Carmen Domínguez Rodríguez led a detailed session on using Google Search Console for technical SEO audits. Key points included analyzing video page indexing, core web vitals, and schema usage.
Carmen identified issues such as missing canonical tags, lack of internal linking, and 404 errors, highlighting their impact on SEO. She also explained the significance of core web vitals, both mobile and desktop.
A huge thank you to Uproer for sponsoring our 5th Technical SEO cohort and making these trainings accessible to BIPOC folks in developing countries!
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Name: Carmen Rodriguez Dominguez
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Noteworthy: Carmen has over 7 years of experience in digital marketing, specializing in content, translations, and digital PR before focusing on SEO.
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Carmen starts by explaining the basics of Google Search Console, focusing on the overview section. This includes metrics like clicks, indexing levels, and video page indexing. She highlights the importance of video page indexing for websites with a lot of video content, as it affects visibility in Google Videos.
Carmen also mentions core web vitals, which are crucial for both technical SEO and user experience (UX). Additionally, she discusses the potential use of schema markup and how it can be monitored in Google Search Console.
Carmen explains how to analyze search results in Google Search Console, covering total clicks, impressions, CTR, and average positions. She emphasizes the importance of understanding where clicks are coming from by filtering by country, device, search appearance, and dates.
Carmen mentions the limitation of 1000 queries and queries per page in Google Search Console and introduces the Search Analytics for Sheets extension to overcome these limitations. She demonstrates how to analyze non-brand and brand performance using regex and custom queries.
Carmen shows how to identify opportunities for improvement by analyzing the performance of specific pages and categories. She identifies issues such as pages not being included in the sitemap and lacking canonical tags, which can be addressed to increase traffic.
Carmen discusses the importance of internal linking and breadcrumbs for better indexing and user experience. She highlights the need to prioritize fixing issues identified in Google Search Console to improve overall website performance.
Carmen explains the impact of 404 errors on website performance and how to identify and fix them. She provides an example of a 404 error caused by duplicate FAQ pages and suggests deleting one of the pages to resolve the issue.
Carmen discusses the importance of maintaining a clean and error-free sitemap to ensure proper indexing by Google. She explains the need to remove links from the robots.txt file carefully, as it can have long-term effects on indexing.
🗝️Addressing Security and Robots.txt Issues
Carmen discusses the importance of ensuring a secure website (HTTPS) and redirecting non-secure URLs to secure URLs. She explains the potential issues caused by having both secure and non-secure versions of a website and the need to resolve them.
Carmen demonstrates how to test robots.txt files for errors and ensure they are not limiting crawling. She also provides tips for giving access to team members in Google Search Console and managing permissions effectively.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 0:13
Okay, so you should be able to see my screen now. Please do let me know if you don’t. So when we start in Google Search Console, I’m sure that many of you are familiar already, there are quite a lot of things that we can already see in the overview, which is the overall performance in terms of clicks, the indexing and not indexing levels.
So we can see the amount of pages that we have indexing here, and if we have increase or decrease in no index pages we can see as well video video page indexing, which is rather important, because whatever we see in here, if you have videos in your website, if you they are not indexing, they cannot be seen in Google videos, which is one of the the filters within Google.
So if you have a lot of videos of you doing a content video strategy, having an eye keeping an eye on the video page indexing is quite important. Experience shows what we call core core web vitals. And core web vitals are really important in any technical audit that we do. So you might, you guys might have not look into core web vitals for this example, but we’re going to be looking into core web vitals more in detail whenever we do the final tech audits.
In when, when we do the final audits, all you need to do is to flag them. You will flag them as well with the tools that we’re going to be using, but we will do a separate training understanding exactly what core web vitals are, because core web vitals are an issue for technical SEO, but they’re also a big issue for UX and how users engage with the pages. And then an enhancement is we cannot see any here, but for example, if you have any commerce, which we potentially can see later.
Another example, if you use a schema, or you have put quite a lot of schemas, they will show in here to see if they are working or not. And maybe we can see in one of your examples. So what we can do in here is to actually look at in any specific URL that we know have an issue. And then from that, we can go into rendering and do a few tests, which we’re going to do in a bit.
But before that, we are going to be looking into search results and how we can get information from several resource sorry, search results. In case you haven’t used this before, we see the basics right, which is total clicks, total impressions, CTR and average positions. And then we can see in here the queries that we get at the pages that are ranking or they’re bringing the biggest clicks and biggest impressions, countries, devices, search appearance, which is really important, because actually you’re going to be able to be able to understand from here where most of your clicks are coming from, and you can filter and then finally, the dates.
Why is it important here? Because whatever we can get from Google is going to be reflected in in here. Now, a few things to mention. You have a limit of 1000 queries that you can take from Google Search Console, but there are quite a lot of different ways. Queries, no, sorry, pages. It’s a limitation in pages and queries, but you can actually overcome the limitation using this, which is a little trick, trick, sorry, using this extension in here search analytics for sheets, and I’m going to show you in a minute how to use it as well.
This is one of the best ways to overcome all the limits that Google puts and to analyze data, but there are quite a lot of things that you can do in here anyway. For example, we want to analyze if our non brand is working as well as our brand, or what’s the difference in the clicks that we’re bringing, bringing from brand terms and non brand terms you go to query, you can choose a specific queries.
For example, if you are searching for shoes, only shoes. But you can also, using regex, try to look into only brand or no brand, or anything that you want. For example, we want to look only at the performance of our our brand, and we’re looking into this brand tracked item. So we get truck Titan in here.
From here, we put it in here. We also going to put it with the space, because maybe people also search for it with the space. And we’re going to choose my. Projects. From here, we can see that actually, this is all the queries that people use to try to get to us with brand but it seems like we have a potential opportunity to improve our brand rankings.
It looks like 19.3 might be very low. It could also be that is because it’s picking up anything Titan related only Titan or iRacing tracks, which might not necessarily be non brand branded. So let’s remove this. Let’s look only this looks much better and actually makes sense that we have a click through rate really high.
So these are the keywords that actually are bringing most of the traffic. For what we can see in here, only 12345, keywords, but we can do now the contrary. We can actually exclude all the branded terms, and we can look at the non brand terms and how we’re ranking the traffic that is bringing and the impressions that it’s bringing.
So from here, we can look into opportunity, right? And we can actually look into the pages that could be performing better based on what we know from what we see here is a few category pages that actually are performing. Are bringing most of the non brand traffic is obviously the home page makes sense. Then most of the traffic is coming from this one, which is a category page. But then we can see here that blog post is in the top, top 10 of traffic pages that bring traffic or that bring clicks.
We can see from here that the impressions are really high versus the clicks that it brings. So we can see from here that, yes, Google is understanding that this page is important, but users are not. So let’s have a look at this specific page. If we do this, we can see that everything is okay, although first issue that we see is that this page is not in the site map, so we know that Google is going to be prioritizing any pages and including the sitemap, this one that we know Google is understanding, because the impressions are really high, but for whatever reasons, the users are not seeing it and not including there.
Not only that, we can see that it doesn’t have a canonical either. So we have identified in this page already two things that we can do to bring it to increase the traffic, and this is only by using Google Search Console, so we can see we can do more things in here as well. We can just filter by post, because we want to look into the performance of the blog. So we go to page, and we put here
carmen domínguez rodríguez 8:11
the URL part that we care about, and we can see that actually the CTR from the block is really, really low, although the impressions are quite high. So what is it causing this issue? Can see that one is the one that we saw, but here, there are quite a lot of others that also have problems. So we could identify what the issue is in here and how we can solve this to make sure that Google is crawling it and indexing, indexing it properly. I think probably the ministry that is going to have in here is none of them are in the site map.
None of them have a canonical, which should be a self canonical. And probably Google is actually not understanding or thinking if you are not putting a canonical, you don’t really, you don’t really care about me finding it if we could, if we go to any of these actually, potentially, we will see that even internal linking is not really strong. In fact, we see zero internal linking. So we are not making it very easy for Google to find these blocks. We are basically not including the indexing.
We are not setting up properly, technically, and we are not pointing at it from anywhere. In fact, you can see here that it doesn’t even have breadcrumbs. So we already discussed last time, the breadcrumbs is a very nice way to actually including internal linking. So just in five minutes, we found a lot of opportunities.
This is what we one of the things that we can get into the search, search results, and I don’t want to spend too much time in here, because here you can go as deep as you want by adding filters and getting deep. Here. So imagine we also want to see now where all the traffic is coming, so the US, but why not the UK? And let’s see three the clicks that we get from the US are even lower than what we saw earlier, and click through rate is even zero, 0.3 which is very low. Is it because we have not saw Google where to put this content? Let’s have a look.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 10:32
So we can see that in the code, there’s no hreflang, so we are not telling Google which are the countries that we want to show these contents. And with again, we found all of this just by looking at it five minutes in Google Search Console. So Google Search Console is a like gold mine that you can find everything.
So you should, at this point already be quite familiar with this part the process I just did was only looking at such results, but you can do exactly the same process by finding the issues in here. So we already know that the 57 issues that doesn’t have a user selected canonical. I think someone asked me a question about user selected canonical being the same as canonical number one.
So canonical number one, whenever you use a crawler, is the first canonical they find. Because sometimes you can have more than one canonical order issue then. So first canonical one should indeed be the user select economical page will redirect. So obviously this is not being indexed because we are telling Google to ignore it.
But this is a problem for a force. So we can see here that from the 404 there are few blog posts that actually could bring be bringing traffic. And this one, for example, which is really recent, is from August. We can see is this one that when you type of the title in the search results within the page is not present.
So how come they wrote a whole article and it’s not even live? This is a question that you should ask whoever writes contents. Why is this as a form for should it be a 404? And can we fix it? Going back to here, discover currently no index only one. Doesn’t seem like a big issue, but look at what it is. It’s a FAQ this actually should be a big issue because of FAQs. Great.
That’s why it’s not indexed. So FAQs is you create FAQs for a reason, right? You want to, ah, they have two FAQs with S, FAQ without s, okay. So explanation why this is a 404, more likely is because they were creating the page then created another one and decided that there are two. So let’s, let’s delete one. But they didn’t delete it from the site.
They let they delete it from their CMS, but not from the sites. So and Google is still trying to find it and crawl it, because somehow we’re telling Google to do it. So what will be the solution here? Redirect to here? You will find tons of 404, which is one of the questions that someone asked me, why there are so many pages.
You will find a lot of pages that are created in the CMS, but and then I left there for Google to find, but no one removed them from from the CMS. So they remove it from the back end, but they don’t remove it from the code, meaning that Google can still find them. And the more we already said it in one of the of the classes, the last one or the previous one, 404, actually, if there are too many 404, Google will think that your website is not being looked after.
And because it’s not being looked after. It won’t prioritize it in the rankings or in the indexing. So it will stop getting the crawl to come back to you, because it’s a waste of time. So that’s why, for a force, we need to pay special attention if we continue going so I always like starting from the top and then going down.
We can see side maps. We have talked about how important it is to to keep assignment. Whenever you put you create your site map and you put it in the robot txt, something else that you should do is uploaded in here. And I think someone showed me an example of a sitemap that there were tones of Sitemaps, and they all were giving errors. If they’re giving errors in here, it means that Google cannot read them. So either you need to submit a new one with the right URLs, or you need to contact Google to understand what’s going on.
Normally, if you put it, you submit it in here and you put it in if you put it in your robot txt, and you submit it in here, and it’s giving errors in here, the likely like, who the. Google won’t read it in your robot txt are quite, quite high, so it’s very important to test it in here, and this is to remove links. Now, for example, and I think it’s one of the samples that someone was asking me, why there are so many links and should, should we remove them?
This is a way for you to remove links, so you are telling Google not to keep indexing those. Now you need to be really careful with this whenever you do it, because once you submit the request of no index from Google, which you can do anyway, with no index, you can do it removed from the txt from the robot txt, but if you submit it in here, it means Google will never see it again, even if you put the must do index. So there are quite a lot of things that you can do before removing it here, then choosing the selection from here.
If you don’t have a choice because no one knows how to put the no index or your CMS doesn’t allow you, then you can do it from here. I will try to avoid leaving this as the last solution. And page experience, which is what we were talking about, the core web vitals. For when we look at core web vitals, we look both on mobile and desktop. Google will prioritize mobile as a default.
And probably you heard, you have heard about mobile first crawling, so it will always try to use Google crawler or Google bots mobile to check your phone your website. Why is that? Because in the last years, most people use their phone to actually look into the internet. They rarely check desktop, so they prioritize mobile.
However, Google is smart enough to know when your website is being looked into from desktop, desktop more often than mobile, so sometimes it does send the Google bot, desktop more often than mobile. That’s why you need to look after both of them. But if you have to prioritize fixes, will always prioritize mobile. And we can see here some of the type of errors and poor is definitely is having an impact on your website. Needs Improvement.
It means that it could be better, but it’s not the worst, obviously. And then green is a good green that it passes the the recommendations by Google, you can see top level the issues in here, so it will tell you which pages have the issues. And then you you can look more in detail what they are. But I’m going to to explain it.
As I said, more in detail in our session only about core web vitals, and there are other tools that you can use to analyze covid vital in more a visual way. It’s very difficult to explain to to clients core web vitals, because they don’t tend to understand it’s too complex. It’s too many letters that you need to visualize it with a page experience website you you will be able to get videos that shows why it is an issue. For example, if the images are moving or it takes to load too long to load.
And that’s the tool that I’m going to teach you how to use next time, whenever you need to present covid virus issues. And here, this is really cool, actually, because for a long time, I think most of the time, SEOs look into links using tools like href or SEMrush. But in here, you can also look at not only internal linking, which, again, is really cool, but also external linkings to understand which are the pages that receive more links. So for example, here, to no surprise, we can see that it is the homepage.
But then this one track Title Act setup, it receives 22 and interestingly, we saw earlier that is the second page that was bringing more traffic. So we can see the correlation between the second page and the links externally is receiving and from here we can also see which are the main pages are bringing referral traffic.
So first one is this one, simrace Seems logical, because it’s racing websites, and this is what and it is. It’s an app for racing, and we can see the second one is Reddit, which is, I think, to no one’s surprise, because Reddit is, at the moment, the second forum with more traffic at the moment, and it’s because of the agreement that it has with Google. So here you can understand without the need of using tools like Ahrefs, because, for example, or Sandra, not everyone has the budget to be using those two.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 19:51
You can also understand which ones are the pages are bringing more traffic or referral traffic to you. And you can also understand from here the anchor text we can see. That a lot of them is empty anchor text, so you can actually try to identify why, and try to go back to these publications to get them to change it to whatever you want. For example, we said, Learn more empty. Click here.
All of these are things that if you have the V, if you have the opportunity to try to fix and get an anchor text with a keyword is much better. And here is just a classic settings where you can actually get people. You can get APIs. You can get book data export in case you need to analyze things. You also can test your robot txt to see if you have any errors, or if it’s limiting any any crawling. And then you can also give access to people to your sites. I think I only didn’t talk about this one, but this one is rather technical.
I mean, is it? Is your site secure or not secure? Normally, when you create a website, people create a secure version and a non secure version, and it will redirect the non, non secure URLs to the secure URLs. It’s very common. So it’s very common that people leave both of them live. So both of them actually cannibalizing in the SERP.
So whenever you’re doing the whole audit from top to end, do we still keep an eye on here? Because if you see non HTTPS URLs in here, you need to to redirect them to the right place before we move into the questions and the examples from you guys. Do you have any questions? They just went through a lot of things. We soon, yes, yes, I was about to show you how to look into rendering. But yes, ask me questions.
stephanie inabo 22:01
Hello, Carmen. Hello everyone. Hello. I don’t know if you can hear me okay, when I posted the Thank you. First of all, Carmen, for all your responses, both during live sessions and on Slack. Really appreciate it. On LinkedIn, I posted the issue my client was having, or my project was having with that page, and someone suggested using this avow, something like Disavow Links.
I don’t know if that’s removal, but when I went to check on it, I saw that it should be like a last option, so something you should do so I don’t want to solve this problem and and affect the credibility of their sites, because it’s already it’s bad right now. So what do you what? What do you say about this? About,
carmen domínguez rodríguez 22:46
we don’t look into your example, but yeah, it is. It is true that it’s exactly the last option. It’s the same last removal. They used to call it this about Now they call it removal is really risky and really dangerous, and you need to be 100% certain that does the right thing to do.
But normally, before you get to that point, you can do a lot of other things, and that’s what we’re going to look into because I think your the website of your client is super interesting for the errors I have, and it’s a good example to use it in the class. Thanks. So look into it you can share right when? Yeah, awesome.
JaQueen McNair 23:24
Yes, hi. Um, first off, this class was awesome. I’ve been looking at Google Search Console for almost a year now, and I don’t know why I never learned these things, but a lot of the stuff that she just went through just mind blowing, because I’ve been hearing a lot of creators talking about how you can do keyword research in Google Search Console, and I’m like, No, you can’t. It’s just showing me top queries.
It’s not showing me anything. I had no idea you could type in just any keyword using that. It said G, E, x, or G, T, X, up there, the top search area, the query area, the top result area.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 24:10
Yes, you can do it with custom extractions. And that custom instructions, a little trick for you as well. If you ask chat GPT to write a non custom instruction, sorry, regex.
If you ask chatgpt to write a regex for you, you can find crazy things. Obviously, we only doing level, like beginning level, but if you want, and we have enough time left before I go through all the things that we have to go, I can do a more in the presentation on Google Search Console, because Google Search Console, for me, is the best tool out there. You don’t need to have a SEMrush or href if you know how to properly use Google Search Console. But sorry, you did have a question, right?
JaQueen McNair 24:54
Oh, yeah. I mean that was, that really was, you answered a lot of it. Um. I didn’t know. Let me look back at the URL inspection area, um, I didn’t know what I think it says GTX means, or regex, like, what is Regex mean.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 25:18
Regex is a type of a code language. So basically, by by putting symbols and words, you are telling the code to extract something for you.
So that’s what I meant by regex. You can ask, if you don’t know, you can ask chatgpt to write predict for you. So you can say chatgpt, I need to find out only the keywords that contain this word and this word and this word. Can you write it for me in regex, and you write it and you can copy and paste it in there.
That is, if you don’t know how to to write regex, you don’t need to to learn projects to be a good SEO. But if you learn regex, you can be really good at data analysis, and data analysis is one of the most important things that you can learn as an SEO and again, I can actually, if you guys want, I can prioritize doing another lesson at the end on this only the other things I know I’m I promise Unzilla to send the list of the classes that we going to do. So I’m not joking. I have it even in front of me.
I will put it in the slack because I forgot if from there, there is any that we see in there that we want to change for more in this or like Advanced Search Console training we can do. I love and particularly that’s thing that I told you to get all the keywords in Excel is fantastic that soon. So I really, I really recommend you to I’m going, in fact, I’m going to show you just very quickly.
I Okay, if I you know how I’m going to do it. So basically, guys, this is the, this is where I have all my planning on the classes. So for example, how to present a technical audit, or one in here, we can just change it for we can put together e commerce SEO and international SEO, and we can put in here more in the Google Search Console training.
But if we go in here, I’m going to just just for the sake of showing you how it works, I’m going to remove you from here. You get the extension. Here. This extension you open the sidebar. You need to have the account connected so
carmen domínguez rodríguez 28:03
uh, again, it just, I just didn’t have the account current. So you do this, this, and then an open side, a sidebar opens in here, which is opening now, you choose your account that you want, you choose the dates, you choose the type of search you want.
If you are looking into videos, video, if you’re looking into Google News, Google News, the default is web, because it’s what we normally use. And you put here what you want. We always want query and we want page because we want to be able to correlate the keywords with the page right? We can then filter here so we can put what we were talking about just
carmen domínguez rodríguez 28:55
so we don’t want to see brand terms. We only want to see a non brand terms. Times and then extract. So what is doing now is trying to get the data and you see how cool it is, the data that comes out of it, because then you can also use it to create pivot tables and to create images on how the keywords are organized, you can organize in clusters.
It’s taking a little bit long to expert sketching the data seems like when I’m sharing, it’s not that fast, so let me stop sharing. And then if you do, you guys actually, right when I was about to stop sharing, it pop up in here. You see it created another tab, and voila. Actually doesn’t match, okay. So he.
We can see the the keyword I forgot to put to put Malone, so I should have put that the page, the clicks, the impression
filtering, and there’s a lot of things I cannot do and putting here, all the URLs are the same. So we can see that all of these the homepage is always ranking for anything that is brand, which makes sense, but it’s also ranking for things that are non brand. For example, this is non brand.
It’s the home page. So it’s telling me that maybe so basically, everything is in the home page. Everything is ranking in the home page here, another page. We can see here that there are quite a lot of keywords that are going for the same page. So do we need to look into the H1s? Do we need to look into the H2s?
Do we need to re optimize everything you can identify from here? Some if you, for example, see one article ranking for 20 keywords are totally different. Something is wrong. You need to look into it. And you can do it by doing it here. Now going into topics. I shouldn’t because this, we will do it in the, in the in more in depth session, if you want. But this is like you can find out so many things from here. That’s it.
JaQueen McNair 31:44
Thank you so much. That’s amazing. It makes sense when people say you can use Python and automate SEO tests, because I’m just like, how? Like, how am I going to automate SEO?
carmen domínguez rodríguez 31:58
You can make sense. Yeah, you can do a lot of things. Um, also, that’s, I’ll put the name later of the plugin, but it’s free. Free. Anything that is free is worth it. Sorry. And then, did you have a question at all? Because I keep jumping,
JaQueen McNair 32:15
you answered them.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 32:17
Awesome, perfect. Okay, so if you guys don’t have any more questions, I’m going to stop recording, because we’re going to go through that website of Stephanie’s clients, and then together we’re going to try to solve it. So anyone before I give the answer, if you want to give your opinion, let’s do so. Let me stop recording. If I can.
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