If you’re not regularly using Google Webmaster Tools as part of your big picture SEO campaigns, you’re missing out on a powerful analytical partner.
When combined with the data crunching power of Google Analytics, this tool can give you a detailed view of how your SEO efforts are working and what you’ll need to adjust over the long haul.
It’s important to understand that Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics are two entirely different tool sets that compliment each other very well.
In a recent posting on SEJ titled, 5 Ways to Use Google Webmaster Tools to Maximize Your SEO Campaign, writer Jason DeMers points out the differences by noting Analytics tells you who is coming to your site today, while Webmaster Tools helps you plan for new visitors.
Here are a few of DeMers insights on using Google Webmaster Tools for SEO:
(Screen shots courtesy of Search Engine Journal)
Search Queries
When utilizing the Search Queries tool, DeMers recommends using the With Change feature to see how your SEO efforts are paying off over an extended period. This should give you a much better idea of which keywords you should be focusing on.
Traffic Analysis
SEO success is all about tweaking your site at a very detailed level and that means getting an idea of how each individual page is ranking. You can use Webmaster Tools to help you dial up this information by showing you the click-through rate for every page you’ve got.
With this information you should be able to adjust your content to boost your CTR.
Keywords
SEOs can use Webmaster Tools to by extracting the information from the Search Queries table. This gives you a good impression not of how end-users evaluate the relevance of your keywords, but how relevant Google thinks they are. It’s a subtle, but very important difference.
DeMers also recommends using the keywords from your most-visited pages as a basis for your link-building efforts.
Authorship
Google’s Authorship capabilities are something that most casino affiliates are still digging into and Webmaster Tools can definitely help them get a better handle on the situation, especially if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging.
Simply head over to the Labs section and look for the Authorship Stats tool. This allows you to plan keywords and future content based on how well your content is doing on a host of different sites.
Site Speed
Site speed is an increasingly important issue now that it’s (likely) been added as a component of the Hummingbird update. By using the Fetch as Google tool in the Webmaster Tools’ Crawl menu, you’ll get a fetch time from the only source that really matters.
Adjust accordingly.