From an SEO perspective, Google Search Console is like Nas is to Hip-Hop. This is because it has a plethora of features that let you assess and modify the on-page and off-page SEO aspects of a website. On-page SEO can be improved using the Search Appearance section. This has structured data which allows you to markup information on your pages, making it easier for search engines to understand the content, with the Data Highlighter being similar and easier to use. It also has HTML Improvements which lets you know if there are any issues with the title and meta description tags along with Sitelinks. This feature gives you the opportunity to demote any sitelinks you do not want to appear for your website or promote the ones that you do.
Another useful feature of Google Search Console is the ability to ascertain and fix issues with the site. The Crawl section of Google Search Console lets you know if Google is having any issues indexing your site, showing you the amount of pages crawled every day along with any issues that occurred during this time. From here, you can use the Fetch as Google tool to fetch a page as Google sees it, and Index status allows you to see that your new or updated pages are being indexed.
It allows you to submit new content for crawling and remove content you don’t want shown in search results. There is no obligation to use this feature as Google naturally crawls web pages, but it can be useful if you want a page removed quickly after you have deleted it. Hearkening back to the second point, if a page has been removed and you do not want it to appear in search results, you can use the Remove URLs feature to make sure it is not shown. This should only be used when trying to mask the page during the process of de-indexing it, as removed URLs will only hide the content for a few months.
Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor and maintain your site’s presence in Google search results. It allows you to keep track of your site’s presence in Google Search results. All you need to do is verify that you are the owner of your site. After you have verified, you have access to the Google Search Console. This allows you to ascertain what keywords your site is ranking for, what position it is ranking in, and what users are clicking on to access your website.
What is Google Search Console?
The Google Search Console – specifically created by Google – is a free tool offered to websites and blog administrators for search engine optimization purposes. It is designed to help webmasters check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites. On this tool, webmasters can see the keywords which are bringing traffic to their site, the links to their website, the clickthrough rate for these links, the websites which link to their site, how often their websites are being indexed, and etc. This tool has a wide range of uses and can provide many statistics for a webmaster to analyze and better the visibility of their website. It is the only place to get search engine statistics from Google. It is an essential tool for SEO service specialists, as it gives a huge amount of information about how a website is performing on Google, what problems they are having in terms of indexing, and more. This information can be crucial in improving and resolving issues that could be what is holding them back in terms of the website’s performance in search results.
Importance of Google Search Console for SEO
Google Search Console or GSC is an interface provided by Google, used for the purpose of communication with webmasters and SEO professionals. The console provides tools for the configuration of the data to be delivered to Google and the adjustment of the structural issues of the website, which Google identifies. The console was known as Google Webmaster tool until May 20, 2015 and had been rebranded to GSC. The main agenda for rebranding the tool was to provide a fresher perspective and to bring together and combine the Console and Search appearance as one. Over the years, the use of Google search console has proven to be vital in the success of SEO for a website, which is due to the way it is capable of performing detailed analysis and checking the health of a website. A website can be tested for security issues and ensured that it can run properly on mobile devices. GSC is also effective for improving the search appearance of a website as it can provide useful insights that can enhance the way of how search results are presented to the users. In a nutshell, the use of GSC has provided webmasters a direct and easy way in communicating with Google, and the satisfaction of knowing that the improvements made to their website lead to better performance and results in search engines.
Getting Started with Google Search Console
Setting up a Google Search Console account
Once you have reached the Search Console, you will be prompted to “Add a Property”. Type in the URL of your website and click continue. You will be taken to a new page which will have you select a verification method. This is the way Google confirms you are the owner of the website. Google gives you several different ways of completing this process, some easier than others. It is recommended you verify your site using “Google Analytics tracking code” under the “Recommended method” tab. If you have never used Google Analytics before, it is worthwhile to start now, as it is very useful software for analyzing your website and tracking traffic. If you are already using Google Analytics, the two are very compatible. By clicking the HTML tag you will be shown a code. Copy this code and head over to your website. Open your editor and your header.php file. Paste this code into the file, right under the tag. (Make sure to create a backup of the file first, just in case.) Then save your changes and upload the file back to your server. Now go back to Google Search Console and click “Verify”. If completed successfully, within a matter of seconds you will have verified the ownership of the website and will be taken to the Search Console dashboard for your website.
Setting up Google Search Console is a very easy process, which only takes a few minutes to complete. Google will require you to have a Google account, so if you do not have one, you will have to sign up for one. Once you are logged into your account, you can visit the Google Search Console page and begin the verification of your website. You can also search “Google Search Console” in the Google search bar and the page will appear in the search results.
Verifying ownership of your website
If you are the owner of the property, then upon adding the property, you will immediately be verified as an owner by Google. If Google is able to identify that you are the owner of the property through interaction with your property in the form of analytics and a Google account, then you will be verified instantly. You can check this by clicking the property and seeing whether or not you are taken to a page of data. If this is the case, then it is likely that you are verified. Unfortunately, this is not always the case, especially if you do not have a significant amount of traffic running through your site. In this case, you may have to go through the verification process and confirm that you are the owner.
When you are done setting up a Google Search Console account, you should be able to use and manage it. It is important to understand that the process requires you to verify ownership of the property. If you are using the Google service to improve your search experience, it is likely that you are doing this on behalf of a client. If this is the case and you are acting on behalf of your client, you can add their property as a new property within the console. This simply involves clicking the “Add Property” button on the top left of your dashboard (positioned by the search bar). You will then be asked to enter the URL of the property you are adding and press “Continue”. When you have done this, the property will appear under the list of owned properties. Please be aware that you will be required to verify yourself as the owner of the property.
Adding and managing properties in Google Search Console
To manage your properties, Google has now provided the ability to group your properties into sets. A property set is a collection of properties within Search Console that is used for aggregating data. All the data for the properties in the set can be viewed collectively within the Search Console reports. Viewing data collectively for a set provides a more complete view of how your site is performing in Google Search. A property set is only a way of grouping data; it doesn’t affect the configuration or settings for the properties. Properties can be added to multiple sets. To create a set, click the ‘Create a Set’ button on the property selector or the property page. Name the set and select which properties you want to add to it. Properties can be added or removed from the set at any time. It’s important to note that adding a property to a set does not verify ownership of the property. Ownership must be verified for each property added to the set. At this time, only the verified owners of a property will be able to add it to a set, and sets are limited to 200 properties.
You can add a new property through the dashboard or the property selector. The dashboard is the easiest way to add a property, but the selector can be found on every report page and allows you to more easily associate your property with the data being viewed. To use the selector, open the property list and click the button to add a new property. From here, type the URL of the property you want to add and click add. This will bring you to the verification flow with the property added to the list. Step 2 is to verify ownership of the site. Without completing this step, you will not be able to access any of the site’s data in Search Console. Properties that you’ve successfully verified ownership of will be listed in your property list.
Adding a property involves verifying that you own the site and associating your Search Console data with your property. Google requires you to add a new property for each version of your site. This includes http, https, www, and non-www. Data is only available for the verified versions of the site.
Using Google Search Console for SEO Analysis
Monitoring website performance and search traffic
The first tool in this section is the search analysis, which also compares with the old search queries feature that has a date range functionality to show how data has changed over time. The new report has a more powerful filtering method and lets you inspect the data more granularly. You can filter through your data by clicks, impressions, CTR, and position. This can enable a lot of detailed analysis and, coupled with the ability to filter by page, it can give a good indication of what types of queries different pages are ranking well for. It also includes an aggregation feature to group query data that is important if you’re using it to inform changes to site hierarchy or to discover information on very large websites.
Performance and search traffic refer, in aggregate, to how your site is doing in search in terms of what people are clicking on from search engine results pages (SERPs). High search traffic and a satisfactory user experience can improve your algorithms and website resources by influencing the appearance, user reputation, and PageRank. It’s also a way to find your site’s weaknesses and act upon them, whether it be by knowing which keywords to capitalize on or if there are sitelinks users see for your site that you don’t want them to access. These tools can be used to target improvements and track them over time.
Analyzing search queries and keywords
Google Search Console can provide a large amount of invaluable data about search queries and keywords. For example, you can get information about which queries have the most impressions for your website and what the average position is that your site gets for each query. You can also see data for clickthrough rates and the top pages that are clicked on from search results for each query. This is useful for seeing where you are successful and where you might need to do more optimization so that users are more likely to click on your content. You can filter the data in various ways such as by page, query, country, or device so that you can get specific information like the previous example for a certain page or for a certain country. You can also use query data to create custom filters in Google Analytics to give more information about user behavior after they have found your site through a specific query.
Identifying and fixing website errors and issues
Ensuring that you have a unique title and meta description for every page is vital. Providing search engines with the right information and plenty of it makes it far more likely that your page will be properly indexed and sit in the correct place in the SERP. On-site errors such as broken links and server errors can severely damage your site’s performance, and this damage is often difficult to notice. Regularly checking for broken links with GWT will ensure that you are aware of any problems. There are various tools available to check for server errors, the W3C link checker is a good one. Finally, consider setting up 301 redirects for any pages that you delete. This will ensure the user isn’t presented with a 404 error and will be automatically forwarded to the next best location.
Identifying and fixing errors on your site can be the difference between success and failure. The vast array of errors we can make are too numerous to list, however there are a number of best practices that when followed will help to identify and fix issues. As always, providing a search engine friendly environment is the priority as they are your primary method of traffic. If they can’t find their way around your site, then you’re on to a loser. Making the site accessible to search engine spiders is done in any number of ways. Using Google Webmaster Tools will help to confirm that your pages are being indexed and will also inform you of any crawling errors that have occurred.
Optimizing website content and structure
Another use of searching a keyword is checking the relevance that keyword has to a particular page. By comparing the keyword to the content of the page, you can determine if the keyword has the right emphasis and if the page is being targeted at the right audience.
If, for example, a keyword has a high amount of impressions but a low clickthrough rate, this means that people are seeing the keyword but not finding our title or meta description relevant to what they are looking for. This will require a rewrite of the title and/or meta description to better represent the content of the page and hopefully increase the CTR for that keyword.
To do this, we can further use the information from top search queries and optimize our pages based on these queries. We can check how often a keyword is used, what position the keywords are at, the clickthrough rate, and the clickthroughs per keyword.
Advanced Features and Techniques in Google Search Console
Enhancing website visibility through structured data can help Google better understand what’s on your website, which can be displayed in a more appealing manner on the SERP. The Search Console has a tool to help generate a structured data markup, without the need to manually add markups to your website, and then test the markups to find whether they have been implemented without any errors.
Indexing can often be an issue for many websites, and it is important to understand how many of your site’s pages are indexed at a given time and to identify and fix indexing problems quickly. The Coverage Status report gives a comprehensive list of all errors, warnings, and valid pages that Google has encountered when crawling the site. This can be filtered by the type of issue, and then by the specific URL that the issue is affecting. The tool allows the webmaster to click on an issue to see more details of what the problem is, when it was first detected, and when it was last crawled.
Utilizing the URL Inspection tool is a relatively new feature that allows webmasters to check whether their URL is indexed and to request indexing, view the crawling and indexing status, and information, and any reported indexing issues. This is a useful tool if a webmaster wishes to add a new page to the index and wants to know if and why it is not showing up in the index SERP. It can also be used to submit changes to a page’s content for a recrawl.
Utilizing the URL Inspection tool
The URL inspection tool is a feature through which you can get a detailed insight into how Google crawls and indexes your pages. It shows the last crawl date and status, any crawling or indexing errors, and the canonical URL for that page. If a page has been selected as canonical, URL inspection will also show the Google-selected canonical and any enhancements. This is particularly useful for new content or for identifying why a page is not being indexed. A live URL can be entered to see the indexing status and request indexing if the page hasn’t been indexed. This is a useful method for quickly getting a new page into the index. URL inspection is also valuable when implementing AMP, allowing users to check that AMP-specific elements are being indexed properly. AMP and Rich Results are two important areas for the future of search, and URL inspection is a key tool for monitoring progression in these areas. In order for a URL to be inspected, the page must be indexed with a Google-selected canonical. If there are no indexing issues, the page can be inspected immediately for up-to-date information. This is helpful for diagnosing current issues on live pages. However, if there is a known issue on the URL, an inspected URL may not be showing the live version of the page. URL inspection will then show the status of the last indexing attempt, which will not always be the live version. This is important to note when troubleshooting URL enhancements or indexing issues.
Understanding and improving website indexing
In addition to this, it is often recommended to create and submit a sitemap as it can assist Google in indexing your site and discovering the content within it. A sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently.
Indexing can take some time, so if your site has not been indexed, check back at a later date. If specific webpages have not been indexed, check the URL Inspection tool mentioned in section 4.1. Non-indexation can occur to content with low quality or if the content is a duplicate of another webpage.
In order to check if your content is indexed in Google’s search results, you can type “site:yourwebsite.com” in the search bar. This will return all the webpages from your site currently indexed by Google. If your site has not been indexed, it will not appear in the search results using that method. Reasons for this can vary, but the most common cause is due to the fact that your site is new and has not been crawled yet, or that it does not have sufficient quality subject matter.
Indexing is one of the most prominent features of Google Search Console, and it focuses on the ways through which websites can be eligible to appear in Google’s search results. The primary aspect involved in indexing is to ensure that your site contains quality subject matter. In other words, your content has to be relevant, authentic, and beneficial to the users.
Enhancing website visibility through structured data
The structured data report in Search Console is an extremely useful tool with which webmasters can both check for errors in implementation and see which types of structured data are being recognized by Google. Being able to see which different types of structured data are providing rich results is very valuable information as it shows exactly how the search engine is displaying your website in results pages. This could also indicate that your website is eligible for rich cards or other forms of rich results. Remember that webmasters can specify the type of result to display for their content with structured data.
Webmasters add structured data to their websites in order to enable search engines to understand the content and organization of the site, which in turn allows search engines to display more informative results for users. This can result in a significant increase in clickthrough and conversion rates. The understanding and correct implementation of structured data can be a powerful tool to increase the likelihood of your website ranking in search results.
Managing and resolving manual actions and penalties
The Manual Actions page provides a history of actions taken by Google on your site, and will also list any active actions which have not yet been resolved. Details are provided for each action to help webmasters understand the cause and how to correct the issue. In the case of a removal of search results, it may also be possible to file a reconsideration request after the issue has been fully resolved. This will be assessed by a human reviewer and if the request is approved, the manual action may be lifted and the site will once again appear in the search results.
In rare cases, a search engine may employ manual action which can negatively affect a site’s ranking or cause it to be removed from the search results altogether. Manual actions are usually a result of a violation of the quality guidelines for webmasters and can be a specific adjustment to a web page or a sitewide change. By contrast, a removal of search results is a more permanent action taken against a site which is considered to have seriously violated the quality guidelines, or has incurred multiple manual actions and not addressed the underlying issues. In all cases, the webmaster will receive notification within Search Console in the form of a message.
