A newbie's information to the Google Search Console
Do you want to know how your SEO efforts are paying off?
Google offers a free tool called the Google Search Console, which has a lot of detailed information about your website's performance, security issues, errors, and much more.
How does it work? We'll get into that today.
What is the Google Search Console?
Google Search Console is a suite of tools from Google that can help you track your website's performance, find issues, and improve your website rank on Google. It's a powerful but complex tool.
Back in 2010, we wrote a comprehensive beginner's guide to Google Webmaster Tools. Since then, significant changes have been made to Google Webmaster Tools, including a renaming to Google Search Console.
We updated this guide to learn how to set up Google Search Console, what data you can find about your website, important data you may have forgotten, and how to continually check for problems that are affecting your search engine rankings could affect.
How to set up the Google Search Console
If you haven't already done so, the first thing to do is to set up your website using the Google Search Console.
To do this, visit the search console website, log in with your Google account – preferably the one you are already using for Google Analytics.
In the upper left, click the Add Property button. The following dialog box appears:
Select the URL Prefix as it will give you more options to review.
Next, you need to check out this site as yours.
Previously, you had to embed code in the header of your website or upload an HTML file to your web server.
If you already have Google Analytics, it will automatically check your website for you and you'll see:
If this doesn't work for you, use one of these other options to check.
Once your site has been reviewed, you'll want to submit a sitemap if you have one available.
This is a simple XML file that tells Google Search Console what pages are on your website
If you already have one, you can usually find it by entering http://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml to view it in your browser.
To create a sitemap, if you don't already have one, you can use online tools such as XML sitemaps.
If you run a website in your own domain with WordPress, you can install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.
As soon as you have activated the plugin, look under your settings in the WordPress dashboard and click on XML sitemap.
The plugin should already have generated your sitemap, so you don't have to do anything else.
You can find your URL at the top of the page:
Copy the link address, go back to the Google search console and paste it into GSC under "Add New Sitemap".
It can take a few days for Search Console to get information about your website.
Wait a little, then read on to find out what else you can learn from Google Search Console!
What data can you get from the Google Search Console?
Once you've added and reviewed your website, there is tons of information about how your website is performing in GSC.
Remember, this is a powerful tool. These are just the highlights of new data types and the important data that you should check occasionally.
Overview of the Google Search Console
When you visit your website in GSC, your overview is shown first.
This is an overview of the important data in the Google Search Console. You can access specific areas such as your crawl errors, search analytics, and sitemaps from this screen by clicking the appropriate links.
You can also navigate to these areas using the menu in the left sidebar.
Search results
You will see search results in the left sidebar.
This section provides an overview of how your website will appear on the search engine results page, including total clicks, impressions, position, CTR, and the queries your website is showing for.
The filters above allow you to sort data by location, date, type of search, and more. This data is critical to understanding the impact of your SEO efforts.
Index Coverage Report
This report includes data about the URLs Google tried to index for your selected property and any issues Google had.
As Googlebot crawls the internet, it processes every page it comes across to create an index for every word that appears on every page.
It also shows content tags and attributes such as your titles or alternative texts.
This graphic shows a breakdown of the URLs on your website that have been indexed by Google and therefore can be shown in search results.
As you add and remove pages, this diagram changes with you.
If you have fewer indexed pages than you think, don't worry. Googlebot filters out the URLs that are displayed as duplicate, non-canonical, or without a meta tag without an index.
You will also notice a number of URLs that your robots.txt file has not allowed to crawl.
You can also use the removal tool to check how many URLs you've removed. This will most likely always be a low value.
Sitemaps
I mentioned sitemaps earlier, so I'll cover this again briefly.
Go to GSC under Sitemaps to see information about your sitemap, including whether you have one and when it was last updated.
If you find that the last date your sitemap was downloaded is out of date, you may want to submit your sitemap to update the number of URLs submitted.
Otherwise, this is a great way to keep track of how Google is reading your sitemap and that all of your pages are displayed the way you want them to be.
Removals
If for some reason you need to temporarily block a page from Google search results, go to Remove.
You can hide a page for about 90 days before it wears off.
If you want to permanently remove a page from Google's crawl, you need to do it on your actual website.
Vitals core website
Core website vital signs are a number of metrics that affect your search ranking. These include speed, ease of use, and visual stability. These are ranked signals now, so be careful.
Accelerated mobile sites (AMP)
Accelerated Mobile Pages is an open source initiative aimed at providing fast loading mobile websites that operate at slow connection speeds.
You can start creating your first page here, if you don't already have one.
You will receive a coding on the boilerplate that you can adapt to your site.
To view pages in GSC, go to Enhancements> AMP.
Links to your site
Curious about your backlinks?
GSC shows you the domains that link to you the most and the pages on your website with the most links. Scroll down the left bar until you see "Links". Click and you will see a full report with links to your website:
This is probably the most comprehensive listing of your backlinks (and internal links!) That you can at least find for free.
It's a powerful tool that can help you determine where your content is being used on the web and what works best in Google's eyes.
Manual actions
Use the Manual Actions tab to see if any of your pages do not meet the Google webmaster's quality guidelines.
This is one of the ways Google has taken action against web spam.
Mobile ease of use
The Mobile Usability tab is where you can verify that all the pages on your website conform to Google best practices.
As you can see, issues can arise with text size, viewport settings, or even the proximity of your clickable items.
Any of these issues, as well as other errors, can negatively affect your mobile website ranking and push you down on the results page. Finding and fixing these errors will improve your user experience and results.
I recommend that you also check your website's mobile speed while reviewing this information. I use Ubersuggest for this.
The first thing you want to do is enter your URL in the search box and hit "Search".
After you hit the "Search" button, click "Site Audit" in the left sidebar, then scroll down the page until you find "Site Speed".
You will see the website speed for both desktop and mobile devices. For this exercise, we're more interested in mobile device charging time. My website loads in two seconds on mobile which is in excellent range.
In addition to the overall website speed, there is also an expanded breakdown for:
- First satisfactory color
- Speed index
- Time for interactive
- First meaningful color
- First CPU idle
- Estimated input latency
If you run into problems here, fix them immediately and test your site again. This can be enough to improve the loading time.
Crawl statistics
For a more in-depth analysis of how often Googlebot visits your website, you can use the Crawl Statistics report in Settings> Crawl Statistics.
Here you can see how often your website's pages are crawled, how many kilobytes are downloaded per day, and what your website's download times are.
According to Google, there is no such thing as a "good" crawl number, but they do have advice for sudden spikes or drops in your crawl rates.
Get as google (now called url inspection)
This tool is helpful because it can actually do a test run on how Google is crawling and rendering a given URL on your website.
This is a helpful way to ensure that Googlebot can access a page that it might otherwise only be able to guess.
If you are successful, the page will be rendered and you can see if any resources are blocked for Googlebot.
To access your website's code, click "View Tested Page" to see the HTML, a screenshot, and any crawl errors. (Note: crawl errors used to be a separate report. Now it's in the URL check under "Coverage".)
When you get to the debugging point of web development, you can't beat this free tool.
Robots.txt Tester
If you are using a robot.txt file to block Google's crawlers for a specific resource, this tool can be used to verify that everything is working.
So if you have an image that you don't want to appear in a google image search, you can test your robot.txt here to make sure your image isn't appearing where you don't want it.
When testing, you will receive either an accepted or a blocked message and you can edit it accordingly.
Url parameters
Google itself recommends using this tool sparingly, as an incorrect URL parameter can have a negative impact on the crawling of your website.
For more information on how to properly use Google's URL parameters, see here.
Using them will be a great way to keep an eye on performance and make sure Googlebot isn't pointing in the wrong direction with this tool.
Conclusion
The Google Search Console gives you powerful insights into how your website is performing and what steps you can take to get Google's attention. Once you understand the basics, you'll learn how to use GSC data to increase your traffic by 28 percent or more.
Are you using the Google Search Console? Which areas do you find most useful? Please share your thoughts in the comments below and happy data analysis!
See How my agency can drive Firmly Amounts of traffic on your website
- SEO – Unlock tons of SEO traffic. See real results.
- Content Marketing – Our team creates epic content that is shared, links accessed and visitors drawn.
- Paid media – effective paid strategies with a clear ROI.
Book a call