Google Search Console is the forgotten tool when it comes to promoting your website
You may have read that you don’t have to tell Google anything when you publish new content; it will find it. Hmmm, okay, but why leave it to chance?
My dad used to tell me, “Son, don’t rely on other people to do your work.” A brilliant quote, and I live by it. When you have created new content, I’d absolutely tell Google and the other search engines about it. If you don’t, then realistically, you are at the whim of them crawling your site; it might be a while.
This is where Google Search Console comes in. People tend to think about Google Analytics when considering data tools for websites, often forgetting its older but often overlooked sister app.
What is Google Search Console and what does it do?
Google Search Console (GSC), previously known as Google Webmaster Tools, is a free service offered by Google that helps website owners, SEO professionals, and digital marketers monitor and troubleshoot their website’s presence in Google Search results.
Here are the main capabilities of Google Search Console:
Performance Reports:
This shows how well your site is performing in Google Search, including impressions, clicks, click-through rate (CTR), and positions. It allows you to view this data by queries, pages, countries, devices, search appearance features, and dates.
The performance report offers detailed insights into how your website is performing in Google’s organic search results. You can see data on clicks, impressions (views), click-through rate (CTR), and average ranking position for different queries, pages, devices, and countries. You can also filter the data by dates and search type (web, image, video). It’s useful for identifying the pages and keywords that are driving the most traffic to your site, so you can optimise accordingly.
URL Inspection
This allows you to check specific URLs to see their index status and understand why Google is or isn’t indexing them. It provides information about Google’s crawl, index, and serving capabilities for a specific URL on your website.
This tool provides information about Google’s index coverage of individual URLs. You can see if a page is indexed, any indexing issues, and the canonical URL for a page. It also provides information about the page’s structured data and AMP errors, if applicable. This feature is useful for troubleshooting specific pages that aren’t appearing in search results as expected.
Coverage Report:
This reports on the index status of all pages that Google has visited or tried to visit on your site. It tells you which pages are successfully indexed, any indexing errors, and how to fix them.
The coverage report shows which pages of your website Google is able to crawl and index, and which pages have issues that prevent them from being indexed. By fixing these issues, you can ensure that Google is able to crawl all the important pages of your site. The report categorises issues by ‘error’, ‘warning’, ‘valid with warning’, and ‘valid’.
Sitemap Submission:
A sitemap tells Google and other search engines which pages on your site are important and how often they are updated. You can submit it here for Google to crawl and index.
Sitemaps help search engines understand the structure of your website and find new pages to crawl. Webmasters can submit a sitemap through GSC, and it will report any errors found within the sitemap. This process can help you speed up the indexing process for new sites or pages.
Mobile Usability Report:
This shows which pages in your property have usability problems when viewed on mobile devices.
This report identifies any usability problems that might affect your site when viewed on mobile devices. It provides information about issues like text being too small to read, clickable elements being too close together, and the content being wider than the screen. Fixing these issues is essential for providing a good user experience on mobile devices.
Core Web Vitals Report:
This reflects the quality of user experience in terms of loading time, interactivity, and the stability of content as it loads (preventing “layout shifting”).
Core Web Vitals is a set of metrics that Google considers important for a good user experience. This includes the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). This report provides insights into how your pages perform against these metrics, which can help you identify areas for improvement.
Security & Manual Actions:
Google notifies you here if they find any security issues (like hacking) or manual actions (penalties) applied to your site.
The Security & Manual Actions section will notify you of any security issues, like malware or hacking, that Google has detected on your site. It will also alert you if any manual actions have been applied to your site due to a violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines.
Links Report:
This shows the most linked pages on your website, as well as which sites link the most to your website.
The Links report provides data about the backlinks to and from your site. It includes both internal links (links between pages on your site) and external links (links from other sites to yours). You can see the pages on your site with the most links and the sites that link to you the most. This information can help you understand your site’s link profile, which is an important aspect of SEO.
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) status:
If you have AMP pages, Google will show any errors it finds here.
If your site uses AMP to provide faster loading pages for mobile users, the AMP status report will show any errors that Google has detected with your AMP pages. These might be issues with markup or the layout of your page.
Rich Results / Structured Data Testing and Reports:
This lets you see errors and improvements for different types of structured data that Google recognises.
These tools and reports help you implement and troubleshoot structured data. Structured data is code that you add to your site to help Google understand your content and provide richer search results, like reviews, recipes, or events. You can test your structured data using the Structured Data Testing Tool, and GSC will also provide reports on the structured data it finds on your site.
Understanding and using Google Search Console is important for several reasons:
- Identify Issues: With GSC, you can monitor your site’s health for any indexing, spam, or other issues.
- Improve Organic Presence: By understanding which keywords you are ranking for and how you are performing for them, you can strategise to improve your organic search presence.
- Optimise Site Performance: You can improve your website’s user experience by focusing on mobile usability and Core Web Vitals.
- Link Analysis: GSC gives insight into your site’s backlink profile, which is a critical part of SEO.
- Improve Crawlability: By submitting sitemaps and inspecting URLS, you can guide Google to crawl and index your site effectively.
For business owners and digital marketers, Google Search Console offers invaluable insights into how a site is performing in search, where traffic is coming from, and how visitors are interacting with the site. These insights can help drive more effective marketing strategies, improve site architecture, and ultimately, increase conversions and revenue.
Related Links
- Moz: Beginner’s Guide to Google’s Search Console
- Search Engine Journal: – How to Use the Google Search Console’s URL Inspection Tool
- Search Engine Journal: – Using Google Search Console for Effective SEO Auditing
- AHrefs: How to Fix Index Coverage Issues Detected in Google Search Console (Step-By-Step)
- Yoast: How to Submit Your Website to Google Search Console
- Content King: The Mobile Usability Report in Google Search Console Explained
- Search Engine Land: Google Search Console Security & Manual Actions
- Bright Edge: Using Google Search Console to Understand Your Link Profile
- Cognitive SEO: “How to Use the Google Search Console AMP Test Tool”
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I’m Phil Gregory, the MD and founder of Peak District SEO.
I’m an SEO & Google Ads Consultant with 28+ years of experience in I.T and helping UK Businesses improve website performance.
I built my first website in 1998, then I discovered the joys of website optimisation and never looked back.
If you want a no-nonsense, no-hard-sell approach and to actually get your website fixed with a solid, affordable, long-term approach, hit the contact button today.
Peak District SEO is a UK-based Digital Marketing Company.
We help businesses make more money, using traditional Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) , Ai Search / GEO and paid advertising (PPC).
Why Peak District SEO?
27+ years of experience.
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Our customers have hundreds of page one and position 1 rankings and we can prove it.
