You are most likely already familiar with the Google Search Console (GSC) if you’re planning on building a website, already have one, or manage someone else’s web presence.
The Google Search Console is completely free, and you can use it regardless of the type of website you manage.
You must properly configure it, grasp what the metrics reflect, and understand how to leverage its tools to get the most out of it!
So, what exactly is the purpose of Google Search Console? A lot more than you think!
We at Blue Dragon Digital Marketing will go through those tools and their functions to help you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results.
This blog includes:
- What Exactly Is Google Search Console?
- Set Up Your Google Search Console in 5 Easy Steps
- What Exactly Does the Google Search Console Do?
- Google Search Console Features and Their Functions: Performance, URL Inspection, Index Coverage, Links, & Experience Mobile Usability.
- Final Thoughts
What Exactly Is Google Search Console?
Google Search Console, formerly known as the Google Webmaster Tool, allows web admins to monitor, manage, and enhance their sites. It is a free web service offered by Google to monitor and optimize the website’s organic visibility.
Google Search Console provides information about your website and the website visitors viewing your referring domains, mobile site performance, rich search results, and most-trafficked queries and pages, and these are all part of GSC.
Set Up Your Google Search Console in 5 Easy Steps
Step 1: Sign in to your Google account
Step 2: Open up Google Search Console and hit “Start Now”
Step 3: Click “Start” to add your new website to Google Search Console
Step 4: Choose Domain and enter your website URL. Then click “Continue.”
Step 5: Verify your website. To do that, copy the Google Search Console tokenized DNS TXT record and enter it on the domain name provider to claim domain ownership.
Setting up your GSC is a must if you want your business to succeed. It is one of the important aspects of digital marketing that you shouldn’t miss.
GSC can help you build a well-optimized website, but do you know that you can apply various digital marketing strategies to be a successful business owner in Bhutan? If you don’t, check out the 5 digital marketing approaches for small businesses in Bhutan.
What Does Google Search Console Do?
Google Search Console helps you understand how Google views your website and helps you enhance its search ranking.
Google Search Console has many functions, especially on your website, and here are some of the things that GSC does:
- Provides Free Content Optimization with Search Analytics
- Google Search Console assists you in examining which inquiries lead users to your website.
- Helps you check your website’s impressions, clicks, and ranking on Google Search.
- Google Search Console also assists you in incorporating aspects into your site that make it easier for web crawlers to traverse.
- Google Search Console displays the websites that are linking to yours.
- Gets your Content on Google Search Result
- Helps you examine your index coverage to ensure that Google has the most recent version of your site.
- Google Search Console confirms that Google can find your site and that web crawlers can access it.
- GSC helps you view traffic data, such as how frequently your site appears in searches, which search terms bring up your site, how often people click through to your page after searching, and other information.
- Alerts and Assist you in Fixing Website Issues
- Receive email notifications when Google detects problems with your website.
- Google Search Console determines which URLs are affected by these vulnerabilities and notifies Google after they have been resolved.
- Troubleshoot issues with mobile search usability.
- Google Search Console sends notifications when there are problems with your site, such as spam or indexing troubles.
- GSC Shows How Google Search Perceives your Pages
- The URL Inspection tool pulls extensive crawl, index, and serving information directly from the Google index.
- Determine whether your site is more popular on desktop than on mobile.
Google Search Console Features and Their Functions
The Google Search Console provides extensive information on various topics depending on the data it collects. You can use the tabs on the left side of the Google Search Console to optimize your web pages.
We will review some of the tabs you will see and what they imply. It appears as follows:
1. Performance
This tab shows the pages on your website that are ranked in Google for specific keywords.
The most recent version of Google Search Console allows you to view data dating back 16 months, and this data is collected from the moment you add your website.
Checking this tab will help you see where your pages are lacking.
The performance tab will show you whether your homepage repeatedly fails to rank for the keyword you’re attempting to rank for. Then you can investigate and make necessary changes to the page.
The performance tab in Search Console provides the following choices for viewing page statistics:
- Queries
- Pages
- Countries
- Devices
- Search Display
- Dates
These selections are displayed in easy-to-read columns and are quite self-explanatory. The column will show you how your pages fare in various regions and search queries.
You can also check how many visitors use mobile devices to access your page. The search appearance of your website indicates how it ranks in web searches.
2. URL Inspection
This tab allows you to perform data analysis on certain URLs. By entering the URL, you can see how Google sees your website. Understanding how Google perceives your page might provide vital insight into what to alter to improve your ranking.
Assume you’ve started a new blog or updated your About Me page. You can type the URL into Google and see what comes up. It will also inform you whether or not Google is indexing your page. You can also view the last time Google crawled your site.
If Google has indexed your URL, an Enhancements tab will appear underneath this information. It has various options for increasing the performance of your site, including:
- Mobile usability
- Breadcrumbs
- Site speed enhancements
- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
The URL inspection tab can tell you if one or more of your sites is taking too long to load. Speed reports show you how quickly websites load on mobile and desktop, allowing you to determine whether speed issues are caused by the device or by something else.
Once you have identified a slow page, you can go through and edit items that may be causing the issue, such as big images or video files.
3. Index Coverage
This tab shows which of your pages have been indexed by Google and are thus searchable. If any have not been indexed, Search Console will inform you of the issues preventing those pages from being indexed.
If there is any issue, you can find out more about it and fix it by clicking on the error in the chart. Always check this frequently to remain on top of any issues affecting your site.
You can also configure notifications to alert you when Search Console detects a new error. Examples of possible errors include:
- A broken redirect link
- A broken hyperlink
- Code error
When there is an error, you can correct it and then revalidate the page by clicking the “Validate repair” button.
Another reason to check this tab frequently is to ensure that Google is indexing any new information you publish. If you have a blog and regularly submit new blogs, Google will index these along with the rest of your site, increasing the number of indexed pages on the Coverage tab.
If you notice a rapid decrease in the number of indexed pages, Google might be unable to access your full site. Check whether the problem is with the server or something in the ‘robots.txt’ file that prevents Google from crawling specific pages.
On the other hand, a surge in indexed pages when you haven’t published new content could indicate that duplicates are floating around. Duplicates occur when the same information appears at many URLs, making it difficult for Google to choose which site to display.
Regularly checking the Coverage page is an effective approach to resolve any issues with your site swiftly. It will keep visitors satisfied and indicate that your site is well-maintained.
4. Links
You can find out via Search Console which websites connect to yours, how frequently they do, and even what anchor text is used in those links.
You can also see which pages on your site are the most popular by looking at the number of times a page has been linked.
The Link tab shows both Internal and external links coming from other pages.
You can determine what is most popular with people by keeping track of which pages receive the most external links. Pages with the most internal links demonstrate to Google the most crucial and timeless material of your website.
5. Experience: Mobile Usability
It’s highly possible that people won’t see your website on a desktop because many use mobile devices to browse the internet.
The Google Search Console offers tools to ensure visitors to your site have a positive mobile experience. You can check for any issues affecting how your pages appear to visitors accessing your site on mobile devices through this tab.
The URL inspection tab will show how AMP works if you have enabled it on your site. You can see which AMP pages Google considers to be legitimate, which ones are flagged as invalid, and any mistakes you need to fix.
You will see the impacted URLs, learn more about the mistake, and revalidate the page when it has been rectified.
GSC will inform you if your content is too small to read or too big for a common mobile screen. You can also use this tab to check if clickable anchor texts are too close.
The Google search console makes your website stand out by helping you track errors that you can then fix. Start slowly, become familiar with the basic strokes, and take further steps until you master the functions of GSC. Take advantage of its capabilities to monitor and improve your website today!
Contact Blue Dragon Digital Marketing, Bhutan’s leader in comprehensive performance marketing, if you need a well-optimized website, experienced social media handlers, and quality content for your brand.
