Over the past few months, you may have noticed an uptick in the number of notifications from Google Search Console (GSC). These pesty emails may be filling up your inbox, but they could contain crucial information that has the potential to significantly impact your website’s SEO.
What is Google Search Console?
With Google commanding approximately 70% of the internet market share, it’s likely that you’re already familiar with GSC, a free service offered by Google. This invaluable tool enables you to monitor, troubleshoot, and maintain your website’s presence in Google’s search results. By providing insights on how to improve your site’s visibility and ranking, it empowers you to optimize it’s search performance.
While delving into the intricacies of this tool may seem daunting, it’s essential for business owners to be aware of its existence and familiarize themselves with the fundamentals of optimizing their websites for search engines. As a website administrator, this tool allows for scanning and resolving potential server errors, page load issues, and security threats such as malware or hacking. Furthermore, it ensures that your website’s search performance remains unaffected during maintenance or updates.
The Reason for the Surge in Alerts
Like any other company, Google, which manages more than 90% of global search queries, constantly strives to improve its products and services. For this reason, Google will introduce Interaction to Next Paint (INP) in 2024, transitioning from using the First Input Delay (FID) metric. The increased frequency of alerts you’ve been receiving from Google Search Console is directly related to this shift. These notifications are meant to grant ample time to rectify any errors before the changeover. Web teams that are not actively monitoring these metrics or addressing the associated issues may encounter problems and potentially experience a decline in Google search rankings once the change takes effect in March.
What We’re Doing to Stay Ahead
As the emails from GSC continue to trickle through, our web developers have been diligently taking extra measures to resolve what Google sees as code-related issues that can affect the user experience. This proactive approach ensures a seamless transition to the inclusion of INP, which means better safeguarding of our clients’ search rankings. Additionally, our marketing consultants are incorporating Google Search Console in their digital marketing decisions and evaluating how any adjustments to the website might impact page load speed and search results in the future.
Maintaining a search result position is becoming increasingly challenging. We strongly advise you to be aware of this impending transition and actively take steps to address any incoming errors, implementing the necessary changes promptly to stay ahead of any potential negative impacts in the months ahead. If you lack the capacity to handle this internally but wish to protect your search ranking, our agency can provide the assistance you need. By taking decisive action now, you can defend your website’s visibility and its performance in Google’s search results.
© Melinda O’Connor 2023
