There are certainly tons of features in Google Webmasters Tools which are loved or loathed equally by search marketers and developer. Still there are few more features which often go unnoticed by the users. These features are very useful, and at times, critical. Here, are some of those underutilized features which I think, if used efficiently can make a considerable impact on your SEO insights and ultimately the campaign.
Preferences
Those lines about getting an email may feel like some of those cheap marketing trick to spam your inbox. But consider this:
- You don’t get marketing info in email
- You get alerts about any problem in your site including malware.
Put a legitimate email address there, or miss an alerts like content that can’t be reached because of blocked robots.txt, or a malware intrusion.
URL Submissions
Writers and bloggers often complain about not getting their fresh content listed in search results, making them sulk about search engine’s crawling speed. The URL submission feature in webmaster allows a user to manually add any URL from their site to search engine index. Though there are some submission limits to protect against spammers. This is a great way to make your fresh content to search results rather than waiting for them to be crawled.
Keyword Insights
Google may have dozens of useful tools which marketers can use but this tool is of particular importance to content writers, bloggers and SEO. With Google Insights you can analyze search volume behavior across demography, time frames, categories and properties. In addition, to showing local interest for a keyword it also shows trending search strings related to that keyword. Providing a powerful data to search marketers, giving them a clear insight into the keyword they’re targeting, is it relevant for their region or type of business?
Read about: Search Queries Alerts – The Latest update in Webmaster Tools
Keyword Insights is a well-integrated tool especially useful for searching related terms to the keyword you’re doing research. Using this analysis marketers can decide rising terms, helpful in writing new blog articles or optimizing their website. This analysis is also very useful for putting any keyword strategy on right note or can be well integrated into future SEO campaigns.
Authorship Statistics
Yes, this data is beyond your site, welcome to Google Authorship. Though, still in beta testing, can be found under lab. Author Stats lets you identify the search statistics for every posts which you’ve authored, verified by google. It’s like a central place to look for every content posted by you, the most views, their position in the search rankings and CTR.
Authorship Statistics is a great effort by google for keeping a check on plagiarism, a verified content writer will have advantages like the ability to put additional images and links into the search results of their work. This results in higher CTR and makes your content stand out in search result. Which ultimately leads to better Placement, Visibility and Trustworthiness.
Site Speed Metrics
Nobody likes loading and waiting, google isn’t an exception either. Google algorithm are consistently giving more importance to site speeds. Also, Google’s Hummingbird algorithm prioritized site speed to next level, this prioritization increases even further when accessing site from a mobile device, showing that google is very seriously considering to include site speed as important search parameter in future also.
Google Webmaster Tools allows users to track Google Bot download time. Making it easier to test site speed at page-level. You can commit this by using “Fetch as Google”, found under “Crawl” menu. You can enter any URL and google will return you with its loading time.
Final Words
Google Webmaster Tools is the primary platform for your SEO campaign. It lets you track changes over time providing you with a powerful insight about effectiveness of your efforts, and a way to further optimize them.
