Table of Contents
What is Google Search console?
Google Search Console is a free platform for users to monitor their sites, domains, and pages. It includes search queries, referring sites, and performance information for a site’s mobile version.
What is Google Search Console Used for?
Google Search Console lets you monitor your site and address common website errors, including server errors, slow site load speed, and security issues like hacking and malware.
How to Start with GSC?
First, Know How To Set Up Your Account
To set up Google Search Console,
- Go to Google Search Console
First, you need to log in and use the exact Google account details you use to access your Analytics account. Alternatively, you can use your Google account or create a Google Account if you don’t have one and use that to log in.
- Once you have successfully logged in, you will see an “Add a Property” button on the top of the page; click it.
- Enter the name of your website in the Website field. Make sure you enter the full domain address, then click continue.
- Next, you will be asked to verify your ownership of the website. You should select a way to verify that you own your websites. Such as uploading an HTML file, using a domain name provider, adding an HTML tag, using Google Tag Manager’s container snippet code, or Google Analytics tracking code.
- If your site supports both http:// and https://, add each domain as a separate site.
Yoast SEO users can get the verification code via the ‘HTML tag. In addition, the Yoast SEO plugin has a ‘Webmaster tools’ tab where you can paste code provided by Google Analytics.
After saving this, you should visit Google Search Console and click the ‘Verify’ button to confirm. If all is well, you will receive a success message from GSC, and your site will begin receiving data.
Do You Need Sitemaps?
Sitemaps are necessary for good search engine optimization (SEO) practices, bringing in traffic and revenue to a website. And since search engines use sitemaps to crawl and index website content for ranking purposes, the sites’ rankings will suffer without updated sitemaps.
Yoast SEO creates an XML sitemap for you automatically. If you don’t have one yet, we advise creating one to make sure Google can easily find your most important pages and posts.
We highly recommend testing your site’s XML sitemap by entering its URL into GSC to ensure that Google can find and read it correctly. In addition, you can use GSC to see which pages on your site aren’t indexed quickly. You’re sure Google can find and read your XML sitemap correctly by checking this regularly.
What is Index Coverage?
The ‘Index coverage’ tab within Google Search Console allows you to see how many pages are in the index of Google, how many are not, and what errors caused difficulties for Google in indexing your site’s pages.
Please check this tab regularly to see what errors appear on your website. Google notifies you when it finds new errors on your site that may affect the ranking of your website.
Errors in themes can breed when, for example, redirects wrongly direct users or Google detects and disallows broken code or error messages on a site. Once you click on the link, you can review errors in more detail to identify which specific URLs are affected and fix them. Once you’ve fixed an error, Googlebot will re-recheck the URL to ensure it doesn’t recur.
When reviewing a coverage report, it is essential to look for these things
Your site’s page count should steadily increase as you add new content. It will confirm that Google can index your pages and indicate that you keep your site “alive” by adding content regularly.
Be alert to a sudden drop in rankings and page views, indicating that Google is having trouble accessing your website or that a server is down.
Sudden spikes in traffic can indicate a problem with duplicate content (such as both URLs configured for www.example.com and example.com) automatically generated pages, or even hacks.
You must monitor these types of situations and resolve them quickly, as many errors could be detrimental to your rankings on Google.
URL Inspection tool
The URL Inspection tool lets you analyze specific URLs. It shows information about the structured data found on this URL. For example, you can retrieve a page from Google’s index and compare it with the page as it lives now on your site to see the differences. This page also gives technical info, such as when and how Google crawled the page and what it looked like when Google first saw it. It might also show errors, which indicates that Google couldn’t crawl the page correctly.
How to Analyze Your Website
Having created an account, you can now begin examining the results of your website. In the rest of this article, we will discuss some of the reports and information available in the survey results.
Performance Tab
Under the Performance tab, you can see the pages of your website, their keywords, and what position they hold in Google. Remember that this data is accessible as soon as you set up your account. In the old version of GSC, you could see data for up to 90 days, but within the current version, it is possible to see data for up to 16 months.
The ‘Performance’ tab provides you with a quick overview of your search results and allows you to analyze the most successful pages and keywords quickly. Using the tabs, ‘Queries’, ‘Pages,’ ‘Countries,’ or ‘Devices’, you can find out which keywords or pages need some attention.
Let’s know in detail about the Performance Tabs
Queries
The Queries report lists Google search queries that generated impressions of your website URLs in Google organic search results. By seeing how users search and the relevancy of your web pages to those queries, you can optimize your content.
Pages
The Search Console Pages report includes metrics for all page URLs associated with your site. However, the report only includes Page URLs that are also Canonical URLs.
If a URL’s page-level metrics are performing poorly (e.g., low numbers of Sessions, Pages per Session, and Conversions) even though that URL appears in search results, then the content on that page might not be relevant to what users had in mind. As a result, your site design might be making it difficult for your visitors to accomplish their goals, or your users could also experience site-performance problems, which you can investigate in the Site Speed reports.
Countries
The Countries report shows your landing pages’ performance and user engagement in different countries.
A high level of search traffic but low user engagement can signal the development of a language-specific version of your site to serve users in that particular country better.
Devices
The Devices report shows the relative performance of desktop, tablet, and mobile devices in delivering search results and generating user engagement.
If you notice strong search performance on mobile devices but poor interactive metrics, then that can signal that you need to reevaluate how you have developed content and designed your site for those devices.
Search Appearances
Google groups result by search results or features, such as images or local business pages. When you add a filter for any type, you will see only the types you have selected. For example, the filter list will not include AMP if you have no AMP results.
A page can have multiple instances of search-related features in a single session, but only one impression is counted for each feature type.
Dates
Using preliminary data groups your data by day. All dates are in the Pacific Time Zone (PT).
By default, only full days are included in the data returned by a date field; to include partial days—for example, today—you must change the date filter used.
Below are five categories of reports, and in each category, they can be sorted by clicks, impressions, average CTR, or average position. We’ll go over each one to explain
Clicks
The number of clicks on your website in the search results of Google can be an indication of the effectiveness of your page titles and meta descriptions. If no one clicks on your result, it might not stand out in the search results, and you could look at what other results are displayed around yours to see how you can optimize them.
Naturally, the position of a web page in search results can affect the number of people who click on it. For example, if a site appears on Google’s first result page, it will receive more clicks than a site on Google’s second result page.
Average Position
The “average position”, the average ranking of the keyword or page in a specific period, is the last indicator on the Keyword Planner. This figure can’t be trusted as an accurate representation of your ranking since Google seems to predict better which results will be most suitable for visitors. However, this indicator can still show if the clicks, impressions, and average CTR rate make sense. (link)
Impressions
Impressions indicate the frequency with which your website or specific pages are shown in search results. For example: In the Google Search Console account of your own company’s website, Yoast SEO is one of the keywords for which your site ranks. The number of impressions for that keyword shows the frequency with which our site is shown.
To see which pages might rank for a particular keyword, you can add the keyword as a filter on the page.
After that, you can check what pages rank for the keyword. Do you want those pages to rank? If not, you may need to improve the conditions of the page you’d like to rank. For example, think of writing better content containing the keyword on the page, adding internal links from relevant posts or pages to the page, and speeding up the response time, so your page loads fast by using a CDN (content delivery network) or hosting it on a faster server.
Average CTR
The Click-through rate is the percentage of users who click on an ad after they have seen it in the search results. You probably realize that higher rankings lead to higher click-through rates.
You can, however, try rewriting your meta description and page title to make it more appealing. When the title and description of your site stand out from the other results, more people will probably click on your result; this might increase your CTR. Remember that this will not have a significant impact if you’re not ranking on the first page yet.
Conclusion
With the above information, you might have got an idea of the Google Search Console and its features. However, if you look forward to knowing more in-depth, reach us at Abhiv Digital Agency for more support.
