The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article:
February 2006, Volume 5, Issue 2

Google’s Webmaster Console: Useful Tool, but No Replacement for Good Marketing

by Joe Lovett, Search Marketing Specialist, iProspect

The football season is behind us, Spring training is barely underway, and there is still one month until March Madness. I realized that I was pretty bored on Sunday when I declared it early tax season and vowed that I would not wait until the last minute to file my taxes. I gathered up my W-2, year-end investment summaries and a dozen other forms, and got to work. After a half of a paragraph into the 142-page IRS instruction manual, I gave up and paid $29.95 for tax software that promised to easily guide me through filing my return. The tax code can be extremely confusing, but is extremely important to understand. When we understand the code and use it correctly, we get the maximum return. The same applies to search engine marketing (SEM). It can be confusing and overwhelming, but when implemented properly, it can help you to maximize your return.

Fortunately, Google has rolled out search engine marketing’s version of tax software. Called the Webmaster Console for Google Sitemaps, the tool aggregates objective, technical information about your website and presents it to you in a user-friendly manner. The service identifies top query phrases, as well as crawl errors and site errors, and provides page content analysis. It shows which pages of your website are indexed in Google, and the number of external websites that link to yours. These are all important factors to consider when embarking on any search engine marketing campaign.

At a tactical level, the Webmaster Console can assist you in making your site “clean”. It will help you locate broken links and identify whether Google is “seeing” all of your website’s pages that you want indexed. The tool shows you other sites that are pointing to yours, which may help you to identify other, similar sites for linking opportunities. Through the Webmaster Console, you can view the top keyword phrases searched, and write content and meta-tags to target those phrases. By identifying technical problems with your site and taking the time to fix them, the Webmaster Console can help you transform your site into a good foundation from which to launch a successful campaign.

So Who Needs An SEM Firm?

Tax software is great for guiding me through the tax code, but it does not help me to plan for the future. It cannot tell me whether I should buy a house or set up a trust. Similarly, what the Webmaster Console lacks is the ability to answer the question, “Okay, so now that I know this stuff about my site, what do I do next?” It is the website owner’s goals, and the steps required to achieve those goals, rather than a collection of data, that define a search marketing campaign. Search engine marketing firms have the necessary tools, experience and expertise to draw a roadmap from where you are today, to where you need to be to achieve your campaign goals. They can tell you what to do next.

At a strategic level, an SEM firm can work with you to decide how best to integrate off-line and online marketing campaigns, or optimize your site for a new product launch. A good SEM firm will also keep a close eye on your competitors, and advise you on adjustments and strategies so that your site wins the battle against other sites that are focused on the same keywords.

Certainly, Google’s Webmaster Console is a great starting point, and will allow you to identify and hopefully fix many technical, on-the-page problems with your website. However, the tool cannot help you to translate business goals into concrete solutions on how to improve your rankings, traffic or conversions, or how to spend your refund.

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The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article: February 2006, Volume 5, Issue 2

Google’s Webmaster Console: Useful Tool, but No Replacement for Good Marketing

The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article:
February 2006, Volume 5, Issue 2