What is Google Search Console?
Google Search Console is a program that helps you monitor what's happening on your website. Here you can see data that helps you better understand how Google views your website. You can use this knowledge to make improvements that Google will appreciate and fix errors on your website that Google has found.
The benefits of using Google Search Console are many, so to make it clear, here are the most essential benefits of using Google Search Console:
- It's free to use and all tools in Search Console are 'free of charge'
- You don't need to create a Search Console login if you already have a Google account
- You'll get regular updates from Search Console on how to detect issues and how to resolve them.
- You get continuous insights into how your website appears in Google Search
- Ongoing reporting on views and crawl information
Who is Google Search Console for?
As written in the introduction, many people mistakenly believe that Google Search Console is something Google has created for developers and webmasters, but this is not correct.
Because Google Search Console provides super important data for everyone. This means that whether you're a generalist or specialist, beginner or advanced user, marketing manager, website administrator, developer, business owner or whatever, Google Search Console can help you.
To give you an insight into why Google Search Console is useful regardless of your job title, Google has presented in the section Help with Search Console some examples of different job titles and why Google Search Console is useful for them:
- Business owners: Should be familiar with the basic tools in Google Search Console and knowledge of how Google Search Console can help improve your ranking on Google.
- SEO specialists: If you work with SEO, it's a huge advantage to make use of the various tools that Google Search Console has available to keep you up to date with your website's ranking and website traffic. The results that Google Search Console keeps you updated with can help you consider what decisions you need to make to improve your website's visibility.
- Page administratorsGoogle Search Console is an important tool if you work as a site administrator, as you need to stay updated on your website's ranking on Google and optimize your site continuously. By using Google Search Console, you will be kept up to date with the maintenance of your website and how you can improve your website. In addition, Google Search Console keeps you informed when the website experiences server errors and security issues such as hacking.
- Web developers: If you work with website coding, Google Search Console can help you with easy solutions to common problems that can occur in the coding system, such as errors in the structured data.
What can I use Google Search Console for?
Google Search Console has a wide range of applications. Under the Help with Search ConsoleGoogle itself describes that the tool includes tools and reports with which you can do the following:
- Confirm that Google can find and crawl your website.
- Fix indexing issues and request re-indexing of new or updated content.
- See traffic data from Google Search for your website: how often your website appears in Google searches, what search queries your website appears for, how often users click on your website based on these queries and much more.
- Receive alerts when Google encounters indexing issues, spam or other problems on your website.
- See which websites link to your website.
- Find and fix errors related to AMP, mobile-friendliness and other features in searches.
Useful tools in Google Search Console
As explained earlier, there are many useful tools that can help you improve your website. To make things easier, here is a short list of some of the most essential tools from Google Search Console that are useful to use:
- Coverage - Coverage helps show how Google discovered the website URL and whether or not Google has successfully crawled the website. If it did not successfully crawl your website, Search Console will provide an explanation as to why. In addition, Coverage can also keep you updated with improvements to the structured data.
- The Performance Report - The most essential tool when using Google Search Console, as this tool gives you an overview of how your website performs in Google search results. Google bases its insights on the four search results: Web, Image, Video and News.
- Search Console Page Experience Report - Indicates the visitor's experience of your website based on how fast your website is. This tool is good to use to get an idea of how fast your website speed performance is.
- Clicks - Clicks show how often users click on your website URL based on Google search results. If clicks are low, this is not a bad thing, but an indication that your website needs improvement to generate more traffic from users.
- Impressions - Impressions are the number of times your website has been shown in Google search results. Impressions do not include the number of clicks to your website from the search results in the data. The data from clicks is sorted in the Clicks tool, as described earlier.
What does Google Search Console have to do with SEO?
Consider it a gift from Google that you have free access to one of the most powerful SEO tools.
Do you work with SEOFor example, you can use the tool to get info about:
- Fluctuations in your organic traffic
- Where you need to improve a ranking for a keyword that is not ranking well
- Where you need to optimize your metadata, for example on pages that have a high search volume but a low CTR
- Where there are errors in your sitemap and how to fix them
- Which content types and topics get the most backlinks
- Which pages need more internal links
In addition, you have the option of keyword analysis by Google Search Console, which can provide insight into your website's exposure and click-through rate from visitors and where your website ranks on Google.
For a more detailed insight into how SEO tools help you improve your website and how the tools work, Google has created a SEO Starter Guidewhich is highly recommended.
How do I get Google Search Console?
To use Google Search Console, you need to have a Google account.
If you do, simply follow this guide:
- Sign in to your Google account
- Open Google Search Console and press start now
- Add your domain
- Verify your account using an HTML file, an HTML tag, Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager.
Once you press start, Google will guide you the rest of the way.
Frequently asked questions about Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a program used to continuously update your website for errors, optimization and how to improve your website's ranking on Google Search. Anyone with a Google account can use Google Search Console. Simply enter your website's domain and Search Console will guide you through the various tools available. Anyone with a website within a specific industry should use Google Search Console to get regular updates on traffic and ranking on Google Search. In addition, Google Search Console can be used by anyone regardless of how experienced they are with working with data. Google Search Console is easy to use no matter how good you are at working with data. The program guides you through and explains how to use the different tools and what they can do to improve your website. This ranges from how to improve your ranking on Google to how to fix coding errors on your website. It's free to use Google Search Console and the tools available in the program.
