Understanding the stats that matter
Hey there, it’s Kate Toon, here to sprinkle some SEO seasoning on your day with the Recipe for SEO Success Podcast.
Today, we’ve got a delightful dish brewing with the incredible Sally Mills. We’re diving into Google Search Console—the boring, yet indispensable, cousin of Google Analytics.
Often overlooked, this tool is a treasure trove for businesses, helping whip up insights into your website’s performance, show you which keywords bring visitors to your door, and even help you spot those pesky errors that need a quick fix. So, grab your aprons and let’s cook up some SEO magic that will elevate your business to new heights.
Tune in to learn:
- What the point of Google Search Console is
- Why you should set up your Google Search Console account
- How to find out if your site has been crawled and indexed
- What to do when you have 500 errors
- What data you can get out of Google Search Console about mobile usability
- What Core Web Vitals are
- How to keep track of your keywords with Google Search Console
- How to see what backlinks are driving traffic to you
- Sally’s top tips for getting the most out of Google Search Console
Listen to the podcast
Share the love
If you like what you’re hearing on The Recipe for SEO Success Show, support the show by taking a few seconds to leave a rating and/or comment on iTunes, SoundCloud, or Spotify. Thanks.
And big thanks to Jon from TN United States for their lovely review:
“Making the complex simple. Thank you helping make complex concepts simple. That’s very helpful for newbies!”
Share the meme
Connect with Sally Mills
Useful Resources
About Sally Mills
Sally, the Senior SEO Lead at InfoChoice Group, thrives on problem-solving technical and on-page SEO problems with diverse teams. With a background in web development, she channels this whenever she’s tackling technical issues, programmatic SEO strategies or automating repetitive SEO tasks. Beyond her professional role, she loves building side projects to experiment with new strategies or areas of SEO. As the driving force behind Brisbane SEO Networking events, she is dedicated to fostering the Australian SEO community and educating SEOs.
Fun fact: Sally is a massive animal person and has 2 German Shepherds and 1 Bearded Dragon called Spike.
Transcript
Kate Toon: Hello there, it’s Kate Toon here to sprinkle some SEO seasoning on your day with the recipe for SEO Success podcast. Today we’ve got a delightful dish brewing with the incredible Sally Mills. We are diving into Google Search Console. The boring yet indispensable cousin of Google Analytics. Often overlooked, this tool is a treasure trove for businesses helping whip up insights into your website performance, show you which keywords are bringing visitors to your door, and even helping you spot those pesky errors that need a quick fix. So grab your aprons and let’s cook up some SEO magic that will elevate your business to new heights.
Hello, my name is Kate Toon, and I’m the head chef at the recipe for SEO Success and Online Teaching Hub for all things related to search engine optimization and digital marketing. And today I’m talking to Sally Mills. Hello, Sally.
Sally Mills: Hi.
Kate Toon: Hi. So Sally and I met at a recent conference, recent-ish in Newcastle. It was dead good, wasn’t it?
Sally Mills: It was fantastic. It was good. Good crowd.
Kate Toon: Yeah, good crowd. Lots of women, which I like.
Sally Mills: Yes.
Kate Toon: Go the women. And it’s running again, so, check that out. Newcastle SEO. If you give that a Google, I’m sure you’ll find it. Anyway, let me tell you who Sally is. Sally is the senior SEO lead at InfoChoice group, oh you’ve got a proper job, thrives on problem solving and on-page SEO problems with diverse teams. With a background in web development, she channels this wherever she’s tackling technical issues, programmatic, SEO strategies or automating repetitive SEO tasks. Beyond her professional role, she loves building side projects to experiment with new strategies or areas of SEO.
She is the driving force behind Brisbane SEO networking events, she’s dedicated to fostering the Australian SEO community and educating other SEOs. Fun fact. Sally is a massive animal person that has two German shepherds and a bearded dragon called Spike. That’s cool.
Sally Mills: Yeah, Spike’s gorgeous. Who doesn’t wanna lizard?
Kate Toon: What are the dogs called?
Sally Mills: Atlas and Aries.
Kate Toon: Oh, okay. Did you get ’em at the same time?
Sally Mills: No. No. Atlas’s a bit older. He’s about 10. Same age as the lizard, and then Aries is about five.
Kate Toon: Okay. Are you gathering more creatures? You could have a-
Sally Mills: I want to, but I probably shouldn’t.
Kate Toon: Why not? You can have lots of creatures.
Sally Mills: I mean, yeah. I mean, I could do with a pond. I keep thinking about fish ponds lately.
Kate Toon: Yeah, yeah.
Sally Mills: And some fish would be nice to add to the menagerie.
Kate Toon: Then you could get frogs as well.
Sally Mills: Yes. Frogs, yeah.
Kate Toon: I’d love a frog, man. Yeah. Um, okay. Well, we’re not talking about pets today. We are talking about the beast that is search engine console. Did you like what I did there? Did you like that segue?
Sally Mills: Yes, yeah I did.
Kate Toon: I’m a pro here. So in the intro, I describe Google Search Console as Google Analytics ugly cousin. Um, and that, that’s a Toonism of old because I think a lot of people understand Google Analytics. They’ve set it up. I mean, obviously it changed to GA4 and it just got a bit more shit to be honest.
But it’s, it’s there. We know it. We use it, we look at it. We don’t do anything with the data that we find in it. But we look at it now and again, but most people don’t realize that it’s really just a couple of clicks to go from Google Analytics to Google Search Console. So how would you describe Google Search Console? What is the point of it? Why should people be setting up their account?
Sally Mills: I think it’s that link between your website and Google. So it’s a bit different from Google Analytics ’cause analytics is purely analytics. Um, Google Search Console just gives you that bit of extra data, whether it’s keyword performance, whether it’s things like whether pages are not indexed, you’ve got different errors. It lets you dive that little bit deeper. And it’s specific to Google only.
Kate Toon: Yeah, and I think. One of the things that people find challenging with Google is they’re pretty relentlessly bad at communicating.
Sally Mills: Yes.
Kate Toon: So this is like having an insight into Google’s mind because you’re like, this is what Google is seeing. This is how Google is interpreting things. Is that different to what I want it to be seeing, well this is where to fix it? And you know, you come from a technical background and I think. Uh, even the non-technical can get a lot out of Google search console. Oh, sorry. I’ve got pings and dings. Let me quit that.
Sally Mills: Oh, you’re an important person.
Kate Toon: All the pings and I don’t know how to turn them off, so I may be important, but I’m computer illiterate, don’t know how to turn my notifications off.
Sally Mills: That’s all right. I’m pretty computer illiterate. Well, I try.
Kate Toon: Yeah. Isn’t it funny? Like we can be techy SEOs but not know how to connect the printer. It’s a whole different-
Sally Mills: Oh yeah, don’t ask me about hardware though, please. No, no,
Kate Toon: Exactly.
Sally Mills: Not hardware.
Kate Toon: So, let’s talk about a few of the things that Google Search Console can do. You know, it’s covered a lot of different areas, but one of the things I love it for is that you mentioned there, crawling and indexing. So you can go to Google Search Console and submit your site map.
You don’t have to, but it’s something you can do. Google will find your site map anyway, and it will come back and tell you how many pages have been crawled and how many pages have been indexed, and often that number is wildly different. Let’s talk about that. Google is not indexing as much as it used to. Is it?
Sally Mills: No, no it isn’t. And I think this is where you’ve got your index and your non index. So whether things are being actually appearing in Google for a user to find and things that are not appearing and something being not indexed isn’t always a problem, really. So like a classic example would be like a 404 error that will pop up.
Everyone will have seen a 404 error. You hit a wrong URL, the page doesn’t exist. Right. Um, the thing is, is not every page should. Right. So the 404 errors in there, it might be fine, but you always need to check. Yeah. So if you are seeing a massive increase in four oh fours, like you’ve got that trend graph at the top and you’re seeing that huge increase.
It’s probably worth having a bit of a quiz. What’s going on there? Seeing what it’s getting, seeing what’s four oh, boring. Um, if you open it up and it’s a bunch of just really irrelevant URLs and there’s only a few of them, it’s not really a big deal. If it’s a past URL that maybe was a, I don’t know, maybe it was a product page or something, you might then want to look at redirecting it elsewhere and actioning it.
So yeah, it’s a classic SEO. It depends.
Kate Toon: Yes, it is. And I think when people look at crawl errors and it, you know, there’s different errors that come up. So some of them are like, it has been blocked by your robots TXT. And that’s generally, most platforms have a number of pages like your admin and certain other ones that they deliberately block because there’s no value of though being crawled. They have no function. You also can manually go in and block pages if you don’t want people to look at them. So you know, if you’ve maybe got a downloadable PDF that you want people to sign up to an email for, you don’t necessarily want that to be indexed and shown.
Yeah. ’cause people can get it without it. So there’s automatic blocking, there’s manual blocking, and then there’s four oh fours, as you said. And often that happens ’cause you made a page and you changed the URL and you maybe forgot to set up a 301 redirect. I look at those, and I think often they feel like they’re in order of priority in a little bit.
So the most important ones are at the top. Maybe a certain amount of 404 errors is acceptable. Google expects that. But as you said, if you’re seeing a massive trend or there are hundreds, then you may want to go in and do some redirections, but also. Sometimes happens is that you do want a page to be crawled and indexed.
And Google’s not doing that. Google’s chosen not to index. It’s not a 404, it’s not blocked by 60. It’s not duplicate content. It’s just maybe a bit poo. ’cause that’s what I’m finding, like there’s not enough value-
Sally Mills: Yeah
Kate Toon: On that page for Google to want to include it in the index. The internet is vast, but not every page deserves to be there. Is that right? What do you think?
Sally Mills: I look after some of the big media websites, and we’ve got a lot of old news articles on there.
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Sally Mills: And a lot of those old news articles will fall into that.
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Sally Mills: It’s like the crawled, not indexed situation right where Google’s gone, Hmm. I’ve gotta index so many billions of pages across the internet.
I don’t have time to include this one in there. And most of the part it’s fine.
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Sally Mills: But if you do notice something in there that should be indexed, first thing you should always do is go and actually inspect it with Google, get Google to crawl it again, find out if there’s an issue, maybe there’s an actual error behind it.
And the other thing you can probably do is just add some more internal linking just to guide Google to show it, it is important.
Kate Toon: Yeah. A couple of internal links. One solid back link to that piece of content. Yes. Rather than sending all your back links to your homepage. Yeah. So, and you mentioned they’re getting Google to inspect it.
So there’s another little tool called the Google Inspection tool, which you can drop any URL and it’ll give you a little report and say if it’s good, bad, whatever. And often, you know, people say that you can use that if you really wanna. Like you’ve just written a new blog post and you really want Google to take notice of it, you can drop it in there.
I’m not sure it makes a huge amount of difference, but it makes you feel good and that’s important.
Sally Mills: It does.
Kate Toon: It does. Another type of error that comes up are 500 errors, which are usually related to your server, your web, your server is down, or whatever. Again, you know, what can people do when they see 500 errors, ’cause most people freak out when they see those?
Sally Mills: I think the first step is, see how many there are. Um, if there’s, and for how long? So if there’s been one that happened yesterday and you go to the page and the page is fine, that’s fine. Google probably just hit your website when the website was having a server error.
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Sally Mills: If there’s heaps and it’s growing day on day on day, I’d be going and talking to your infrastructure team or your web dev and find out what’s going on there. Because no one wants 500 errors.
Kate Toon: No, no. So, you know, servers aren’t infallible. They do have little mini micro down times, and it could just be unlucky that you hit that at that time.
So we talked about 404 errors. Obviously you want to try and fix as many of those as possible, but some are allowed. We’ve talked about crawling and not indexing. We’ve talked about 500. We’ve talked about no index tags, yada yada. Are there any other things related to crawling and indexing that you can find out in Google Search console?
Sally Mills: Um, I think probably things like, we didn’t really talk about redirects much and redirect loops is probably a big one. Yeah. So, um, you’ve got sort of page with redirect, which is fine. Like if a page is redirecting, that’s all good, but if you are getting a bunch of redirect loops. That’s a bit concerning because-
Kate Toon: Can you explain what a redirect loop is to people?
Sally Mills: Good point. So redirect loop is if you were to take two URLs and redirect them.
Kate Toon: To each other.
Sally Mills: To each other. Yeah. And it just keeps going back and forth.
Kate Toon: Pretty self-explanatory really. Probably didn’t need to explain that. Sorry people. pretty obvious.
Sally Mills: No, yeah. It’s still, yeah. And like they’ll just get stuck in a loop, which means the user’s not gonna land anywhere and Google’s not gonna land anywhere. So it’s always worth digging to.
Kate Toon: And the other thing I think is another problem that I see a lot with e-commerce site is redirect chains.
Sally Mills: Yes.
Kate Toon: Where product’s gone out of stock and you’ve redirect it to another product, then another product, then another product, all of which have then, and you know, Google doesn’t like that kind of, you know, redirect chain as well.
So that’s crawling and no indexing. There are a few other bits in there we can talk about, but that’s the main elements. Another section that’s really useful on Google Search Console is looking at mobile usability and mobile friendliness. Mm-hmm. Uh, so let’s talk a little bit about that. What data can you get out Google Search console around mobile-ness-ness-ness.
Sally Mills: Ness-ness-ness. I think the big thing would be, just the core web vital stuff. So actually seeing your page speed and seeing how it’s compared against mobile and desktop and search console will give you that information and it’ll be pretty clear that usually your mobile’s not as high performing, and it will give you reasons why.
So that’s really valuable. Then paired with, Google Lighthouse as well. From there, you can see what actions you need to take. Sometimes page speed is just simple as optimizing an image.
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Sally Mills: Sometimes you just put a really, really big image on there and that’s the real issue. Sometimes it’s a bit more in depth than you need a web devs help there.
Kate Toon: Yeah. And to get a bit basic bitch biscuit on this bitch. Bitch biscuit. Bitch biscuit. Uh, you know, people often like, well, why is my mobile result so much worse than my desktop result? And if you’ve gotta think about it practically, you know, your mobile phone has a tiny little processor compared to your desktop. So your mobile is gonna be stricter and harder. And also people’s patience on a mobile is a lot less. ’cause often, you know, they’re searching while they’re on the move or while they’re out and about and the sun is shining on their phone and they’re busy doing something else. So people’s patience.
So, you know. It’s double whammy. It has to be faster, but mobile’s slower just by its very nature. And you touched on core web vitals there. So we’ve done previous episodes on core web vitals. It’s changed a little bit recently, but there’s really three main metrics that they look at, which is LCP. I’m not gonna forget, you’re gonna help me out here, Sally, LCP. First input delay. Is that one still there?
Sally Mills: Yeah. C-L-S
Kate Toon: C-L-S.
Sally Mills: C-L-S, yeah. And there’s a new one too.
Kate Toon: Yeah, there’s the new one too.
Sally Mills: I-N-P.
Kate Toon: I-N-P. Yes. Yes. Which I think is replacing first input, delay.
Sally Mills: Yeah.
Kate Toon: But let’s not use their terrible acronyms. The main things are. LCP stands for Largest Contentful Paint. Do you see what I mean about Google coming up with nobby names?
So that is what Sally was talking about, A big image, a big video, a big thing that has to load before the rest of the page can load. And it’s chewing up a lot of time and bandwidth before it can load. And then there’s cumulative layout shift, and that’s often caused by the big image because the page is kind of loading and jiggling and ping.
Sally Mills: Yep.
Kate Toon: Because the code is trying to get in there and the page can’t be fully formed. So you’re trying to click on something and suddenly it jumps down the page. So, so I big picture wiggle and jiggle. And then the next two are both kind of related to when can I start interacting? When can I click on things in the navigation?
When will the button start working? When can I enter stuff, data, into fields. So those are the main, that’s a layman’s way of explaining core web vitals. And Google Search Console breaks it down and gives you scores on each of them. But as you said, often, I mean, I would say 90% of the sites I look at it’s big fat monster images and 72 plugins that do bugger all. What do you think, Sally?
Sally Mills: Yeah. Yep. 72 plugins for sure. I think the other one is just your hosting. I recently moved all of my hosting to a new hosting and page speed just went up.
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Sally Mills: So sometimes it is just being a cheapskate and being on cheap hosting and you’re there banging your head against the wall, being like, why can’t I get the page speed up? Why can’t I get the Lighthouse score better? Just needed to move hosting and server companies.
Kate Toon: That’s it. And I think, you know, when a lot of people starting out in their business, they choose cheap deals.
Sally Mills: Yeah.
Kate Toon: From maybe American server, host, and you know, even just moving to a host that has servers near where your customers are. So here we’re in Australia, you know, a lot of the bigger suppliers like Site, ground and Venture, IPP now have servers within Australia, which they didn’t used to have. It used to be Singapore. So that’ll make a big difference. And also, you know, if you do have a high volume site with a lot of traffic, you might wanna move to a dedicated service.
You are not being impacted by what other people are doing on their sites. I think a lot of people don’t realize that, you know, you’re sharing the changing room with five other rugby teams. That’s a horrible analogy. That is a visual horror. You know what I mean?
Sally Mills: It’s accurate though. It’s accurate.
Kate Toon: It is, it is.
Sally Mills: Like you are, like, I didn’t know for years, but yeah, my website would be sitting there with, and up until recently they were, and I knew it and I was like, probably that’s why they’re slow. But yeah, just sharing that server with so many other websites.
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Sally Mills: And who knows what they’re doing,
Kate Toon: Who knows what they’re doing.
Sally Mills: How many users they’re getting, exactly.
Kate Toon: They get great traffic. So there’s a few other things that we can find in Google Search Console.
So you mentioned keywords. So you can actually see, obviously just for your own site, obviously you are on, if you’re on something like SEMrush or you can put your competitors in and all, look at that. Obviously you can’t do that on Google Search Console. You can only see yourself. But what you can see is, you know, pretty good overview of what keywords are driving traffic to you. People go, well, I can see that in Google Analytics. Why do I need to see it in Google Search Console? It’s a little bit different though, isn’t it? Talk to me about keywords in Google Search Console.
Sally Mills: It is a bit different. So back in the day, you used to be able to get a lot more information in Google Analytics, yeah.
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Sally Mills: But now we’ve got to rely fully on search console and it-
Kate Toon: Now we’ve got ‘not provided’ for like 90-
Sally Mills: Not provided. Exactly. And now you’ve got search console, which is also getting less and less keywords. So when you’re looking at the different numbers and they’re not gonna align perfectly with Google Analytics, but they are a great way to have a look at average position, see what, what Google is doing with you.
Like I think you can just open up performance and open up the keyword performance and automatically find an insight. Like I spend so much time and they’re just going, oh, that’s a great content update content idea. Because you’ll have blogs that actually rank for keywords they shouldn’t be ranking for. Or maybe you just need to change a H1.
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Sally Mills: Because that’s probably a better target there. So.
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Sally Mills: And a top tip for that, I actually use Keywords Everywhere, which is a Chrome extension. Mm-hmm. And that will plug into that report and it will give you volumes in there too.
Kate Toon: Yeah, that’s great.
Sally Mills: So it’s great.
Kate Toon: I think there’s a few things there like. As you said, there can be keywords that you’re ranking for that you didn’t intentionally use, and that’s great. You can work them in, or pages are ranking for a keyword that you didn’t use as your focus, you didn’t really think about it, and now you can actually reverse engineer and put it through.
So I think that’s, that’s really powerful as well. And you can see click through rates and all manner of other things as well. It, it’s super useful. So, and it’s free. This is the thing-
Sally Mills: It’s free.
Kate Toon: We keep saying, it’s completely free and it’s, as we said, a Google eye view of your site. This is what Google thinks. The other thing you mentioned there is insights, um, because I think, one of the things is with, especially with data tools, not everyone is data minded. Not everyone is good at, you know, taking figures and stats and turning them into actions. But what I love now is that Google Search Console has Google Search Console insights.
So you can go in there and Google will tell you what it thinks is interesting about your data. So it might say something like your, you know, 60 more, four or four hours have come up, blah, blah, blah. And it will actually tell you stuff. And then you go, oh, okay, well that’s something that Google thinks is important.
Maybe I should action that. So I just often spend some time looking at the insights that Google’s put up and use that. Do you look at that much?
Sally Mills: I actually don’t.
Kate Toon: Oh, okay.
Sally Mills: But maybe that’s ’cause I’m there in so much, but I do look at that as a, it’s such a great option for like small business. Right,
Kate Toon: Exactly.
Sally Mills: Or like people that just, they’re not SEOs by trade and they have two seconds to open and have a look once a week or probably once a month. Like it’s just hand feeding you some priority issues so you don’t have to get fully bogged down.
Kate Toon: And I think it’s really important to say for the newbies, ’cause this is a newbie episode, you can’t break Google search console.
Sally Mills: No.
Kate Toon: There’s often this fear that, oh, if I interact with it, I’m gonna piss off Google. I’m gonna mess things up. You can’t break it. It’s simply an output of data. There’s no real input of data. Yes, you can put your site map in. Yes, you can put your URL, but that’s not gonna break anything. Everything else is data that’s being pushed to you.
The other thing you can see in Google Search Console is your backlink, so you can see which backlinks are driving traffic to you as well. Can we talk a bit about backlinks?
Sally Mills: Yeah. Yeah. I think people forget that that’s in there, right? Like, you can actually dig in there. And I’ve seen some of my little like hobby websites, right, I’d like, oh, they are getting backlinks ’cause I don’t really pay attention to those.
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Sally Mills: You dig in, you can see where they’re coming from. The only catch is you only get the domain.
Kate Toon: Yes.
Sally Mills: So you then need to go and hunt down where, which you could do just in Google by doing a site search for that domain. So site and then colons and put the site in, and then if you actually just put your brand name in there. So like a URL.
Kate Toon: With a plus?
Sally Mills: I always just do two quotation marks around-
Kate Toon: Speech marks, yeah okay.
Sally Mills: Like the domain.
Kate Toon: So site colon, domain that’s backlinking.
Sally Mills: Yeah.
Kate Toon: Your brand name in speech marks. Yeah.
Sally Mills: Yeah. And then there you go. You should be able to actually find that page that’s linked to you. Which is really cool ‘cause it’s free.
Kate Toon: Really cool. Yeah. One of the ways that I do, it’s really basic, but like I go in and type my name into Google ’cause we should be Googling ourselves, right?
Sally Mills: Yes.
Kate Toon: Or our brand name, and then I just go way to the end of the results. You know, like 29, 28, whereas really all the murky stuff.
Sally Mills: Yeah.
Kate Toon: And sometimes I find stuff like I’ve been mentioning in an article and I’ve had no idea. And you know, for those of you who are concentrating on building backlinks, which I still think is relevant, lots of people disagree. If you then approach them and say Thank you for the mention, thank you for the brand, mention the citation, but could you give me a link on that?
Often you will get a link from that. So that’s a much better way of getting links than harassing people to put a guest post on their site or cold spamming people to get on their podcast. They’ve already mentioned you. They already, they maybe just forgot. So that’s a good way of doing it and often I find, because I give people a lot of testimonials ’cause I’m such a nice person, Sally.
Sally Mills: You are a nice person.
Kate Toon: I’m so nice. So you know, maybe someone’s put their testimonial, my testimonial on their page and they haven’t linked to me. And so the spirit of reciprocity is, I did something nice to them. I’m sure they can give me a link and say. It’s a good little way to find those. And again, you know, these are all three tools and you know, a lot of people can’t afford the SEMrushes and the Ahrefs and I always say it wrong, people get annoyed with me. Say Ahrefs.
Sally Mills: Oh, I get, oh, I say it wrong too
Kate Toon: A-hrefs.
Sally Mills: A-h-refs.
Kate Toon: Tim’s thing.
Sally Mills: Ahrefs.
Kate Toon: I actually had a-
Sally Mills: I don’t know.
Kate Toon: I had a review on iTunes really pissed with me for saying it wrong. So, A-H-refs. There, just to irritate all of you.
Sally Mills: That’s good brand. That’s good brand. You’ve got, like, if they’ve got people so passionate about the way it’s said.
Kate Toon: Yeah, I’ve got a lot of haters. It’s really powerful. It’s really-
Sally Mills: What about SEMrush or S-E-M rush?
Kate Toon: I say se, oh, I say S-E-M rush.
Sally Mills: SEMrush. I don’t know, I think I say SEMrush,
Kate Toon: Why are we giving them free advertising? Let’s advertise ourselves.
Sally Mills: Yeah.
Kate Toon: It’s Kate Toon, it’s-
Both: Sallys Mills.
Kate Toon: What else, what else, what else are penalties? So, one of the things that you know is important, I mean, I can’t remember the last time I know anybody who got a manual or algorithmic penalty. It seems to be a little bit old school, but you work with bigger brands.
Maybe they get them all the time. If you are registered on Google Search Console, it’s gonna be the first spot that you find out that you’ve been given a penalty. And if you have to, obviously put your email in and you will get an email alert as well. So, as I said, I can’t remember. Of the last time anyone got a penalty, it seems since Penguin days.
Sally Mills: Yeah.
Kate Toon: Do you still see them?
Sally Mills: I haven’t, I mean, I don’t work agency, so I’m sure the agency see a lot of it. I think the only ones I’ve really seen is like malware warnings. I think a while ago, maybe it was like two, three years ago, one of our sites got a malware warning, which made no sense ’cause there was no malware and it freaked everyone out.
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Sally Mills: And then we had to wait. We basically got this, we checked this, right? This can’t be right. And luckily Google came back, no malware. But-
Kate Toon: Yeah. That one’s a freaky one.
Sally Mills: That’s one way to scare everyone.
Kate Toon: Yeah. But at least, therefore, again, it’s, it is very hard to get in touch with Google. You know?
Sally Mills: Yeah.
Kate Toon: Like it’s very hard to get Bob on the phone and say, Hey Bob, this isn’t going on. This is not gonna happen. Right. So this is the closest you can get to kind of communicating with Google other than like webmaster forums and things like that. So again, a good reason to have it there. Now, there’s lots of other things that Google Search Console can do, you know, video indexing and lots of other things.
But I think that’s a good beginner summary because what I want people to do after this call is if you haven’t already, go and set up a Google search console account, or you can go into Google Analytics and do a one click install, can’t you? I’ve not done it in a while. Can you still do that?
Sally Mills: Yes. Oh, you’ve gotta, I think it depends.
Kate Toon: In Yoast or-
Sally Mills: Maybe you can’t do a one click. Maybe if you’re on WordPress or something. It’s pretty straightforward.
Kate Toon: Yeah. It’s pretty straightforward.
Sally Mills: Yeah.
Kate Toon: And Shopify, Squarespace.
Sally Mills: Yes.
Kate Toon: Wix, WordPress all make it really easy. And in terms of getting a developer to do this for you, if you went through developer and said, Hey, could you set up my Google search console? I’d be thinking it’d take them a couple of hours max to do that for you.
Sally Mills: Yeah. Yeah.
Kate Toon: So they’re coming back and saying, oh yes, that’s $3,000. They’re being dodgy. Should be a couple of hours work for someone to do. And you know, there’s lots of resources on Google that show you how to get through and understand.
The main thing is, is just to go in and play. And also I always think with data, go in with a concern. Go in with a problem. So Sally’s raised a few already, like. Have I got lots of 404 errors? How many pages are being indexed and crawled? Is that a problem? You know, what’s my core web vital score? Is there anything I can improve? Go in with a problem, seek answers to the problem, take action. Don’t just go in and go, ugh, and click on buttons and then do nothing. So use it as a tool rather than kind of getting overwhelmed by the data. Any other tips you can give small business owners to get started?
Sally Mills: I think just, yeah, open it. Open it and dig in there. Like that’s the thing, like I find you just find things by going in there and if you’re not going in there, like I meet SEOs that don’t even go in there. I’m like, how? How are you doing your job? So just open up and go in there and if you wanna take it a step further, there’s also Bing webmaster tools.
Kate Toon: Yes.
Sally Mills: Which is very, very good. So
Kate Toon: I do love Bing, so yes, you can register for that as well. Now obviously DING has a tiny market share, but I think it’s like 3% in Australia, but 3% still quite a lot of people.
Sally Mills: Yep.
Kate Toon: So you do get good insights into it, I think like. If you’re listening to this and you’re a small business owner, maybe Sally recommended every- a couple of times a week or maybe every couple of weeks if you’re already small business.
Yeah, just have a Google Hour, have a quick look at Google Analytics. Is there anything you can learn? Is there a post performing? Well have a quick look at Google search consoles, anything you can fix, and then just log into your Google business and maybe put a little promo post up or check your opening hours.
Just have a Google Hour every couple of weeks. Have a little scoot through and then you, you know, you’re gonna notice things. You will, once you start looking, you do start look seeing opportunities that maybe you didn’t realize were there before. So that’s that. Well look. Thank you very much, Sally Mills, where can we find out more about you?
Sally Mills: Thanks Kate you can find me on sally mills.com and then also on LinkedIn as well.
Kate Toon: Great content on LinkedIn and also, I’m forcing Sally to have me come and speak at Brisbane SEO. I don’t know what about, because I don’t wanna talk about SEO, but we’ll talk about something. Crisps. She runs Brisbane SEO, which runs every month, is that right?
Sally Mills: So we run the, yeah, basically every month. Yeah.
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Sally Mills: So quarterly. Quarterly for the more formal speak to the crowd. And then we have a casual beers, which is very Queensland style.
Kate Toon: Yes. So if you want to find out more about that. I think it’s on Sally Mill’s website, but she also posts about it on LinkedIn. Go along and meet some other geeky humans, and then talk about Google. I can’t think of anything more fun.
Sally Mills: It is fun.
Kate Toon: It is fun and I know we’re being silly. Alright, well thank you so much for coming on the show.
Sally Mills: Thanks Kate.
Kate Toon: Yay. So that’s the end of this week’s show, a delightful human, if you ever in Brisbane, go and meet up with her other SEO crew.
So, thanks for joining in. If you’re listening to this, it’s probably only a few weeks away from us launching the next round of the recipe for SEO’s success. I think it’s our 31st. It might be our 30th launch. If you’d like to join me on a 12 week adventure to learn how to master SEO, go and join the wait list.
Our testimonial today is from Jon from TN in the United States. He says, making the complex simple, thank you for helping more complex concepts, making complex, complex, simple. I can’t even say that. So I’m not making that simple. Very helpful for newbies. Yeah, we are just talking about that at the end of the show there is Sally, I turned the mic off.
But you know, we are gonna do some more techie episodes for those of you or more advanced episodes for those of you who do know a bit more about SEO. But I really do feel there’s a gap in the market and a gap in the world of helping people who know nothing about SEO just get started and feel more confident.
Because often it’s the basics that make the biggest difference, it’s not the super techie stuff, so, yeah. Anyway, if you enjoy the show, I would super appreciate a rating. If you’re on your app now, you can just click and give us a little five star rating. That’d be lovely. And as I said, if you wanna learn more about the course or this show, you can head to the recipe for seo success.com.
There’s also a group on Facebook called I Love SEO where you can find me as well. So until next time, happy SEOing.
