same section works the same way but this time by listing the pages of your
website positioned on Google.
The main advantages of this section:
Do not suffer
the constraints of not provided (and get complete information on Google website
visibility).
Detailed information on the pages of your site that
are positioned and click rates.
Identify weak
CTR to improve the appearance of pages in the SERPs (<title> and <meta
description>, as proposed by William
last year).
Note however that the statistical analysis is
restricted because the history is limited to 3 months and it is impossible to
recover the data prior to this period.
2 - Indexing and 404
Google Index> State of indexing Another key
section concerns indexing pages. It is updated regularly and it helps
(especially for large sites) to detect the level of indexing of pages.
Frequently, I detect abnormal increases of indexed pages and this happens most
of the time, when a development project is under way.
The developer may very well (at a particular
revision) Open Google indexing certain pages (and this unintentionally) and
therefore it is necessary to analyze the problem which can be harmful for SEO.
Sample site with abnormal changes in indexing Note that this section is
connected to the automatic e-mail alerts for those who do not check their
accounts regularly. Exploration>
Crawl errors This section focuses on the 404 errors that are very important for
SEO.
This track 404 goes very often to monitoring indexing
as an increase of pages indexed is often concomitant with an increase of 404.
It is crucial to regularly monitor this curve and to intervene as soon as
abnormal rise occurs. Webmaster Tools Errors. Benefits of these two sections:
Related to the warning system automatic email For explorations errors, there is
the ability to export a complete list of the 404 pages (server errors), which
allows to treat the problem accurately
3 - Monitoring backlinks Monitoring of backlinks is
also possible free with Google Webmaster Tools in a specific section: Search Traffic> Links to Your Site On
this section you will be able to list some of the links that point to your
site. The information is regularly updated, but for use in conjunction with an
external tool such as Majestic SEO or Ahrefs because of its
"incompleteness". Some SEOs feel the same need to be limited to links
on GWT in a relationship cleaning. Webmaster Tools Links to your site.
