Google Webmaster Tools | The Booster Seat Season 2 Episode 10

Update: Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) has been rebranded to Google Search Console.

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The Booster Seat Season 2, Episode 10

The Top 5 Reasons to Use Google Webmaster Tools

Hey there Boosters, I’m Andrew Eagar and welcome to another edition of the booster seat. Today, I would like to discuss the top 5 reasons to use Google Webmaster Tools.

Google Webmaster Tools is a great resource for webmasters and SEO’s. Sadly, it is often underutilized or misunderstood. I have created a list of the top 5 reasons you should use Google Webmaster Tools.

Reason #1: Site Messages

So often it feels like with all the edits and files we create that we are just giving and giving and giving to Google with nothing but silence on the other end. If this were a relationship it would surely fail. Google Webmaster Tools opens that communication. If Google needs to communicate to you as the webmaster they are going to communicate through Google Webmaster Tools, specifically through the messages or manual actions sections.

Reason #2: Search Queries

This is a very exciting section. Here you can see both Query and traffic information. This data shows you the number of queries your website show up for in the Google Search Engine Results Page. This doesn’t only show you keywords that you got impressions for, it also attempts to show you the keywords you got traffic for. It isn’t perfectly accurate, but the data does give you an idea of trends.

This data shows the Query, impressions, clicks, CTR and Average Position. In addition to seeing this data for a given keyword you can take a deeper dive into the keywords to see its performance over time.

This section really helps with Keyword Research and can also help to see what keywords might need some help or extra optimization.

Reason #3: Links to your website

This shows you sites that link to you and your most popular pages that get links. Knowing who links to you is an important tool. SEO’s have discovered that Google doesn’t show all of the links that link to you, but this tool does show a good sample of links.

Review the links to your website and if you feel like a site is linking to you that is not relevant or you don’t want, then you an use the disavow tool to do that.

Reason #4: Crawl Stats

This section of Google Webmaster Tools is pretty fun and has a lot of technical data. I think the most important piece of data however is pages crawled per day. This simply shows how often Google is crawling your website.

Reason #5: Fetch as Google

This is a neat section of Google Webmaster Tools and allows you look at your website just like a Googlebot would crawl and see your website. It allows you the option of seeing the desktop or mobile view. By using this tool you can see if there are any potential errors or issues when Google is crawling your website.

Well, there you have it, the top 5 reasons to use Google Webmaster Tools. Did I miss any? Comment below if you have any other ideas to use Google Webmaster Tools. Stay Cool.

Learn more about Google Webmaster Tools with this blog post: How To Properly Setup Google Webmaster Tools.