Heads In Beds Show - EVERYTHING You Need To Know About Google Search Console

Episode Date: March 29, 2023

In this episode, Paul and Conrad break down one of Google's best FREE tools to help you grow your organic search traffic: Google Search Console. ⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellChatGPT PluginsGoogle BardSkift on Google🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagramTwitter🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads and Beds show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. All right. Hi there, Paul. How's it going today? Fantastic.

Conrad, another start of the week here. Another bright start of the week here another bright start of the week here where it is we've already been talking about our home issues with the kids not quite being healthy but how's your week how was your last week how's the week going so far as we're just kicking off yeah I'm just hoping for a better week this week I guess I'll leave it at that it was there was illness running through the house there was problems there was minor professional chaos you can't win them all right if they were all perfectly amazing then i guess we would just have no frame for when they actually need to be a little bit better so i'm ready to put that one behind me so like an athlete getting interviewed after they

lose it i'm just gonna come back out here next week maybe i'll do a better job so that's how i'm feeling we lost we lost the game but good news there's another game being played this week and i can win this one so that's my thoughts on it that's the key that is the key we'll get back out there and it is we've heard i feel like we've all you've heard the last week or two is interviews with college kids that are saying the exact same thing yeah there we get back out there or just excited to be making it on the next weekend with march madness here yeah some of those games are entertaining i did catch them being stuck in the house not really doing much so yeah i caught a few of them the san diego state team seems pretty fun to watch i kind of like watching them that's why i guess now it's too late to be like oh i'm rooting

for the underdogs now they're like eating everybody but yeah those have been just entertaining i don't really have a team so i just like to watch it i just want a close game and they have been in close games which is fun these yeah at least it's been fairly entertaining basketball i at the very least everybody's brackets are long since been i've long since been busted, I think. We've got a 3-5-5-9 or something, 4-5-5-9. That's a skew that obviously nobody predicted, but it is. I think it's going to make all those pools that everybody joins next year just a little more entertaining. You're going to see a few more low scores that are going out there from people just picking with their hearts or doing whatever they're going to do there.

Yeah, I'm not an expert in it. But my understanding is that there's just a lot of parody this year because there's teams that have, I guess this Aztec team got the COVID kind of messed them up. But then they like came back with all the same guys or something like that. It's another, they have a chance or whatever the case may be. So it seems like there's like external factors other than just, hey, put a bunch of five star kids together and let them try to figure it out as they go along,

which I think is like the Kentucky Duke UNC model or whatever. So it's interesting to see that approach and how it's working. Yeah. I mean, that's it. That's exactly it. They, as a gopher's fan,

it definitely hurt. It could have been two out of four or three out of four teams represented the head coach at San Diego state as a gopher's alum. His dad coached that a Gophers coach. We danced around that hire a little bit there. Texas's point guard was a portal, and so was Florida Atlantic's, one of their key players, as a Gophers transfer. So, yeah, I mean, it is.

I think COVID, the transfer portal, it's definitely added some nuance. You've got guys that are 23, 24, 25 years old that are playing. added some nuance. You got guys that are 23, 24, 25 years old that are playing. It'll be interesting to see as we're post people who came into school in 2020, people staying for four years or three years or something like that. I'm interested to see that. But yeah, it's a fun time. I think that at least CBS, the family, that family of network, the Turner family, they got to be pretty happy with what they've seen so far, even if it's not the perennial blue bloods that they typically see. So yeah, right on. You said that there's some teams winning that we didn't expect, but who else is winning?

Open AI. So they dropped some, let's get into marketing minute where they dropped some plugins over the past week or so. Here's that. We'll put a link in the show notes to this like blog post that they announced it with. And the headline is fascinating. It just says chat GPT plugins. We've implemented initial support for plugins in chat TPT.

Plugins are tools designed specifically for language models with safety as a core principle. That's important to help with chat TPT access up-to-date information, run computations, or use third-party services. Now, you and I have been beating the chat TPT drum. Holy smokes, take your shot now, whatever time of the day it is for you, because it's only been four minutes and 18 seconds of the episode. And we've already mentioned chat dbt. However, this one is interesting. Because the criticism, if you will, over the past little bit with many of us was, oh, this chat dbt thing is great. However, all this data is old, it is not accessing data that's happening today.

Now Bing took their spin on it. And they're combining like web indexing with API. But then it but open AI is just we can do this ourselves so there's now a web scraping plugin from what i saw i can't access this by the way i'm not in the beta i guess here we'll talk about betas in a second and how disappointing they can be but there's an expedia one which is obviously fascinating for our audience the travel industry when that's out i will definitely do maybe a thread on that or i'll put a linkedin post about that how to because expedia allow me to book a vacation rental using chat TPT because there's still some vacation inventory on Expedia to actually feed from Verbo. That'll be an interesting look at it. But what was your takeaway from this plugin thing?

It seemed like to me, I was like, I saw it and I was like, Oh, I was thinking that was something they're going to get to next year. They were like, No, we'll get to that next week. And it just seems like pace in which they're solving problems is unbelievable. And I don't know, this just seems like a very transformative piece of technology in my side. I would agree. And I think it is like seeing Kayak, seeing Expedia both come into the fray. I think it is. It's pretty incredible to think that you could book and I've seen the links, the examples of someone going through and doing it, like asking about what the vacation situation is, writing the prompt of, okay, I want to go to this destination and I want to do these things with my family. And then to see

breakdown, hotel, resort, vacation rental, going down to specific areas and then getting the booking link to actually go right into Expedia and book that. It's a pretty slick and streamlined process there. The ability to, obviously, I don't think it's going to stop with, I've seen open tables on there as well. This, I would say, it's absolutely something on the e-commerce side of things. If you hadn't considered that, if you'd only been thinking about your brick and mortar website, your domain website, this is certainly going to be something that you're going to have to consider. Just with, I think the number that I saw, that was probably the most stunning just because there's always a new chat GPT number. But I think it took chat GPT

two months to get to 100 million users. Facebook, it took two and a half years. Twitter, it took a year and a half, something like that. Some of these ridiculous numbers, I think it is. We are so in the moment right now that it's hard to pick your head up and really try to figure out where is this all going? I don't know where it's going next. The pace at which everything is happening right now is just so fast that I think it almost doesn't give you enough time to catch up, learn, read, and really figure out how you're going to strategically use it down the road here. Overall, really exciting news, but it does. I think it puts us all behind the eight ball to a certain extent here of, man, we're going to have to, like learning on the fly, I don't even

think that's a good enough characterization. I think we're learning at warp speed. And when you're trying to do that, obviously stuff's going to fall through the cracks there a little bit. Yeah, just reminds me as I've been working on our documentation and I had documentation that I just had to delete the other day because it was like the way that I was doing it was now completely basically ineffective and didn't work in the way that it should. And there's now a Google Sheets plugin. And I used it to build a page the other day for a blog post where it was like intro for blog posts, this and

that. And it was just like, wait, this didn't work like two weeks ago. Now it works. So yeah, that like you said, the pace is fascinating. So we'll see how it goes. Google is trying to keep up. So let's go into this note. You and I both got access to Bard, which we were joking before we hit record, that this is a terrible name, Bard. It just sounds like, almost sounds like an STD. I don't know if I can say that, but it's, oh no, we got the Bard. Like he's going to be out for a while. Anyways, that may have been an off color joke.

Not good, not impressive. Wasn't the outputs a little bit slower too than I noticed chat GPT 3.5, the Turbo API. The output's not very good. It doesn't cite sources. It has some of the same problems as like almost GPT 2, which I think people were talking about

playing with two years ago. I just, I don't see it. Are you, what's your thoughts on this? Are you impressed by it? I wasn't impressed by it. I think on the barred side of things, I certainly haven't been impressed either. I think we joked about that over the weekend here, just trying to test it through. I saw enough people online on the social media feeds starting to do some testing and giving it some prompts that it was already struggling with. So I had a feeling that we're probably going to be in that area. But yeah, old data, just not very good answers, not very comprehensive. The content I haven't been impressed with. I don't know. And maybe it

is. Maybe it's that I need to work on my prompts for Google like I have worked on prompts for ChatGPT. I think that there's something to be said for that. I'll give Google the slightest benefit of the doubt there. But at the same time, I think there's a reason why they didn't roll it out. It's still a work in progress. And I don't know where what the timing is, if they're going to catch up, if they're going to catch up at all, if they're going to catch up in six months and a year, but they are significantly behind. And again, you add plugins into that and you add some of the other functionality that you're seeing with chat GPT. I don't know where Bard goes. I don't think Google's in any fear of losing search impression. The baseline of 90% of people or 85% of people still going and starting their searches on Google,

I think that remains accurate and it will remain accurate in the short term. However, if ChatGPT continues to distance itself on results and being able to, and as it is more implemented into Microsoft Bing, all these products, there could be a shift of foot here. I just, I am just so underwhelmed by Bard and then the Google performance up to this point that this is the first time I've ever been scared that people are going to start switching away

from Google search. What are your thoughts on that? We're, like you said, we're in our bubble. So I think that in our bubble, we're not impressed, but I think the broad public, like moving away from Google, I think that would be like a multi, that may be a decade long process. What are your thoughts on that? to Google in the sense that if they did think the results were going down in quality and something became the default, here would be a fascinating conversation. If the default changed from Google to the new version of Bing on the next release of the iPhone happening in the fall, how many people would manually go switch it back from Bing to Google? Today, I don't know if that number would be as great as I would have said a year ago, because they may be like, oh, this is interesting.

This is different. And a good portion of people, think wouldn't change it. I think they would be fine with exactly how it was working or exactly how it was looking. So yeah, that's something that maybe would be an interesting litmus test for it, which is that if you went and changed the defaults on a lot of different devices, whether it be a phone or a tablet or obviously a laptop or desktop computer, and you made someone's new Bing kind of the default, would they be that bothered by it? I think a good chunk of the general population wouldn't be that bothered. Therefore, I feel like you must make the case or you could make the case that if that were true, then obviously the difference in quality between these two search engines is not nearly as great

as it once was in the past. And or people may be like, oh, this is new. This is an interesting feature I've not seen on Google before. And they would be a little bit less loyal. I'm not I think again, I think the idea of someone choosing being over google right now to be like oh the results are better over here and people who are not in the search marketing space people are just regular people that use search engines to find vacation rentals i think that would be a pretty big leap for me right now to say that i wouldn't go and short the google stock or anything like that i think that a lot of loyalty built in from a user base yeah yeah but we'll see like to your point they're on shakier ground today than they were a year ago or two years ago that feels like a pretty

fair statement and the like stock price and things like that does reflect that that people obviously believe that there's a chance that not that this takes them down but maybe it takes a chunk out of them they're this kind of freight liner moving through the ocean and i don't think they're about to hit an iceberg i don't think this is the titanic but I do wonder if this is someone's going to come up and take a swing at them and take 5% market share, 10% market share. I don't think that's an insane thought, especially if some of these LLMs

become better at like the search product, which the ChatGPT having a plugin, back to our first note, seems pretty reasonable. The idea that you would use like a ChatGPT powered tool with a plugin to scrape the web and find out what's going on now

and combine that together to have like new summaries or notes or things like that kind of sent your way in a way that's more user friendly and less advertiser friendly, which of course is Google's whole model. So those are my high level thoughts. I'm not burning the boats yet, but I see something there that I wouldn't have seen coming a year ago. And I think some of those initial articles as Microsoft was making the decision to invest in OpenAI, was that there was definitely a red alert. And Larry Page and Sergey Brin coming back into the fold for the first time. I think that should have told us everything.

Maybe we didn't read into that enough, but that should have told us that something's up, something's happening. Google feels a little threatened. And again, now that we're using three, two months, three months later, five months later, for good reason. So yeah, I would agree there. There's definitely some steps to getting there before Google loses market share or anything like that. But yeah, there's something to be considered at the very least there.

We still like Google, though, for most. Yeah. Let's flip that note on its head then, because there's actually a tool from Google that we love. You know what that tool is called? Google Search Console, formerly FKA, formerly known as Webmaster Tools. When I got started in this space,

that's what I was aware of, known as Webmaster Tools. And the interface used to be really ugly, but it was very Google-y, very Gmail-like. And now of course we have this new slick material design interface and it's called Webmaster. Sorry, it's called Search Console. See, I just, I flubbed it right there. I flipped it on its head. But so break it down for the people. What is Search Console? What data does this tool give us? Why should I care? How much does it cost? Give a high level overview. What the heck is this thing? First of all, like most of the most important things that you can

have with Google, it's free. Google Search Console is just another one of those products that is a you can pay for just about anything in Google to do. But in this case, yeah, this is a free product. And really what this allows you to do is understand the organic presence, the the organic nature, the overall performance, it gives you a lot of behind the scenes metrics on how your website performs, how your domains perform really across all of the Google products. Search results is certainly the marquee area, but one of the things that built in more recently, and it's because it's more, I think it's a better product or a product that they're trying to get more use out of is that Google discover side of things. So you can see your search results performance, your Google Discover, you can see really, I mean, for any medium that you can show up in Google search results, video, anything like that, you can find it, you can index your website, you can let Google know that there are new pages, you can let Google know that there

are old pages, you can submit a sitemap, you can really do all the technical things to ensure that Google understands exactly what your website's all about, what pages it should be crawling. And then you, again, as you get some of the reporting and KPIs back, you get to understand what are the search terms that people are using to find your website? What, where, what are the fluctuations that are happening as your impressions go up and your clicks go up? What's the click through rate over a given period of time in which areas? It's a lot of fun data. For us, we probably nerd out over it more than the average people. But did I do it justice? Did I give it the full overview here with the Google Search Console side of things? Yeah, I was actually comparing it to their landing

page while you were talking. And what do they say specifically? They're like, basically, this is for your performance on search, which I think to your point doesn't do it justice. There's a lot more inside of it that actually you can do. And really, it's one of, like you said, we joke about this actually being the rare free tool from Google that gives you pretty decent data. But I would say more importantly than that, in some respect, it gives you free information and it lets you know what's going on in your site, emails you and lets you know. It's almost like the little friendly SEO buddy you never had that's out there just checking

out things for you for free. So Search Console, one of those things that's in our like onboarding, or even a lot of times we get Search Console access before we begin to work with a client on the guest side of things, maybe a little bit less important on the owner side, with respect to like data, because you can quickly check a handful of keywords. But on the guest side, we don't always know how much blog traffic is coming in, or what sort of issues are on the site, or whatever the case may be. And this tool is fairly valuable. So a lot of times we'll get it again, pre-kickoff call, just during the proposal stage to dig around, see what's going on, look at traffic, look at trends.

But certainly as part of our kickoff call information, this is in my mind, just as important as having analytics. It's like the next thing we ask, hey, give us analytics access, but give us search console access right after so we can get in there. And pretty common that we find people that we begin to work with that don't have this set up, which is a bummer because if it's not set up at all, it doesn't go back and gather historical data. So in some cases, we've set up an account logged into search console and learned that it was never set up previously. So we have no historical data to

refer back to, which is a bummer because we can obviously get a lot of insight from data coming in from all the metrics that you said a minute ago, clicks, impressions, click through rate, average position, and so on. Important to set it up. If you haven't set this up yet and you're listening and you made it this far, definitely check it out. It's really valuable. I agree with you. The top assessment that I'm looking at for sure, whenever I log into search console, search results, that's the most common tab I'm looking into. But a lot of the time now I'm seeing discover and we have some clients who are actually getting some of their content in Google news. It's never consistent, but you'll actually see three tabs there. In some cases,

search results, discover, and then Google news. I'm looking at one client that we work with right now, who's gotten 8000 visitors over the past year through Google News. So it's not nothing, it can certainly help a little bit. And my logic there is that your site's pretty trusted if you show up in Google News. So forget the 8000 visitors, I just like the fact that I have clients who sometimes get their content shown in discover and in Google News, because Google is specifically promoting it in a way that's, I think, like proving and showing that they like the quality of the content and the information on your website. So that makes me feel good when I see that. But certainly we have sites that perform well that don't get much

Discover traffic and don't get much through Google News. So don't think that those are requirements, but it is like additional services where your content can be displayed. And that may be something you want to take a peek at if you're in there. But inside the search results tab, like most of the time what I'm looking at, obviously, is like overall traffic trends. How are the clicks from Google going up, going down? How seasonal is it? They do store, this is an important note, only 16 months worth of data. So if you do set it up, and you've had it set up for some time, you unfortunately can't go back and look at what was happening in 2020 or the pre-COVID data. That's all gone. Now there's

third-party tools that you can use to archive this data and store it in like a Google sheet or inside of a database, but inside the regular Google search console interface that you and I and everybody out there can access, they only store 16 months of data. So keep that in mind. If you do want to keep this data for the longer term, you may want to go and explore that. Another thing, the web interface is pretty limited. They only show you the top thousand rows of data on pages and queries. Now, if you're a small site, that may not be a big deal to you. But for some of the larger sites that we work on, we work with a client for several years now who's pretty large, 500,000 plus pages indexed in Google, several million organic

visitors a month. This is a listing site in the short-term rental space. This site, it's not sufficient to go into the web interface and look at traffic trends because it shows a limited view of the data. So in that scenario, you have to use the API. So if you're a bigger site out there that's been around for a long time and you have thousands of pages or you have hundreds of properties and a lot of blog content and things like that, the web interface is a bit of a Fisher price toy compared to the API in terms of getting

all that data out there. Now there's different tabs too in the interface. So if you've not logged in before, you can look at it based on queries, which is what Google calls. We might call that a keyword, what the actual term is that people are searching for pages. So those are the ones where I spend probably 90% of my time. But you can also break it down by countries. So the client I'm looking at right now, for example, got 13,000 clicks last month from the US and 344 from Canada, and then very low after that, but like India, Philippines, UK, Mexico, but there's some of our clients that are more international, this tab is really useful, because we can see, hey, are we making inroads and progress with people who are searching on Google and looking for us specifically from

another country looking to vacation where we're based. So that can be valuable information. Also breaks it down by device. And I'm always surprised when I go and look and I've realized that yes, 60 to 70% of the people clicking on our websites are typically on mobile, not on desktop. And that kind of backs that up there from a click perspective. Then it also breaks down the date of traffic by date, obviously, and then search appearance. So if you have any specific extra markup on your pages, if there's good page experience, product results, product snippets, reviews, featured snippets, those will all show up under search appearance. So that's good data to have. So that's my go in look. And what I'm looking at is like trends.

Where's, what are some of the top keywords? What are the, some of the top non-branded keywords? We talked about this in previous episodes, but we talked about what is the branded search volume for a specific company. And that's actually one of the best ways to measure, in my opinion, is to go look at people, how many people are looking on Google for the name of the company. The client I'm looking at right here got 751 clicks last month on just the name of their company. So almost 800 people came in last month just looking for that company, nevermind the fact that they actually were considering vacation rentals and getting traffic in the market for those keywords as well. So it's super insightful, valuable data. And this is a little bit more closer to the source than a

lot of these third party tools. We've waxed poetic and talked about how we'd like Ahrefs and SEMrush in the past. But this is a little bit closer to the truth in terms of what the actual impression and click counts are. So if you had to, if I could only have one source, and I couldn't have a third party SEO tool, and I could use this to evaluate my site performance, I'd be okay with it, because you get a good amount of insight. But when you log in, and you look at a new GSC account for the first time, is there other things that you look for beyond those kind of base level things and dig a little bit deeper into the other reports? Yeah, I think I think when Google started to put more of a premium on the Core Web Vital side of things, and then when Google in turn put Core Web Vital into the search console experience, that was definitely something

where it was that eye-opening item of, oh, site's running pretty slow. Okay. So I think that was that quick glance at a quick performance metric of how is it really performing there? And again, knowing that, man, we're almost three years removed from Core Web Vitals or page speed being a major ranking factor. I think it is being able to monitor that and see when those little blips happen. Hopefully you are. You're consistently, your mobile and desktop versions of your website are running smoothly, everything like that. But to see in a given day, And I think that's the notification communication from Google as well, not just how your site is performing overall with visibility within the

search results, but then with the performance of the website itself too. If you're getting, if you have mobile issues or if you have core web vital issues, you're going to get that notification from Google if you've signed up for those notifications. So I think that's been a big part as well, really understanding. In most cases, I think most of the partners that we deal with or most partners you deal with now, I'm sure there may be some opportunities on the Core Web Vital side of things. still nice to see, see how their overall booking direct booking website is performing and be able to match that or make that comparison to we build out dedicated landing pages for partners. So trying to make sure that experience is not going to diminish when they're going from their branded domain to a separate landing page or a sub domain there. So I think that the core web vitals portion is very important. I think just the overall, like the technical SEO

aspects, like the ability to submit a sitemap, the ability to update your sitemaps, I think those are really important too. And again, as we look at it from the technical side of things, maybe we're the only ones who are really concerned about that. But having worked on one of those mammoth sites previously, a 50, 60, 70,000 page site, where you are trying to get rid of some of those mammoth sites previously, a 50, 60, 70,000 page site where you are trying to get rid of some of those server errors and 404s that have backed up and maybe hurt your performance overall organically. Having this as a repository of all those things that need to be fixed and do stuff like that, and to give Google a quick indication, hey, I'm going to submit this URL. This is now the URL we should be directing back to. So I do, I think on the technical side of things, there really is a lot of functionality

that helps point Google in the right direction to ensure that I think everything's aligned on the technical SEO side of things. And ultimately, again, if Google thinks it's an issue, it's probably something worth looking at. Occasionally, they do flag things that I think are a little bit like they mean, but it just doesn't make sense. Like they give a lot of product review markup Google thinks it's an issue. It's probably something worth looking at. Occasionally they do flag things that I think are a little bit like, they mean, but it just doesn't make sense. Like they give a lot of product review markup errors on sites that we work on because you don't have, if it's in stock or not,

like it's a vacation rental house. It's not in stock or out of stock. It depends on the day. Some of the markup that we use, it doesn't actually perfectly mesh in with what Google is trying to do with like product markup as an example. But to your point, once you submit the sitemap

inside of Google, you're quickly able to see, okay, here's the sitemap. Here's what I, here's the pages I care about. Grade me on those pages to both the things you mentioned, page experience, core web vitals. Do you have any mobile usability errors? Those, that kind of thing. And then, yeah, it'll tell you if you submit it, if you're submitting pages and it's not indexing it, it'll also tell you why I'm not indexing this content because you submitted it, but I don't see, basically it's not good. I don't see any value in the content or there's the no index tag. Hey, you submitted a bunch of pages that index. So why'd you do that? Or just simple. Hey, here's a bunch of broken pages I found. Might want to click these, fix these up. I found I'm looking at right now and I see,

ah, two broken pages that we somehow missed that just triggered about two days ago. So we can log in and fix those pages. And yeah, we could go run a crawl and screaming frog or something like that to find that. But it's nice that Google lets you know, Hey, here's where it is, here's where we found it, we can just quickly copy that URL, fix the broken link and get things corrected. And then resubmit and validate that fix the Google and they'll come back and make sure they let us know that they've corrected that error on their side of things. So I like logging in here for most clients once a month, if we can, when we have time to do if we don't see anything, then maybe there's no action item taken. But sometimes there's problems in there that we can uncover and we can fix and try to make Google happy. And that we think this kind of ties in well, we'll just

it's kind of like SEO health checkup, if you will, right? So the doctor and they look at your heart and your lungs and your eyes and your all this kind of stuff. And they just want to make sure there's no glaring issues, you can grow a site that has a bunch of things popping up here and there inside of these technical interfaces. I'm not one of these people that believes that perfection is even possible in technical SEO. It's usually I read an old post post about Ian Laurie, right about this called distance from perfect. It's like, how close can I get to perfect? I can't actually really be perfect. So is there some reasonable distance I can get from perfect that allows me to perform at a high level and spend times on things that are really growing the site in terms of traffic content, things like that.

But yeah, one other thing I wanted to mention that I don't think either of us touched on yet is the idea that you can inspect any page. So we do that quite a bit. It sounds simple, but we publish content for clients frequently while content, and we'll just go in there and submit the page in Google and say, Hey, click here, submit this, please crawl this as soon as you can. It used to be a while ago where we'd have issues where clients content wouldn't get indexed for days, if not weeks, but it seems like they fixed a lot of those issues that I don't have indexing issues nearly as bad as we were in the past. I don't know if that was some sort of technical change that has been made on their side of things, or it's just like, we're producing better content. I don't know. I don't know. Can you explain that one? But we seem to have better

luck overall with getting indexed content quickly. When once our Philippe and our team publishes that content, logs into search console, click submit and gets that off to the races. That does help a little bit. I think getting some performance out of that content right away, which is useful. What you want to dig into some of the other stuff that is a little bit deeper into the process. So there's the manual actions tab, which we hope to click on and never find any issues. But anything else before we get into the bad, here's where things can go wrong in this interface. I think that we're, I think we can touch on it in a little bit. But I think initially, how I got introduced to search console was disavowing links. And I know that we have.

We've had some discussions on that more recently. But yeah, there's definitely. I think we can jump right into the slightly negative side or the more alarming side of Google Search Console. Talk about the manual warnings and the security issue. Hopefully nobody has security issues. It is. It's been a long time since we've had, thankfully, knock on all the wood in the world, but any security issues,

manual actions, anything like that. It is. Have you been nursing anything in the last six to 12 months where you've seen any of those manual actions and security issues come through? I like to think we do a good job on both areas of the puzzle on the security side. A lot of our client sites that we built, we take the WordPress kind of security pieces pretty seriously. We update the plugins. I'm not going to say we've never had a site hacked. That would be not necessarily accurate.

We've had one or two sites hacked over the past few years, but usually it was, I hate to say, it's like the client's fault. But in this case, it's true. We had a client who had a very insecure password and then their password was compromised, not our password or our server or our security. Then they got in there, admin access,

they were able to install some kind of plugin usually it's that file manager plugin that seems to be how all these hackers do it they get wp admin access dump the file manager plugin there and then it's oh boy you're up you're screwed because they basically have ftp access to that subfolder at least so we had a hack site warning come through search console i forget when like you said maybe six months ago something like that but we were able to fix it we saw it i appreciate that google emailed us we actually had already caught it I think the day before but I didn't like to get the email at that point for that particular scenario because I was like shoot now Google knows about it I wonder if we're gonna have some long-term issues but we

really didn't I think that Google seems pretty forgiving about that if you have a hack site I always was concerned because it shows like a hack site message yeah in the actual search results when that does occur and I was always terrified oh no Google's gonna just gonna just completely de index the site and kill it. And that doesn't seem to be the case. If you act quickly, and you get things corrected, we notice no loss of traffic. In fact, I think the next month, we actually did a little bit better traffic wise in the month before. So security issue, yeah, keep an eye out for that. Obviously use all the best practices on your website, relative to securing the backend admin area depends on what CMS and things like that you use. We're obviously WordPress fans

on the buildup side of things. So WordPress is our CMS of choice, very popular. But I know there's some custom CMSs out there that are not hacker proof. There's a CM, there's a vocational marketing company out there that we compete with sometimes that claims that their system is more secure than WordPress in some way.

And I guess it's like, what's the terminology? It's like security through obscurity, which is basically like 100 websites on the planet use the CMS, that's custom. So yeah, I guess it's more secure in that way because no broad scale attack would look for it. But I guarantee you, if someone wanted to hack that site,

it would be possible to do so. And I know this because they sent fake phishing emails out to people a while ago. Someone got into their customer list, pulled down their domain names, sent, oh no, I'm sorry, this is what it was. Sorry, I'm remembering the story now. They went to the name server, like records, they pulled down all the sites that were using that particular name server that this

web agency uses, email them, say, hey, you have to reset your password, click here, put in your old password, then put in your new password. And then they basically were able to get access to 30 or 50 different websites. Now that wasn't necessarily an exact security issue in the web agency side. It was just more of a really kind of pretty elaborate, pretty intelligent scam phishing password attempts, but it was successful. They were doing no sort of two-step authentication at that time. So people were able to log in, upload files, upload, I think like some kind of executable script, which then gave them access to the server. And then at that point, it was more of an issue where they were able to manipulate data. So keep an eye out here.

They'll email you. But if you ever see that security issue, that's something you want to hop on immediately like that day, not, oh, we'll get to that next week. When there's a broken link, sometimes you can put it to tomorrow and go do what you have to do. If your site's hacked, you want to take care of that right away. So definitely keep an eye on that security issues tab. Manual actions haven't dealt with one of those in a while. It's been, it's been quite some times I've dealt with the manual action. Number one, I think we do our of seo approach is such that we hopefully would never get caught in that filter i wonder how many they're handing out though because i don't even see people that i follow on like twitter and social media talk about manual actions that often i feel like marie haynes would be the person who

would talk about that the most and i rarely see her post about it and she's supposed about it all the time oh client got a manual action we save them which is her specialty is that area of seo link audits and pulling people out of like really nasty situations in that respect is my understanding. Yeah, I don't have much experience there. We long time ago, a client in the vacational space that is very well known and popular in public did have a manual action when I was still at the previous agency I worked for and very able to get it revoked by going through filling out the form doing all this kind of stuff. But man, that's been six years ago. I don't think I've got one manual action since I had a client that had one about two years ago resolved right before we started

working together. So that's the only experience I can rely on there. Two tabs that you want to see right now. I'm looking right there and there's a check mark that says no issues detected. That's what you want to see. You don't want to see anything else in these two tabs, but have you dealt with that in the past or these mostly just hack sites every once in a while and a few manual actions in your day or. It is. Yeah. We had a couple of hack sites and the bad thing was we didn't have search console on it we just we actually found out by a it was google ads giving us a malware malware warning and disapproving that way so we it is we went through installed search console on the site after the fact and yeah it was great at that point

but it really would have been nice to hopefully catch some of that a little ahead of time and because i don't know we don't know we'd never do timing we didn't know anything like that and it took oh i would say a good month and a half to really work through with with google ad support because it is we weren't going through search console side of things we were going through with google ad support and trying to say, okay, where are you finding the malware? And at some one point you could get on the live chat with Google and they would give you the 15 to 20 links that they found, which we had that were hacked links or hacked code or whatever that was. So it was a lot more back and forth than, i would have liked we get we got it resolved

eventually but yeah i would guess it was about a six week process and couldn't run google ads during that time couldn't do a lot of stuff it is for a little while we were getting the google protection page i would say when people were trying to access the site of this site is not secure do you want to go forward or do you want to turn around the traffic obviously went down pretty substantially there so it's yeah that's certainly something anytime you can't i never want to see anything there but anytime you've got anything in either of those tabs that's an immediate that's a drop everything what you're doing yep and that's in the hour that's if you're in me that's if you're in a meeting you hang up the meeting and you go fix things right away yeah yeah that can cause some severe traffic issues and

to your point if you're a customer just think about it from the guest perspective for a second too if you're going to book on a vacational website and it says this information isn't secure even if that was fixed and you go on it the next time and you go yeah let me put my amex in this website nope you're gonna think is this legit probably not so yeah definitely something to keep an eye on for sure and keep a close eye on now right under that is the legacy section the only tool i ever end up using in there occasionally is that a robots.txt tester um they have an ad experience tool in there but very few of our clients run any display ads on their website so right not something i typically ever fiddle with and like i said the only tool i've ever used in there since the redesign has been the robots.txt tester so i don't know if you have anything else in there that you've used other than that it's

links and settings so the only other tabs maybe to run through pretty quickly yeah pretty much no like i said what we did in the legacy was disavow links so that is where we did that previously it's not something i would do now again google i think most of google's research says don't just don't disavow links. Anybody out there who is still disavowing them, you probably shouldn't do that anymore. Just because if Google says it, if Bing has said similar things, but we didn't carry as much weight there, then that's who we should be listening to there. So yeah, on to links and settings there then. External, internal links.

We talk a lot about link strategies and link backs and all that stuff. It is, I think it's important to understand where those links are coming from, what pages are the top link pages from external links coming in or internal links going from page to page going out. I think all of that is important there. So understanding what your top linking sites are. Anchor text. I think that's important as well.

If you've got some link text that's going nowhere right now, that is one of those things. Help clarify for the search engines where the traffic is going and where those links are going there. It's stunning sometimes to see what that top linking text, what those items are. There's actually, I'm looking at one right now. I see a link in there.

I see this link in there. I see an empty in there. Yeah, you really want to. That's just another point where you can give Google that clear indication with that linking alt text or not. It's not technically alt text per se. Anchor text there. Thank you.

So it is making sure that anchor text is spot on with where you're actually going or gives a little extra direction. That's an SEO play. Yeah, I guess anything in the links area or just overall settings that you spend a lot of time in there. I sometimes will take a look at the crawl stats, which is under settings. I don't know why it seems like a weird home for it.

I feel like it would make more sense under some of the other sub menus, to be honest. But yeah, typically the only tool that we sometimes will do inside of settings is that change of address that we had a site rebrand. Sure. We worked on a little while ago, went from domain A to domain B. That is actually, you can tell Google that change of address that we had a site rebrand sure we worked on a little while ago went from domain a to domain b that is actually you can tell google that you're doing that which sometimes can help speed up that process of getting things indexed so that's a rare

one if you ever do rebrand you excuse me if you ever do rebrand you go from company a to company b.com and you're renaming the company that's a tool to have in your back pocket for sure there's also like an association of service to google analytics so that's under tool to have in your back pocket for sure. There's also like an association of service to Google Analytics. So that's under settings as well. That sometimes is worth, it's a convenience. It doesn't really give you like more data. It just puts the data in one interface that you can sometimes look at the other way.

And then obviously you can add, remove users and things like that under the settings users section. If you're not an owner, you don't want to see a lot of those settings though. So make sure you're an owner too. I was telling this to a client the other day. I was giving him ownership access of Search Console, not just user access. And he was like, why do i want this and i'm like well who

knows i could get hit by a bus and now you have search console i was just saying we always try to do things the right way there but yeah the crawl stats report i don't find myself going in there a lot at first when that report first came out i like to look for under that host status tab to be like is there any issues but i just rarely see any issues there even with sites that do sometimes have downtime i rarely see any issues so. Even with sites that do sometimes have downtime, I rarely see any issues. So I don't think that report is particularly sensitive, to be honest with you, for lack of a better term. If your site is having downtime issues, I think that you're better off using

some kind of monitoring tool, like Uptime Robot is our tool of choice there. And use that. Don't rely on Google to tell you if your site's down. If your site's down that often to where they're crawling you once a day and they're finding it down frequently, then your site's probably down way more than that.

You should definitely dump that host and get it to a new host. So I don't go to those a ton, but occasionally there's some data in there that I might want to poke around, especially if a site was struggling with issues like that, like downtime issues and things like that. Or like I said, I was doing some kind of rebranding projects. So those are some things that come to mind, but really going back to the, where we started on this particular segment on search console, it's search results tab is where I'm spending about 85% of my time. That's the one to play in on. It gives you data that one thing to keep in mind too, is it gives you data that's anonymized or based on what everybody's seeing. So I had a, not a debate, but I had an argument with a client one time about, hey, where I did

the search in incognito and I see as ranking number four in Google for this keyword. But that can change depending on device, where you're accessing the content from, et cetera etc. And then he went search console and looked because he was savvy and he understood how to log in and pull that data. And he said in here, it says 8.7 over the last 30 days. And I said, Okay, that's plausible. Because first of all, we may have just jumped recently. So it could be it could have been 10. And now it's four. And therefore the average balances out to be a number like that. And I'm like, that's just what I saw. You could do that search and see a different ranking. Paul could do the search in Minnesota and see different rankings. So that's the thing to keep in mind is that this isn't like a, it's not a number on the

position piece. That's the piece that I sometimes have had some conversations with people about. It's an average. And I think the best thing to do is look at it over a short time period, seven days or three days or something like that. Don't pull some long amount of data because one or two low ranking days will like mess up all the data and make it useless. The other thing is there is a threshold on what they consider to be like,

like PI or like personally identifying or like clicks hidden for privacy. So sometimes when people are searching like the name of a property, I noticed that it doesn't actually show up in search console because they think it's like a person's name or something like that. So that data isn't perfect to keep that in mind. There is a bit of filtering going on there, especially the web interface. We talked about that earlier, how there's only a thousand rows of data that you can access at any given time. If your sites have any decent size and significance, that is just flat out not enough data to be able to analyze. Better off pulling it down into a tool like link some tools in the show notes that we

use. There's a Google Sheets tool. I'm blanking on the exact name right now, but it's something named something very simply like Google Sheets for GSC or something like that. I'll put it down and I'll put it in the show notes because that's super useful. But really, I think this tool is your lifeline. It is your view. There's not a lot of areas where you get free information directly from Google to you to help you improve your site, make it better, improve your traffic. And this is one of the few that does. So hopefully whether you're a beginner,

intermediate, advanced, you picked up a tip or two from this. Anything else you want to cover here? Or should we just, we slammed Google at the beginning beginning so we're going to end on a high note and say thanks google google for search console we appreciate it it's super useful we enjoy pretty much that that's exactly it after after they may not have done bard well but fortunately some of this legacy stuff that's still in place here search consoles yeah it will i hope it will but search console is definitely something that if you know where to look and it's i I wouldn't say it's overwhelming. It's pretty straightforward. You can dig down a rabbit hole with Google analytics. I think in general, search console is one of those where they put just enough information there. And if you want to keep digging, you can get down that rabbit hole,

but they're not going to easily allow you to do that. So it is, it's certainly something that provides value, lets you understand how that website is performing. And if you want to know more than that, you can find that too. Yeah. Awesome. I think we should put a button on this one and ask for reviews. So Google, we reviewed Google search console highly. You know what else people should review? This podcast highly. You should head into your favorite podcast player of choice, head onto that reviews tab, click five stars or whatever you think is appropriate. We would appreciate five stars. Yeah, we're not going to force you to do that. We're not like one of these Airbnb hosts that five stars are nothing. If you want

to go leave a three star and break our hearts and make us really sad, then you can do that. I don't want you to do that. But you can. It's America free choices. No, it's all good. But we do appreciate the reviews. I think we've gotten a few more since we always joke at the end about begging for reviews, but it does seem to work a little bit. So I guess until we have as many as everybody else has, we're not going to stop begging for reviews.

Hopefully it doesn't bother people too much at the end. But thanks, Paul, for joining me today. I really appreciate our little chat today on Search Console. We've got more episodes coming. I think we might have analytics coming down the pipe.

So definitely check that one out when that's ready to go. Paul has to learn GA4 first. Now I joke in order to get us in good shape there. More things on the horizon, but we appreciate it. If you can leave us a review, please do. If you have any questions or feedback or comments, we'd appreciate it.

You can always hit us up. Conrad at buildupbookings.com is my email. And then Paul is paul at ventori.com. B-I-N-T-O-R-Y.com. So check us out there and we will catch you on the next episode. Thanks so much.