What is Google Search Console?
Google Search Console is a free platform for anyone with a website to monitor how Google views their site and optimize its performance. It includes viewing your mobile site performance, rich search results, and highest-traffic queries and pages.
Who should use Google Search Console?
Google Search Console can be used by any and all websites, no matter if its a single page website or a news portal.
Business owners: If you are getting sales through online customers then Google Search Console will help you in your growth. It will provide you data about customer behaviour on Google which can be used to boost your chances online.
SEO specialists or marketers: Google Search Console will help you monitor your website traffic, optimize your ranking, and make informed decisions about the appearance of your site’s search results. As someone focused on online marketing, you can use the information in Google Search Console to influence technical decisions for the website. You can even do sophisticated marketing analysis by using Google Search Console with other Google tools like Analytics, Google Trends, and Google Ads.
Site administrators: With Google Search Console you can easily monitor and also resolve server errors, site load issues, and security issues like hacking and malware. As a site admin, the primary focus is the healthy operation of your site. Any site maintenance or adjustments can happen with smooth integration with respect to search performance.
Web developers: Search Console helps you monitor and resolve common issues with markup, such as errors in structured data.
How to Add Website to Google Search Console:-
- Sign into your Google account. Make sure you’re using your business account if it’s a business website.
- Go to Google Search Console Tools.
- Choose “URL prefix” and enter the URL of your site. Make sure you’re using the correct URL.
- Click ‘Continue.”
Google starts tracking data for your property as you add it to Google Search Console . Then it verifies the site owner.
Google Search Console Verification Methods :
- Select HTML Tag : Copy the <meta tag> and paste it to yours sites home page. It should be paste under the <head> section.
- As soon as you paste the meta tag and save the file. Go to GSC and click on ‘VERIFY’.
- So Google Search Console will Verify your site.
Once you’ve added and verified your website, you’ll be able to see information about your site performance in Google Search Console.
Features of Google Search Console :
Overview Report:
The overview report in Google Search Console is divided in to three main parts.
- Performance
- Coverage
- Enhancement
Performance:
The Performance Tab shows how your site performs in Google Search Results. It is shown into four tabs: Total Clicks, Total Impressions, Average CTR, and Average Position.
Total Clicks: It shows you the number of clicks on your website’s search results received in a specific time.
Total Impressions: This number of impressions shows you how many times your website shown up in the google search results.
Average CTR : The Average CTR Tab (Click Through Rate) shows how many people saw your link and clicked on it.
Average Position: Average position is the numerical order in which Google displays a URL in search results. We can see on which position our website or post is ranking.
URL Inspection Tool:
The URL Inspection tool see how Google views your website. This tool allows you to test how Google renders your website.
You can use this URL inspection tool to submit the URL of a new blog. This tool informs Google to crawl that page.
To use the URL Inspection tool, add your URL to the top search bar in Google Search Console. After that you will see when the Google last crawled your site.
Coverage :
The Index Coverage Report shows you the status of every page Google has tried to index on your site and it also shows the error due to which the pages not index. According to Graph we can see four status that is –
Error: It shows the count the error.
Warning: The page is indexed but has some problem.
Valid: Pages which are properly index and are displayed on Google Search Results.
Excluded: Pages which are valid but not index in Google Search Result.
Sitemaps:
A sitemap is a file where you provide information about the pages, posts, and other files on your site. This allows Search Engines to crawl the site and to find URLs that may be isolated from the rest of the site’s content. This helps you keep track of whether or not all of your pages are viewed by Google.
In this tab, you will be able to see what sitemaps you have already submitted, their status, their last read and the last date they were last crawled.
Removals:
The Removals section in Google Search Console is divide into three areas.
Temporary Removals: The Removals tool temporarily block pages from Google Search Results. You can also see if any URLs on your site that were reported as adult content. We can temporarily block a page from Google’s search results for 6 Months.
Outdated Content: In the Outdated Content section you can able to see the removal request send by the users.
SafeSearch Filtering: In the SafeSearch Filtering section you can able see which content is reported as an adult content.
Core Web Vitals & Mobile Usability:
Core website vitals are a set of important metrics that impact your Google search ranking. Core Web Vitals include speed, usability, and visual stability.
Largest Contentful Paint: It is the time taken by a page to load its main content. An ideal LCP measurement is 2.5 seconds or faster.
The Mobile Usability report shows which pages in your property have usability problems when viewed on mobile devices. Mobile Usability reports there are some common errors so you can fixed it :
Content Wider than the Screen: Make sure that your pages does not have any horizontal scrolling.
Clickable elements too close together: Make sure that your links and buttons are far enough.
Viewport not Configured: Make sure that the pages use the meta viewport tag to adjust the width based on the device used by the users.
Manual Actions:
A manual action or penalty is given out by Google to websites that use unethical practices that are against their guidelines.
Types of Manual Actions & different Manul Penalties :
- User Generated Spam
- Cheap Hosting
- Spammy Freehosts
- Backlink Issues & Redirects
- Thin Content
- Cloaking
- Structured Data Issue
- Hidden Text
- AMP Content Mismatch
Crawl Stats:
The Crawl Stats report shows you statistics about Google’s crawling history on your website. For instance, how many requests were made and when, what your server response was, and any availability issues encountered. You can use this report to detect whether Google encounters serving problems when crawling your site. You’ll see how many kilobytes are downloaded per day, and what the download times of your site are.
Backlinks :
Backlinks are links from one website to another website. Google and other search engines consider backlinks as “votes” for a specific page. Pages having a high number of backlinks tend to have high organic search engine rankings.
Why Are Backlinks Important?
Backlinks are basically votes from other websites. Each of these votes tells search engines that ‘ This content is valuable, credible and useful’.So the more of these votes you have, the higher your site will rank in Google and other search engines.
Conclusion
Google Search Console is an Powerful Tool. And if it is properly used then you can easily rank in Google Search Results and increase your Website Traffic.
