What is Google Search Console?
Google Search Console is a program that helps you monitor what's happening on your website. It allows you to see data that helps you better understand how Google is looking at your website. You can use this knowledge to make improvements that Google will appreciate, as well as fix any errors on your website that Google has found.
The benefits of using Google Search Console are many, so for the sake of clarity, here are the most essential benefits of using Google Search Console:
- It is 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 problems and how to fix them.
- You'll get ongoing insight into how your website is appearing in Google Search
- Ongoing reporting on views as well as crawl information
Who is Google Search Console for?
As written in the introduction, many people mistakenly believe that Google Search Console is something Google created for developers and webmasters, but this is not true.
Because Google Search Console contributes super important data for everyone. That means whether you're a generalist or specialist, a beginner or advanced user, a marketing manager, website administrator, developer, business owner or anything else, Google Search Console can help.
To give you an insight into why Google Search Console is useful, regardless of your working title, Google has provided in the section help for Search Console some examples of different working titles and why Google Search Console is useful for them:
- Business owners: You should be familiar with the basic tools of Google Search Console and how Google Search Console can help you improve your ranking on Google.
- SEO specialists: If you work with SEO, it is a huge advantage to use the various tools that Google Search Console has available that can keep you constantly updated with your website's ranking and traffic on the website. The results that Google Search Console keeps you continuously updated with can help you consider what decisions you need to make to improve your website's visibility.
- Page administrators: Google Search Console is an important tool if you work as a site administrator, as you need to keep up to date on your site's ranking on Google and optimise the site continuously. By using Google Search Console you will be continuously updated with the maintenance of your website as well as how to improve your website. In addition, Google Search Console keeps you informed when the website experiences server errors and security problems such as hacking, for example.
- 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 occurring in the structured data.
What can I use Google Search Console for?
Google Search Console has a wealth of uses. At help for Search Console, Google itself describes that the tool provides tools and reports with which you can do the following:
- Confirm that Google can find and crawl your website.
- Solve indexing problems and request reindexing 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 those queries, and more.
- Receive alerts when Google encounters indexing, 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 functions in searches.
Useful tools in Google Search Console
As explained earlier, there are many useful tools that can help improve your website. To make it more manageable, here is a short list of some of the most essential tools from Google Search Console that are useful to use:
- Coverage - Coverage helps to show how Google discovered the URL of the website and whether Google has crawled the website successfully or not. If it has not successfully crawled 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 overall view of how your website is performing in Google search results. Google bases its insights on the four search results which are: web, image, video and news respectively.
- 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's speed performance is.
- Clicks - Clicks show how often users click on your website's URL based on search results from Google. If there are low numbers of clicks, 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 appeared in Google search results. Impressions do not include the number of clicks on your website from search results. The data from clicks is sorted in the Clicks tool, as described earlier.
What does Google Search Console have to do with SEO?
Take it as a gift from Google that you have free access to one of the most powerful SEO tools.
Do you work with SEO, you can use the tool to get info about:
- Fluctuation in your organic traffic
- Where you need to improve a ranking for a keyword that is not ranking satisfactorily
- Where you need to optimise your metadata, for example on pages that have a high search volume but a low CTR
- Where there are errors in your sitemap and possibly how to fix these errors
- Which content types and topics get the most backlinks
- Which pages need more internal links
In addition, you have the option to have keyword analysis done by Google Search Console, which can provide insight into your website's exposure as well as click-through rate from visitors and where your website ranks on Google.
If you want a more detailed insight into how the SEO tools help you improve your website and how the tools work, Google has produced a SEO Starter Guide, which 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, just 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, HTML tag, Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager.
Once you've pressed start, you'll be guided by Google the rest of the way.
Google Search Console Frequently Asked Questions
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 domain and Search Console will help you with the various tools available. Anyone with a website in a specific industry should use Google Search Console to keep up to date with traffic and Google Search rankings. In addition, Google Search Console can be used by anyone, regardless of their experience working with data. Google Search Console is easy to use, no matter how good you are at working with data. It guides you through and explains how to use the different tools and what they can do to improve your website. This is everything from how to improve your ranking on Google but also how to fix coding errors on your website. It is free to use Google Search Console and the tools provided in the program.What is Google Search Console?
How do I use Google Search Console?
Who can use Google Search Console?
Is Google Search Console hard to use?
Does it cost money to use Google Search Console?
