Google SEO Tools

Google puts at our disposal several free tools that we can use to Improve SEO Optimization of our website.

• Google SEO tools for analyzing organic traffic: Search Console, Google Analytics
• Google SEO tools to detect technical improvements in your website: Mobile Optimization Test, PageSpeed Insights, Chrome Developer Tools
• Google SEO Tools to search for keywords: Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends

Google Search Console

Formerly known as Google webmaster Tools, Google Search Console provides a lot of data on the behavior of your website in Google as well as allowing you to see the traffic that arrives organically to your website.
The most interesting sections in the new version of Google Search Console when it comes to improving the positioning are:

• Performance: You can see what search terms and what pages make a greater number of impressions or visits. You can follow the evolution of a search term or a specific page using the filters. For example, if you make any improvement in a meta-description you can easily see if the change has meant an increase in the Click Through Rate (ratio of clicks to the Impressions). In addition, you can see what the performance has been for a specific period and to match it to a previous period.

• Coverage: It indicates which URLs are indexed in Google and which URLs are being excluded from the index and the motive. In this section we can see if there is any anomaly in the URLs we want to position or if you are indexing pages that are not relevant to the user and fix it.
• Sitemaps: From here we can send the sitemap of our site to Google, check that there are no errors and that are indexed correctly URLs included in the Sitemap.
• Links: You can see which sites contain links to your website and which pages within your website receive more internal links, although there are payment tools that give more detailed information on both internal (such as Screaming Frog) and external links (such as Ahrefs).
• Manual Actions: Here we can check if there is any “manual action” that can affect the positioning of our website for some practice that Google considers inadequate.

Note that if you want to evaluate the behavior of the pages that are within a directory within your web, like a blog, you can create a specific Search Console account, such as “https://www.digitalmenta.com/blog/””

Google Analytics

Through Google Analytics we can analyze all the traffic that arrives to our web site. Within the section “Acquisition > ALL traffic > Channels” we can see the behavior of users who access our website from all channels, including the organic, see the evolution in a specific period and compared with past periods. To save time you can create custom reports and dashboards that include the metrics or graphics that interest you most, both in Google Analytics and through Google Data Studio.

Mobile Optimization Test

The traffic coming from mobile devices is increasing and in many cases exceeds the traffic coming from computers. This Google Tool Check whether a page is optimized for smartphones or if Google manages to download all content without problems and in a short time.

PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights analyzes the loading speed of a page and gives you recommendations to improve it, like the following:

You can visit the tool by doing Click here.

Chrome Developer Tools

Within the Chrome Browser we can access the “Tools for developers” to identify problems that can affect the performance of a web, its accessibility and the user experience simulating the behavior of the page both from a Computer like from a smartphone.

Google Keyword Planner

The keyword planner allows you to know an estimate of the monthly search volume of a list of searching terms, which will help you to decide the target keywords in your SEO strategy.
This tool is free but you can only use this tool if you have a Google Ads account (or a colleague who gives you access). If this is not the case, you can use the payment version of keywordtool.io For example.

Google Trends

It allows you to see the trend in the search of certain keywords, as in the name of your brand and of the competition, or to detect terms with seasonal search trends, something that can be useful when planning the articles of a blog for example.

In Addition to these Google SEO tools, we can use some search operators in the browser itself and combine them to analyze which pages are Indexed in Google and its contents. The most common are: site, intitle, Allintitle, Inurl, Allinurl.

Finally, don’t forget to read the Google guidelines! If you know what Google values most in a website and adopt its recommendations will avoid penalties. At the moment we give you some Tips for writing articles for your blog’s SEO.