Google Webmaster Tools is a free service that provides diagnostic reports and tools for improving a site’s visibility on Google and other search engines. While it focuses on technical aspects of search engine crawling and is aimed at webmasters and SEO practitioners, it also contains several features and reports of particular interest to online marketers. Listed below are three features of Google Webmaster Tools that can help improve your marketing efforts.
Sitelink editing. Sitelinks are links to internal pages that appear with some natural search results (these are sometimes referred to as ‘quick links’ by other engines). Google generates these links automatically for results they think will be useful to searchers. If inappropriate or undesirable links are appearing in Google’s natural search results for your site, you can block them from appearing using Webmaster Tools. For example, some retailers prefer that pages like ‘Clearance’, ‘Careers’ or ‘Investor Relations’ not appear as a sitelink.
Individual links can be blocked or unblocked on the Site configuration > Sitelinks page of Webmaster Tools. Sitelinks are listed with a button labeled ‘block’ (or ‘unblock’) next to each one. Before blocking a link, keep in mind that Google only displays sitelinks when a site has three or more sitelinks available. Once you’ve blocked a sitelink, it won’t appear in the Google search results for 90 days. The Help section of Webmaster Tools contains other important details about managing sitelinks on Google.
Top search queries. Webmaster Tools contains valuable information about search queries that have returned pages from your site. This data can be found in the Your site on the web > Top search queries section. The report lists top Google search queries by both Impression and Traffic with position data is listed for each query. While top natural search terms driving traffic can be determined from web analytics, the top terms by impression and rank data are unique to Webmaster Tools. This data can be filtered along 3 dimensions: by type of search (e.g., all of Google, Web Search only, Product Search only, Image search only, etc…), by country and by time period.
This search query data has multiple uses for search marketing, including:
- identifying opportunities to strengthen presence on high impression/low click terms using paid search terms
- monitoring trends in queries and rankings over time to identify shifts in consumer behavior or SEO improvements
- identifying which product or image searches are driving impressions and traffic
- identifying mobile searches driving impressions and traffic
- identifying keyword variations to include in paid search marketing
Inbound links to your site. Webmaster Tools allows you to see which external sites are linking to your site. This data can be found under Your site on the web > Links to your site. The report provides an overview of all the pages on your site which Google has found links to, and the number of links it has found to these pages. Clicking on the number of inbound links shows external webpages that have links to your page.
This data can be used for reputation management by monitoring external sites that are linking to yours and whether or not it was in a positive context. Inbound link data also provides a source for exploring advertising or partnership opportunities.
If you’re not already using data and features from Google Webmaster Tools to improve your online marketing, hopefully this post will help motivate you to begin. Getting started requires you to verify ownership of your site – you’ll likely need to work with your web team to accomplish this. Also, while Google’s free tools tend to receive the most love from the industry (and this blog post), Microsoft’s Bing Webmaster Center deserves some attention too. Bing’s tool doesn’t currently provide all of the same features as Google, but is expected to continue to grow over time.
Anthony Avolio is Director of Web Analytics at PM Digital.
