Once upon a time, Google Webmasters Tools was useful in finding out how Google crawled your website and to submit an XML sitemap to. In recent times Google has beefed this up to include many new features, some of which have become very useful in understanding your SEO benefits.

Now don’t get me wrong, Webmaster Tools has always given a useful insight into what is going on with your site, but whereas I might have checked my clients sites weekly or even longer, this has now become an almost daily occurrence. So, which features should you be looking at? In a number of blog posts I will go into some of the information which I use the most and why.

Search Queries

What was once known as the Top Search Queries Report is now simply “Search Queries” and take it from me, this gives some brilliant information. Basically, this gives information on web searches that have returned your sites pages. For those Google AdWords bods out there, think “Search Query Performance Report” for those that aren’t familiar read my previous post (Save Money on your Google AdWords with the Search Query Performance Report).

Information you can find from this report includes:

• Keywords: The actual phrases which resulted in your site being found
• Impressions: The number of times the site was seen
• Clicks: Petty obviously really
• CTR: This stands for Click Through Rate and is the percentage of impressions that resulted in a click to your site
• Average Position: Whereabouts on the SERP the keyword is

Best of all  you can filter between:

• Images
• Results from Smart Phones
• Results from other Mobiles
• Results from just Web
• Countries (not all countries though)
• Dates (a couple of days behind unfortunately)

Whilst there is a lot of information here, there will be some results that instead of having a number will show <10. This shows that whilst the search was performed, your site was not viewed.

Now this information is never going to replace that found in your analytics package but in my opinion is there to compliment it.

If you haven’t got webmasters tools installed I would recommend it now. If you have but haven’t used it in a long time, go for it.

Come back later for more information on Google Webmasters Tools and SEO.