Webmaster tools associates

The concept behind all tools is the same: you create an account, verify ownership of your website, submit xml sitemap and then use the available tools and reports to analyze your traffic and troubleshoot any errors. It is normal to spend the majority of your time and effort on Google but do not forget about other search engines. They can generate extra traffic to your website utilizing your existing content.

Alex Chris is a digital marketing consultant, author, and instructor. He has more than 18 years of practical experience with SEO and digital marketing. Alex holds an MSc Degree in eCommerce and has consulted with Fortune companies in different industries.

He blogs regularly about SEO and Digital marketing, and his work has been referenced by leading marketing websites. Connect with Alex on Twitter and LinkedIn. Thanks for the article. The services they offer are surely more human-centric than what Google does. Thank you. Your email address will not be published. Key Learnings One of the ways to optimize your website for the various search engines is to make use of webmaster tools.

Often the CTR is highly dependent on external factors such as competition, number of advertisers, and amount of specialized results like rich snippets, local carousels, images, etc….

Understanding which search queries tend to have lower CTR in your niche can help inform your future keyword research and SEO strategy. Third, CTR may help tell you if your page is what the people are looking for. It appears our ranking was driven by our CTR being well above average. Fourth, sometimes the organic CTR is something you have some direct control over; and you want to find opportunities to directly improve CTRs.

Below-average click-thrus may indicate an opportunity to employ rich snippets or tweak Meta descriptions. Another important insight is the CTR of searches for your brand. See if you should try to win more real estate in the SERPs.

This can aid in AdWords decisions, such as bidding. Benchmarking CTR is required for the above analyses. You could look to the varying results of external studies for a figure on average CTR. You could also take the average CTR for your data. First, export the search query data into Excel. Then isolate a bucket of queries for a given rank all queries for position 1, for example. Then take the average for the bucket.

One limitation of connecting the accounts is that you can only connect one GWT account to one GA account, and a GWT account can only be for one subdomain. So, if you have multiple subdomains, an individual GA view will only display some of your GWT query data. These limitations can be overcome by viewing the data directly in GWT.

Viewing keyword data without landing page data is like having chocolate without more chocolate. So now you can have double chocolate. Automatic exports One problem with the Search Queries report is that it only goes back 90 days. The obvious solution is to export it periodically, but this is a pain to constantly do manually. GWT help article here. Unlike the rest of the reports described below, the Change of Address tool is not located in the left menu.

It can be found in the top right. There are three main things to know:. More major migration tips here , btw. Hopefully, you know by now how Google uses schema. And, that by implementing the right data markup, you can hope to trigger the data on your site to display as these rich snippets and dramatically improve click-through-rates for a notable bump in search traffic.

By viewing stats on structured data for your site as a whole and by type of data, you can verify that Google is picking up structured data.

You can also get nice details on the individual data pieces being picked up and also on errors. Excellent GWT help articles here. Nice article by Portent here. The Data Highlighter is a tool that basically tells Google the same things schema. The Data Highlighter is very user-friendly and can be used to tag at least 9 types of data, and every tag corresponds with schema. Whenever feasible, I prefer getting schema. If hard-coding schema is not practical, take the Data Highlighter for a spin.

The HTML improvements section can not only help you improve the appearance of your SERP listings, but also help you find opportunities to address keyword optimization and duplicate content issues. Sniff out duplicate content. As you likely know, it is generally a bad practice to have pages that do not contain content unique to that page.

So use caution. Google your brand. Now do it on private browsing. In our opinion Majestic offer the best 3rd party link data on the market, and conveniently they also give you free link data for your own verified domains. To get this, you will need to sign up for a free account , then head over to their Webmaster Tools area and verify your domain. There are a variety of verification methods which require you to have some level of access to the site. Once your domain is verified, you can click on the little cog alongside it and choose to create a report.

You can then choose to download the link data to your local machine. Clicking the button below will open a new tab and allow you to sign into Clarity. You can also find your Clarity JS snippet again, as well as guides for installing it on platforms such as Wordpress, Wix, Google Tag Manager, and many more:.