What Does the Google Search Console Do?
The Google Search Console is a free web service offered by Google that allows webmasters to monitor, check, and troubleshoot the indexing status of their websites to optimize its visibility.
What You Can Do With Google Search Console?
Earlier Google Search Console known as Google Webmaster Tools, it was rechristened to Google Search Console in 2015. The move by Google to change the ten-year-old name of its toolset was because Google thought that the tool was not just for webmasters anymore.
With it, you can find out how many people visit your site, how they find it, what is the percentage of mobile vs desktop visitors, and which site pages are the most popular.
Ready to benefit from all that Google Search Console can offer? Let’s see what a GSC does and how it can help you improve site performance.
1. Performance Dashboard
The Performance report dashboard displays crucial metrics about site performance in Google search results.
The Performance tab allows you to see the pages and keywords your website ranks for in Google SERPs. Checking the Performance report regularly shows you which keywords or pages need greater attention and optimization. Using this information can help you enhance site search performance. You can get data from Search Analytics for the following:
Keywords
One of the best features in GSC is the Queries tab, which gives you a list of keywords that have a high number of impressions but a low CTR.
By running a simple report after clicking the four filters of Clicks, Impressions, CTR, and Position, you can select the Queries options, and it will throw up a host of keywords that are performing well.
This list will contain those keywords and key phrases that people use most frequently to access your site. You can also find keywords that have a low CTR and a high impression count and optimize them.
Location-Based Traffic Analysis
You can get a location-based traffic analysis by clicking the Location option to see how traffic segregated by area.
This can help you direct your efforts for specific locations based on how much traffic you are receiving from it. You can then target location-based keywords to use them for your landing page.
Date-Wise Clicks and Impression Data
You can adjust the date range with the Dates option to uncover issues that are affecting SEO and fix them.
For example, if one of your keywords is at position 14 and has high impressions, you may think it is doing well.
But the same keyword could have had higher impressions and a better position a month ago.
After setting your date range, you will be given a rundown of the time-wise clicks and impression data and also see how these metrics have changed. You can use this data to fix your issues, thereby improving your ranking.
Website Page Traffic Analysis
The Page option helps you analyze the ranking position your pages appeared on Google for certain queries.
It also tells you which channels are generating the most traffic, how many people are visiting your website, which page are they landing on, how long (time session) they are staying on your website, how many of them are bouncing, etc.
Device Types
The Device option lets you see which devices are being used to search.
It’s an incredibly useful feature that lets you perform keyword research for both mobile and desktop.
By selecting the Devices option, you can go and Filter devices. This will
You can then select any option and see all the keywords being used by desktop and mobile users to access your site from the SERPs.
2. Google Indexing
With the Index Coverage tab, you can see the number of pages that are present in and absent from Google’s index since the last update and which warnings and errors cause complications for Google indexing your pages.
Apart from that, you also receive notifications when GSC finds new errors, allowing you to check the error in greater detail. Errors are caused when Google finds error pages or broken code in your theme or when a redirect isn’t working properly.
You can then go on and run an in-depth evaluation of the said errors to see which specific URLs were affected. After you’ve fixed them, you can mark them as fixed for Google to test the URL again.
3. Mobile Usability
Within the mobile usability tab of the GSC, you can see usability issues that plague your mobile website or discrete mobile pages. With mobile traffic seeing an upward trend over the world, checking mobile usability issues regularly is a must. If your mobile site isn’t up to the mark and user-friendly, you will find your bounce rate jumping higher and lots of visitors leaving quickly.
4. Backlink Analysis
With the Link tab in Google Search Console, you can analyze the strength and health of your backlink portfolio with the help of reports from four sections. These four sections in the Links page are:
Top-Linked Pages
It shows how many links per page there are. You can click on any page and see which sites link to it and also filter pages to exclude or include characters after clicking the filter option and selecting Target Page.
Top-Linking Sites
This shows the top 1,000 domains that are linking to your website. Search engines then see how many unique and unaffiliated linking domains you have to measure the value of your website.
Top-Linking Text
The top-linking text, or the anchor text, is a word or a phrase that contains a link. It provides contextual relevance to both the linked page and the page that contains the link. This report helps you see how specific and valuable the anchor text is.
Top-Linked Pages
The top-linked page tab makes the analysis of your internal link network available. Internal link reports help you determine the most important pages for your ranking. Every internal link forwards a low amount of relevance and link equity. The stronger your internal link network is, the stronger organic search rankings you produce.
5. Speed Insight
The Speed reports that are located under the Enhancements section of the Google Search Console provide immediate information about which sections and URLs of their websites may have issues with speed performance.
If you want to get more details on how to enhance web page speed, it will redirect you to the PageSpeed Insights tool.
Conclusion
Google Search Console is a gold card for webmasters who are truly blessed to have it as a free tool. Apart from the functionalities and features mentioned above, GSC also:
- Confirms that Google finds and crawls your site
- Analyzes search traffic data for your website
- Provides alerts when Googling results in encountering spam or other issues
- Troubleshoots AMP, mobile usability, and other issues
Now that you are aware of Google Search Console can do, are you going to use it for your website? If not, it is highly recommended that you create an account and can start collating data for better website performance and business success.
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