Must-Know Google Search Console Terms for Real Estate Websites
Days ago I published an article titled “Must-Know Google Analytics Terms for Real Estate Websites“, it was cool so I decided to write another for Google search console terms!
Google Search Console? The platform that provides data and insights into how people find your website on Google.
By learning key terms like impressions, clicks, CTR, and crawl stats, you can better optimize your site for search.
With some basic knowledge of Google Search Console, you’ll be able to boost your rankings, traffic, and leads.
This article will walk you through the most important terms and sections for GSC for real estate websites.
Let’s start:
Site Verification
The first step to using Search Console is verifying that you own the site. You can verify your site by uploading an HTML file with a meta tag, adding a DNS record, or using Google Analytics. Verifying your site allows you to see data specific to that site.
Performance Reports
Search Console provides reports on how well your site is performing in Google Search. The Performance report shows you impressions, clicks, and click-through rate (CTR) over time so you can see trends in your site’s visibility and traffic from Google. The Queries report shows you the specific terms people searched for to find your site.
Impressions
Impressions refer to the number of times your site or page has been shown in search results. The higher your impressions, the more visibility your site has. For real estate sites, aim for consistently high impressions for important search terms like “homes for sale in [city name]” or “[neighborhood name] real estate”.
Clicks
Clicks measure the number of times someone has clicked on your listing in the search results to visit your website. A high click-through rate (CTR), calculated as clicks divided by impressions, means your listings and content are appealing and relevant to searchers.
CTR
CTR refers specifically to the Click-Through Rate for your website’s organic search results. It calculates the percentage of impressions (times your webpage showed up in search results) that resulted in clicks.
Average Position
It’s a metric that indicates the typical ranking of your website’s pages across all the keywords they appear for in search results.
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic encompasses all the visitors who come to your site through unpaid search results.
Sitemaps
Sitemaps help Google discover all the pages on your site, especially newly added ones. Generating XML sitemaps and submitting them to the Search Console ensures your entire site is indexed properly. Read more at the Sitemap guide.
Core Web Vitals
These metrics measure key aspects of user experience like load speed, interactivity, and visual stability. Improving your Core Web Vitals can boost your search rankings.
Page experience
Page experience is a broad term that encompasses how users interact with and perceive your website. Factors like page speed, core web vitals, and mobile friendliness all impact the overall experience.
Removals
Google Search Console allows you to monitor removals of your site’s pages from Google’s index. You can request Google to immediately remove pages from SERP.
Discover
Google’s Discover service surfaces content from websites in Google’s apps and features like Google Search, Google News, and the Google app. Getting your content discovered by Discover can help expand your reach and traffic.
HTTPS
Switching to HTTPS with an SSL certificate signals to Google that your site is secure and trustworthy. This can provide a small ranking boost.
Sitelink Search Box
The sitelink search box is a feature that displays an interactive search field for your site in Google’s search results. Requesting this feature in Search Console can help surface your site higher in relevant searches.
Backlinks
Backlinks are links from other sites that point back to your website. They are a signal to search engines that your site is an authority on a topic. Read more at real estate backlinks guide.
Crawl Errors
The Crawl Errors report shows you any issues Googlebot encountered while crawling your site. Fixing crawl errors helps Google index your site fully and can improve your rankings. Common issues include 404 errors, robots.txt issues, and page canonicalization problems.
Manual Actions
If Google has applied a manual action penalty to your site, such as for unnatural links or content quality issues, you’ll see it reported in the Search Console. You can then submit a reconsideration request to have the penalty removed once you’ve fixed the issues.
Site Kit
The Search Console Site Kit is a plugin you can install on WordPress sites to access Search Console data directly on your WordPress dashboard. The plugin shows you performance reports, search analytics, mobile usability issues, and more.
Google Search Console is always constantly updating to give more and better insight to SEO Experts and website owners.
We will keep this article up-to-date to make sure every new term will be explained in it.
Thanks for reading. If you are interested in continuing reading, visit our comprehensive article on real estate SEO.
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