What is Google Search Console?- A Quick and Definite Guide For Beginners

What is Google Search Console?  Any idea or ever heard it before?  If you are an online business owner you must have been familiar with the websites. And you should know how much Google Search Console is important for your website.

About Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a tool that helps you to inspect your site traffic in a definite way.

GSC is a free tool provided by Google that helps people to understand how they are performing in their website on searches of Google. It helps with improving their presence on search so that they can drive more relevant traffic to their websites.

Google Search Console plays a very important role in the life of website or business owners for long-term success and improving website performance.

It helps users measure their site’s traffic, view keyword performance, fix issues, and receive messages from Google about their website.

Why is Google Search Console used?

You can’t use Google Search Console to make changes to your site directly, but you can use it to submit pages to the Google index, verify that your site’s URLs are healthy, and that check for errors in the domain property.

For performing good search engine optimization, GSC is good for adjusting strategies that help businesses discover new ranking opportunities, boost existing performance and learn new features including how people are coming to their website.

This means that it is a vital tool for any business that relies on its website for user experience or to generate leads through organic traffic.

Search Console helps you monitor, maintain, and optimize your website’s organic search presence at its core. Most primarily use GSC to view clicks and impressions.

While that’s cool, it has much more to offer. For example, it can:

1. Find search queries that drive traffic

2. Locate errors that need fixing

3. Ensure the eligibility for rich snippets and schema

4. Show if your site has been hacked

5. Identify and leverage backlinks to boost link juice

6. Monitor your Core Web Vitals

7. Find how well all your pages rank

8. Make your site more mobile-friendly

9. Add sitemaps

Google Search Console Works:

As we have already discussed what it works. Apart from them, Google helps you to know about crawls, indexes, and how Google serves websites.

Google Analytics also helps in looking performance of your website but the search console gives a bit more clarity to the performance of the site. This can help website owners to monitor and optimize Search performance.

GSC has that many responsive services that you don’t need to log in to the tool every day for checking issues or errors. You will get the alert message from the search console when any type of issue is detected.

I recommend you to check the search console once every month, or when you make changes to the site’s content, to make sure the data is stable.

Quick set up for Google Search Console

To access Google Search Console, you first need to set up your account.

Here’s how to set up Google Search Console:

• Create your own Google Search Console account.

• Log into your Google Search Console account and click on ‘Add Property.’

• Enter the site URL and click on ‘Add Property.’

• You will then be prompted to verify your site.

After adding your website to Google Search Console, you’ll need to verify your site as proof that you’re the webmaster, site owner, or some other authorized user.

Site verification can be done in different ways, although there are 4 common methods used:

• Adding a Google Analytics (GA) code, if you already use GA to track site metrics
• Adding an HTML tag, if you possess HTML coding experience

• Uploading an HTML file to your site’s root directory,

• Verifying your site through your domain name provider.

Once your verification is complete, you can link your Google Analytics account to your Google Search Console account by using the GSC dashboard and clicking on the website you’re trying to link.

When this is done, you can start using Google Search Console to get important insights that’ll help you improve site performance.

Let’s learn the features of Google Search Console

When you open up your search console-

From the left side of the search console, there are menus each that have several functions.

Overview

Do you know what this Overview show in the Google search console?
Let’s have a look at the overview report of the Google search console which has three main reports.

• Performance
• Coverage
• Enhancement

Performance

Under the performance section, you can see the search results of your site including your web pages.

Performance report shows the graph of how your site performs in Google Search Results. How many Clicks, impressions, average position in search results you get, it all you can check in the performance report.

URL Inspection

What does the URL Inspection tool do? This is the tool in the Google search console that provides information about the indexed version of a particular page in the search console.  Through this tool, you can see your structured data, indexing issues, AMP errors, etc.

This tool tells you about how Google crawls your website. That’s why this is one of my favorites that when I publish a blog or website page I use this URL inspection to give a signal to Google to crawl that page.

Index Reports

Index report mainly covers three features named coverage, sitemap, and removal. It will help you in looking for index bloat, finding blocked CSS, or removed URLs.

The Google Index report in Google Search Console provides data on how your content is performing in Google Search.

___Coverage___

The Coverage report displays all your indexed pages and all the pages that are not included in your sitemap in the Google Search Console.

It will give you the lists of errors that you have made on your sites.
The Coverage report is also the Crawl Errors report. It tells you what pages are broken on your website.

From this, you will want to monitor this report to make sure there are no major increases or decreases in your indexed pages.

SiteMaps

___Sitemaps___

In the Google search console, a sitemap is a file you place within your domain with info about pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them.

Google can read this file and use it as a quick and easy directory to find and crawl the pages on your site.

So, this is what can affect your website when you make changes in your site like excluding tags to removing categories.

Some errors may be found with the help of a sitemaps report that helps you to fix easily.

___Removal___

Google’s new Search Console includes a helpful Removals Tool that allows you to temporarily exclude your content from search rankings, as well as analyze user engagement, and gauge analytics on your outdated content and pages affected by the SafeSearch filter.

The Removals section is broken down into three areas.

• Temporary removals
• Outdated content
• SafeSearch Filtering

Temporary Removals

In this scenario, you isolate your content from ranking for half a year. After the expiration of this period, crawling resumes, and hidden pages will float up in the search dropdown again. The page’s cached copy and the snippet will be cleared. 

You are free to block a single page or a group of pages that share the same prefix. 

This option can be used as the first stage of ultimate content blockage. 

Outdated Content

If users think that the information on your website is no longer relevant and requires an update, they can flag it as outdated content via a special public tool.

You can access data on public removal requests made over the past six months in the Outdated Content tab of the Removals Tool.

Each record in your history table will include the URL that is the subject of the request, the type, date, status (approved/denied) of the request, and the reason for the appointment of a particular status.

Approved requests will change how your content is featured by Google. If the claimed content has been deleted or is no longer relevant, the URL that leads to it will be wiped out from the search dropdown. 

SafeSearch Filtering

In the SafeSearch Filtering section, you can see what content is reported as adult content using the SafeSearch suggestion tool.

You can turn to the Webmaster Forum to appeal against the placement of your page under the filter. Then the person who made the request may cancel it, or Google’s administration may deny it.

If the request is approved, your URL will not float up in the search dropdown of users having SafeSearch turned on.

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Experience

It mainly shows three insights.

___Page Experience___

Google has added a new report in Google Search Console named the Page Experience Report. Google also added new filters in the Performance Reports where you can compare the performance of green, yellow, red performing pages to each other.

Page Experience report provides a summary of the user experience of visitors to your site. Google evaluates page experience metrics for individual URLs on your site and will use them as a ranking signal for a URL in Google Search results on mobile devices.

____Core Web Vitals___

The three main web vitals represent the three distinct phases of the user experience: the loading experience, site interactivity, and the visual consistency of the website’s page content. 

All three are designed to quantify and continuously improve these metrics to ultimately improve the ‘real world’ user experience.

When you want to view a particular page for its web core vitals, simply log into your website’s Google search console and select the core web vitals button on the console’s sidebar and a report will appear.

Google Search Console will show you the pages that are currently performing “Poorly”, “Needing Improvement”, or “Good”.

Mobile Usability

___Mobile Usability___

The Mobile Usability report shows which pages on your website have issues that represent non-responsive websites when viewed on mobile devices.

As mobile usability is an important factor that affects the search engine rankings of your website, you should generate Google mobile usability reports to identify the issues and ensure the best performance for your mobile users.

Google gives a lot of preference to mobile-friendly sites and hence, you should make sure optimal mobile experience by conducting a mobile usability test. 

Some of the errors show in mobile usability are as follows:

• Viewport not set

• Content wider than screen

• Uses incompatible plugins

• Text too small to read

• Clickable elements too close together

★ Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

This report helps you fix errors that prevent your AMP pages with AMP-specific features from appearing in Google search results.

The AMP report in Google Search Console allows you to monitor your AMP pages.

You can watch for site templating and any other implementation issues that affect your AMP pages. You can also the AMP Test Tool if you’re making any big changes.

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Enhancements

There are different sections of the GSC tool, and the “Enhancement” section is one of them.

The Enhancement lets you know how active your AMP pages are and if your structured data is working.

The goal is for it to say that you do not have any error codes. You can view all the tools and reports at the left menu bar “Enhancement” tab.

Google Search Console is essential for your website, and Enhancement is vital to the GSC.

___Breadcrumbs___

The breadcrumb trail on a page indicates the position of the page in the site hierarchy and can help users understand and explore the site effectively.

This Breadcrumbs report helps website owners fix any issues that may be preventing breadcrumbs from displaying in the SERPs.

And, any website owner can understand the woes of implementing structured data. You add the code to your site, but it’s still not showing in the SERPs.

Luckily, Google has done all the hard work for us.

After you’ve added the code to your website, pop into Google Search Console > > Enhancements > > Breadcrumbs to check for errors.

The report will include all the breadcrumb structured data errors and how many URLs are affected.

___Sitelinks Searchbox___

The Sitelink search box is a quick way for people to quickly find your site or application on the search results page.  The search box implements real-time suggestions and other features.

Similar to the Search Console reports, Google Search Console will display listed errors with clickable options to understand what the problems are and how to fix them.

Security & Manual Actions

Google added a new tab in the Google search console.
This section will let you know if Google finds any security issues with your site, including hacked URLs, malware, deceptive pages, harmful downloads, and much more.

This was a feature in the old Google Search Console and is now under a new section with Manual Actions named “Security and Manual Actions.”

Legacy Tools & Reports

Legacy tools and reports are a smaller yet crucial set of tools. This includes robots.txt testers, URL parameter tools, international targeting, data highlighting, message reports, crawl rate settings, and web tools.

While the reporting tool acts as a summary to track your site’s health, clicks, and an overview of the page.

The significance of legacy tools is that it allows for more experience reports and microdata testing. This tool has intrinsic value and is key to recognizing and understanding how they work with others.

On the other side in getting the full breakdown of your site the reporting tool allows you to analyze any issues or errors that might be accruing. Specifically when it comes to crawling stats, link issues, and issues with security. Report tools in GSC serve as a big picture of your site and offer a full overview.

Links

In the links insight of Google search console, you see your links building to which pages. It shows the external and internal links of your websites.

There are many sites that link sometimes by blog commenting you give your links to other sites for increasing traffic. In this case, you build your external link to many sites related to your niche.

This backlinking may affect our site ranking sometimes if not followed with the Google algorithm. You can be able to correct your linking from this links tab insight.

Setting

Setting menus of Google search console includes managing of change of ownership verification, associates, address, email notifications, crawl stats, etc.

Note: Some of the tabs have been updated from the previous version of Google Search Console, that’s why your dashboard may have some more menus or can be no menu. So don’t feel confused after reading this article. You can ask your queries in the comments down below regarding it. I’ll try my best to answer you all.

Conclusion:

Google Search Console is a must when you are a site owner. There are many reasons and benefits why the data you can get from Google Search Console is crucial to anyone with a website. 

It is completely free and simple to set up, the additional data, and an understanding of how your website performs on Google. Makes using the tool worth the time investment it would take to understand everything the tool can offer. 

As Google Search Console, it’s free and easy to use, and it deserves a spot on any webmasters, marketers, business owner toolkit to manage their visibility on Google Search. 

If you are a beginner and want to know about Google search console, I have covered all the parts which help you to use easily.

In the end, I want you all to give your feedback on this article in the comment section down below. And feel free you ask your doubts and give your suggestions.

If you haven’t read my previous article, please check once.

Thanks for reading!  🙂