Performance Issues are a Common Concern for Winemakers

Don’t be ashamed. Almost all small wineries struggle with poor search performance. Google Search Console can help to straighten things out.

Google Search Console offers enormous benefits to small wineries, allowing them to gain valuable insights for improving their website’s search performance.

If you’re unfamiliar with it, Google Search Console (GSC) allows website owners to see how their site looks from the search engine’s perspective.

This brief article provides instructions for gaining an impressive boost from this powerful free tool to improve your website for more organic search traffic.

The Difference Between Google Search Console and Google Analytics

You may have poked around in Google Analytics and noticed that it tells you how many visitors have viewed pages on your website.

Possibly, you have dug deeper and discovered the possibilities when dimensions are combined to reveal finer details about user actions on your website.

The key is that Google Analytics provides data about visitors who have landed on your site. It is the view from within your website.

In contrast, Google Search Console (GSC) provides the outside view. It tells you how your site looks to people conducting searches who are yet to land on your site. 

It is also the view that search engines see, showing where your site is ranking for specific keywords, how many pages of your website are being indexed, and so on.

When it was launched in 2005 under the name of Google Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console was tremendously useful to website owners. Since then, it has become increasingly more powerful with every enhancement Google has added along the way.

I’ll get into the many ways you can use Google Search Console a little farther down, but here are three powerful insights you can get from GSC very quickly with just a glance.

Powerful Insights, Unbelievably Quickly

I check in on GSC several times a week for a quick read on my site’s health status, and less frequently but still regularly, I dig deeper for new opportunities.

Before I get into the bountiful list of how you can use Google Search Console to identify performance issues and improve your search rankings, here are my three favorite quick go-to’s for keyword, content, and traffic ideas.

1. View the search terms for which your website gets the most impressions. There is little value in ranking #1 for a search term that gets only ten impressions a month. However. a search term that gets 1,000 impressions a month, for which you’re ranking #15, deserves your attention.

2. View the search terms you’ve previously not identified for which your site is now getting ranked. New search terms that appear in Google Search Console might be worth targeting and writing some content around. GSC allows you to see a comparison of, for example, the last 28 days against the previous 28-day period.

A search query that shows up in the 30th position in the last 28 days but zero in the previous period might warrant some keyword research to check the monthly search volume, keyword difficulty, and additional related keywords.

3. View the search terms for which your site ranks high in the search results but gets low click volume. Low click-through rates in high-ranking search results usually indicate a weak page title or meta description.

If you are consistently ranked #1 for a particular keyword but only getting a 10% click-through rate, you are forfeiting at least half* the traffic that position typically garners.

You can investigate further by looking at the sites you’re competing with.

You can easily do this by conducting a search for that keyword and looking at the results that appear near yours.

*A study published by Search Engine Journal indicated that the top result in Google gets 25% to 30% of all clicks, while the second result gets around 15% and the third result about 10%.

Image Credit: IB Photography – stock.adobe.com

Getting the most from your Google Search Console

As I mentioned, GSC is a tremendously powerful SEO tool.

Whether you use it to reveal missing pages, broken links, slow page loads, display issues, and accessibility issues or to uncover new opportunities to secure better search results placements, Google Search Console provides tangible benefits.

Here are the major starting points:

1. Monitor Search Performance:

The Performance report lets you see which search queries your site ranks for. It tells you:

• The average position for each term over the specified period
• How many times it appeared (Impressions)
• How many times each term was clicked,
• The click-through rate for each term

Advanced Tip: Having identical keywords appear on multiple pages can harm your search performance. This is because your various pages that share the same keywords are competing with each other, known in SEO circles as cannibalizing.

To discover if this is happening on your site, add a Query filter in the Performace report, say, Pinot Noir Tastings.

Next, select Pages.

If you see multiple pages listed for the same search query, these pages are cannibalizing each other for that keyword.

2. Check if pages are indexed:

If a page is not receiving traffic, you can use the URL Inspection tool to check if it is currently in Google’s index. (If a page is not indexed, it cannot appear in search results.)

Click on URL Inspection in the left column and enter the full URL for the page in question.

If the page is not currently indexed, GSC will display a button to request indexing. If you have made significant changes to a page, you can submit it to be re-indexed.

 3. Submit or Update Sitemaps:

You may not be familiar with XML sitemaps, but they help tell search engines what pages are on your site that should be indexed.

You can get a free sitemap created for your website by searching for “free sitemap generator.”

GSC makes it very easy to submit a sitemap. Click on Sitemap in the left column under Indexing, and enter the location of your sitemap on your web server.

Once a sitemap is submitted, Google will crawl it periodically to check for changes.

4. Discover Indexing Issues:

Particular issues can prevent pages from being indexed. To discover if any of your pages report issues, such as a “404 Page Not Found” error, redirects, or other errors, click Pages under Indexing in the left column.

Being alerted to any errors, you can now resolve them and resubmit the affected pages for re-indexing.

5. Enhance Mobile Usability:

In 2019, Google fully implemented their “mobile-First” update which uses the mobile version of web pages for indexing.

What this means for your website’s search rankings is that the version of your website that gets displayed on mobile devices must be fast-loading, well-structured, and user-friendly.

Google Search Console allows you to see your page load times for mobile (and desktop) versions of your site and alerts you to the issues that need improvement.

To access this report in GSC, go to Core Web Vitals under Experience in the left-hand column.

With some creative thought and experience, you will continue discovering new ways to gain insights from this resource that is — did I mention? — permanently and unconditionally FREE!

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