You can learn more about what makes a difference to your viewers, how they find your content, and whether or not it seems in search results by monitoring the performance of your website. Site owners and SEO specialists can do just that with the aid of Google Search Console, which is a collection of tools and reports. Let’s take a view at what is google search console and how it is useful to website owners.
What is Google Search Console?
The free Google Search Console tool enables users to track website traffic, examine keyword performance, address problems, and receive notifications from Google about their webpage. It offers information on how a webpage performs in organic results and suggestions for improving the site’s indexing by Google. (Contrary to Google Analytics, Search Console only offers traffic data originating from web searches, it excludes other sections like direct traffic, traffic from ads, and traffic from site referrals).
Google Search Console is a useful tool for SEO strategy modification. Businesses can learn how exactly people are accessing their websites and how to improve existing performance using the search console data. This means it’s a crucial tool for any company that depends on its website to improve the user experience or produce leads from organic traffic.
Why Google Search Console is Important for SEO?
The most effective way for Google and SEO managers to share pertinent data is by far Google Search Console. No other SEO tool in the market can compete with it in terms of features and information for enhancing SEO performance, both technically and in terms of content.
How to Setup Google Search Console?
To begin, visit the Google Search Console landing page and select “Start now.” You must then log into the Google account you want to link to the Search Console account for your website. If you’re using Search Console for the first time, you’ll be prompted to choose between creating a domain property and a URL prefix property.
A domain-level property gives you a thorough overview of your site’s performance on both HTTP and HTTPS, including all URLs across all subdomains.
On the other hand, only URLs with a specific prefix are included in a URL prefix property. This could be a good choice if you want to monitor certain subfolders, such as https://your.site/home.
Once you’ve added your domain, see if the drop-down menu includes your domain registrar. Select it to start the automated authorization process if it does. The line of characters next to the “copy” button, are be copied to verify your domain name provider if your domain registrar isn’t listed. Google advises trying again in a few hours if the verification doesn’t work the first time because it might take some time for the change to take effect.
If you chose a URL prefix property rather than a domain property, if you choose you can copy the HTML tag from the search console
you can confirm site ownership by uploading an HTML file to your WordPress site,
If you can doubt how to upload the code to the WordPress site, we can clear about that.
First, you need to install and activate the AIO SEO in your WordPress site, then through the general settings of AIO SEO, you can go to the below page where you can add your Google Search Console HTML tag in the text box. After adding the tag to your site you can verify the ownership of your Google Search Console account.
Google Search Console Overview
Your Overview will be the first thing you see when you access your website in GSC.
This is a summary of the key information in the Google Search Console. You can navigate to specific areas from this screen, including your crawl errors, search analytics, and sitemaps by clicking on the relevant links.
You can also access the other areas by using the menu in the left sidebar.
Performance
The Performance report in Search Console is the most useful feature for many online businesses. As the name suggests, this area of the platform provides individuals like marketers and companies with crucial data on their organic performance and can assist them in monitoring crucial KPIs for business success and ongoing growth.
The Performance report includes metrics for both the total volume of organic traffic to a company’s websites and for each individual URL. Information on clicks, impressions, click-through rates and typical keyword rankings are provided.
Let’s explain what each of these is,
Clicks: This metric shows the quantity of Google search clicks that lead to users visiting your website. In contrast to Google Analytics, these clicks may not accurately reflect users’ sessions (the total time a user spends browsing the site) or even page views (the number of times a page is viewed in total). Just clicks are what they are clicks. Because Google measures the above metrics with slightly different definitions, the number of clicks you see in the Google Search Console doesn’t always match the number of sessions you see in the landing-page report of Analytics.
Impressions: They are measured by the number of links to your website that a user saw in the Google search results (even if the result was not scrolled into view). The number of times your website appears in search results, even if no one clicks on them, are referred to as impressions. If your results are on the second or next page of search results that the user did not click on, so your results are not counted as impressions.
CTR: This metric stands for click-through rate, and calculates the ratio of the number of clicks on the site to the number of impressions.
Average Position: This refers to the top result from your website’s average position for a specific type of keyword. The position fluctuates frequently, give or take a few spots, so the average is given here.
These provide online businesses with ways to gauge the success of their SEO campaigns directly and provide information for further optimising SEO strategies.
With the help of a skilled SEO campaign, a company can identify keywords with a high CTR and determine the types of searchers who are most likely to click through to their website from the SERP. High-value keywords with lots of impressions but a low click-through rate (CTR) might indicate issues with the company’s SERP presence. Making sure that the meta-title and meta-description are well-written might make sense. Low keyword impressions or few clicks could indicate that your site isn’t showing up for those searches or that users aren’t finding it.
Additionally, search engine specialists can use this information to identify the keywords with the highest click-through rates to learn more about user behaviour and the purpose of site visitors. This enables businesses to better match their existing high-CTR, high-value traffic by optimising their on-page content or organising new content.
Indexing
A more technical but cherished section of Google Search Console is “Indexing.” This section displays the number of pages that have been added to Google’s index since the last update, the number of pages that have not, and the errors and warnings that prevented Google from correctly indexing your pages. In addition to collecting your regular pages and video pages, Google divided this section into sections and provided a home for your XML sitemap and the removals sections.
You must frequently check this tab to see if any errors or warnings have appeared on your website. You also receive notifications when Google discovers new errors, though. When you receive such a notification, kindly double-check the error.
If, for example, a redirect doesn’t seem to be working properly or Google discovers broken code or error pages in your theme, you might find that errors are the result. Google Search Console provides a comprehensive list of potential causes for why pages aren’t indexed as well as solutions.
Pages
This will show you the pages and blogs which are indexed and not indexed, and also show the pages which are not working. The Google search console will also give a suggestion and ideas on how to solve that problem and what is the exact problem in the page.
Sitemap
A sitemap enables Google to discover and crawl key content on your website, so adding a sitemap to Google Search Console is essential.
Go to “Sitemaps” and enter the URL of your XML sitemap into the “Enter sitemap URL” box to submit a sitemap to Search Console. Next, click “Submit.”
URL Inspection
You can analyse certain URLs with the aid of the URL Inspection tool. To check for discrepancies, you pull the page from Google’s index and compare it to the current version of the page on your website. More technical information, such as when and how Google indexed this page and how it appeared at that time, is also available on this page. Additionally, you may encounter several errors at times. This may be related to Google’s inability to properly crawl your page. Additionally, it provides details about the structured data at this URL.
For that simply enter the URL which you are going to check in the text box at the top.
Then after that by clicking enter, the inspection will start and it will show if there are any issues on your page. No issues have been found means it will show like the below page.
You can also request indexing if you updated any information recently.
Experience
The addition of the experience report is crucial. This report provides a good idea of how quickly your site loads on desktop and mobile devices, as well as how Google rates your site’s page experience and essential web metrics. It also reveals, which pages have problems that prevent them from functioning properly. The information is accurate because it is based on the Chrome UX report and comes from actual users.
Mobile usability
The Mobile Usability tab in the experience section displays any usability issues with your website or specific mobile pages. We advise checking this frequently because mobile traffic is expanding globally. It is crucial to update the website to be mobile-friendly because many visitors will leave if your mobile site is unusable.
Manual action
The manual actions report under the security and manual action tab will let you know if a Google human reviewer has manually penalised your website. In this scenario, some or all of the sites may not appear in the search results. If a website violates Google’s webmaster quality guidelines, such as if it appears to be using dubious SEO techniques to manipulate its ranking in the search results, it will be subject to manual action.
Conclusion
Google Search Console offers you insightful data on how your website performs and what you can do to keep Google interested. We think that you have a solid understanding of Google Search Console’s capabilities and how to use it after reading this post.
