Many of you who manage and develop websites are familiar with different useful Google products. For visibility and detecting website issues, Google Search Console (GSC) is an essential tool.
What Is Google Search Console?
Google’s free service lets you keep track of how the search engine sees your website. Are there any issues that prevent it from being indexed? Does Google even see your website? Do you get any traffic for your website? GSC tells you about all this.
In this blog post, we review the most important Google Search Console tools to improve your site.
How Do I Access My Google Search Console?
To get started, you must have a Google account. Log in to your Google account, and click here:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en
Once logged in, you’ll need to verify your site ownership before you can start using GSC features. There are several methods to verify your site like adding a meta tag, uploading an HTML file, or using your domain provider’s DNS records.
It’s also important to understand users and permissions in GSC. You can add other users and assign different permission levels to control what data and settings they can access and modify.
Check out our blog post on how to set up Google Search Console and manage users/permissions (coming soon).
1. Google Search Console Insights
This feature is especially helpful if you are working on your website content. It lets you know how your content resonates with your target audience. The tool pulls its data from both Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
The Insights feature monitors user experience and user behavior. Determine what articles or pieces of content are performing the best on your websites. Eliminate the ones that do not and focus on the ones that do.
It lets you know the number of views your website has received over the last 28 days. The Achievements feature on the top of the Overview page shows milestones by tracking how many clicks you have reached in 28 days.
Below, you can see individual content items and how they are performing. GSC measures this by the number of views they get and the amount of time people spend reading these items.
Finally, you find some information on how people find your website, such as the three top traffic channels. Visitors can reach your website in three ways:
- They can type your website’s URL directly into their browser (direct traffic).
- They can find it through a Google search (organic traffic).
- They can also click on other websites’ links to your site (referrals).
Search Console Insights is a crucial tool in GSC. It offers a wealth of valuable information on one easy-to-read page.
2. Performance
The Performance tab also gives you an update of two crucial factors:
- Total clicks: How many times people clicked on your website’s URL in Google search results.
- Total impressions: How many people saw your website’s URL in Google search results.
Further below, you see some of the keywords that generated the most traffic for your site. You can see the location of your visitors and the device they used for their search. This includes whether they used a desktop computer or a mobile device. Understanding the behavior of your visitors is important to assess the interest for your content.
You can also look at how individual pages on your website are performing, which brings us to our next point.
3. URL Inspection
The URL inspection tool helps you check if Google has visited and added a particular URL to its index. This can be a webpage or a blog post.
What’s even better, you can directly tell Google to index the specific page. Submit the page URL, click “Test Live URL”, and then click “Request Indexing”. This is especially useful if you have a brand new page on your website, or you have recently changed one. By notifying the search engine directly, you can avoid waiting weeks or months for Google to discover and crawl your website.
If Google has experienced any issues while crawling or indexing your website, it appears on the Pages tab.
4. Pages
The Pages tab shows how many pages on your site Google has indexed. It also shows if there are any crawl errors that prevent certain pages from being indexed.
Some of the most common errors you will find are:
- Page with redirect
- Not found (404)
- Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag
- Crawled – currently not indexed
- Redirect error
- Discovered – currently not indexed
- Alternate page with proper canonical tag
For a detailed description of these errors and how to fix them, check out our blog post on technical SEO.
5. Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals include key metrics that tell you about user experience on your website. When evaluating your website, you should consider the speed at which your pages load. Additionally, you should think about how easy it is for users to interact with visual elements. Lastly, you should assess the stability of those elements when Google crawls your site.
Google’s documentation on GSC explains how these numbers are calculated and offers solutions to fix any problems with them.
6. HTTPS
Use the HTTPS report to see the URLs that begin with HTTP and the ones that begin with HTTPS. While HTTPS has been an industry recommendation for several years now, many websites still use HTTP. The “S” in HTTPS stands for “Secure”. Google prefers this protocol because it is more secure.
By using HTTPS, you are ensuring that any data exchanged between the user’s browser and your website is encrypted and secure. This is especially important for websites that handle sensitive information such as personal details or payment information.
Google has been pushing for a more secure web by giving a slight ranking boost to websites that use HTTPS. It is also worth noting that some browsers may display a “Not Secure” warning for websites that are still using HTTP.
Making the switch to HTTPS is not only beneficial for security reasons but also for improving your website’s credibility and trustworthiness in the eyes of both users and search engines. If your website is still using HTTP, it is highly recommended to make the switch to HTTPS as soon as possible to ensure the safety and security of your users’ data.
7. Sitemaps
Instead of individually submitting your pages to Google, you can submit a whole sitemap. This document informs Google about the structure of your website and includes a list of its pages. Some website editors, such as WordPress, Squarespace or Wix, automatically generate a sitemap for you. They usually connect to Google Search Console and handle the sitemap submission for you.
In case you don’t use such an editor, the Sitemaps tab is there for you to submit the sitemap to Google.
8. Removals
Removals is the opposite of submitting your page to Google for indexing. Do you have old content you want to take down? Have you discovered explicit or inappropriate content on your website? Do you want to change your content strategy, and this requires throwing out some of your blog posts?
This is what the Removals tab is for. You can request Google to remove specific pages or directories from its index.
9. Sitelinks Searchbox
A website search box enables you to quickly search your entire website while it appears in Google search results. It not only allows search, but also gives you suggestions and hints. Google is associated with the search field, so you cannot directly provide the results that show up there.
However, you can submit structured data to Google that helps the search engine understand the content on your site better. This can improve the search experience in the sitelinks searchbox.
10. Manual Actions
Having a manual action against your website is not a good sign. It means someone reported your website for whatever reason (e.g. inappropriate content or copyright infringement). Someone could have done it with malicious intent, to harm your website ranking in Google search results.
If your website receives a manual action, it will rank lower in Google search results. When someone presses the ominous button, it will appear under your Manual Actions tab. You will also receive a notification.
Now it’s up to you to determine whether someone has reported your website for justified reasons.
First off, look at the manual action report. Which pages did the issue affect? Now, review the content on those pages carefully.
Make sure you understand why Google issued the manual action against your website. If you have fixed all the issues, request a review from Google. This means resubmitting your pages, and telling Google about the issues and the steps you’ve taken to resolve them.
Conclusion
Google Search Console is a powerful tool that provides invaluable insights into how Google views and interacts with your website. By taking advantage of its features, you can improve your site’s visibility, user experience, and overall performance in search results. Stay on top of any issues, monitor your site’s health, and make data-driven optimizations for better rankings.
