Websites perform differently because of different factors. These factors either benefit your website or not. And what better way to determine these factors than by using Google Search Console?
This tool allows you to spot errors, improve your ranking in search results, and enhance your overall user experience. Understand Google Search Console better to use it to improve your website’s performance.
Why use Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a web service that helps website owners manage and optimize their website’s performance for free. The tool enables its users to spot errors that affect a website’s ranking on Google search results. If you don’t know by now, optimizing a website makes it rank better in search results. It also helps you understand how Google indexes and crawls your website.
Steps on How to use Google Search Console
Follow these steps to use the Google Search Console:
- A Google account is required to access the Google Search Console. So, log in to your account first.
- Then, head to add and verify site ownership in the Search Console — either choose a domain or URL prefix property. Once done, verify it using different verification options (HTML file upload, HTML tag, Google Analytics tracking code, Google Tag Manager, Google Sites, Blogger, or DNS records). For domain properties, your DNS records are the only verification method.
- If verification isn’t completed right away, wait a few hours or a day and then try again.
If you’re trying to add a new property, you may follow the steps below:
- Click the drop-down button and + Add property on the upper left side of the Search Console account.
- Choose the type of property to add.
- Choose a verification method. Then, either choose to verify immediately or verify later instead.
Sections in Google Search Console
Performance Report
The Google Search Console account shows how your website is performing in Google search results, Google News, and Google Discover through the Performance tab. Under this tab, you’ll find queries, pages, countries, devices, and search appearance, which can be arranged according to clicks, average CTR, impressions, or average position. Let’s check each metric below:
- Clicks
This details how many clicks you get from Google’s search results, excluding the ones from ads. It tells if your website is visible in search results and if it’s getting site visits. However, the number of clicks alone doesn’t mean conversions or other desired actions from the users; it must be interpreted along with other metrics such as the click-through rate, position, and impressions to find out whether your website is performing well.
Your website’s relevance to the user’s search query, its position in the search results, and its meta title and descriptions all affect the number of clicks. - Average CTR
Clickthrough rates (CTR) measure the percentage of users who clicked on your website in the search results. It is determined by using the formula:
CTR = (Clicks / Impressions) * 100
High CTR indicates that users find your website relevant and useful to their search queries. It also means that your website title and description are well-written and informative to warrant a click through to your website.
Note that there is no standard percentage of CTR that you need to reach. It all depends on the industry that you belong to, your website’s position in the search results, and the keywords you’re targeting. To improve your CTR, create compelling meta titles and descriptions that include relevant keywords in them. - Impressions
This metric refers to the number of times your website appeared in search results — whether they’re clicked on or not. This indicates that your content is visible to a large audience. However, this doesn’t mean that users are engaged with your website; it just presents an opportunity for your website’s content to be discovered.
To improve on this metric, you should use relevant, high-ranking keywords in your content, write compelling meta titles and descriptions, make sure your website is mobile-friendly, and produce fresh content regularly. - Average position
This refers to the average ranking of your website’s URL for every search query. It provides a summary of how your website usually ranks in comparison to other search results. For example, if your website’s URL ranked third for one query and seventh for another, the average position will be 5 (3+7)/2).
You must note that this is not a permanent position of your website’s URL. To improve or maintain its ranking, you must use high-ranking and relevant keywords every time you produce high-quality content, make your website mobile-friendly, and build backlinks to your website from reputable sites.
Indexing
Indexing means that Google’s spider bots will crawl your website and store it in its index. Once that happens, search engines, like Google, can display your website URL in its web search results whenever there’s a relevant search query.
The indexing tab of Search Console shows the indexed pages of your website on Google. For the pages that aren’t, it indicates what errors were encountered during the indexing process. On top of that, Google also lists reasons for your pages that don’t get indexed and what to do to fix it. Lastly, if a website page is not indexed, you can use the tool to submit a request so that Google will crawl your website.
Experience Report
This refers to the overall experience of users on your website. This includes various factors such as mobile usability (if your website has a mobile-friendly design), core web vitals (page loading speed, responsiveness, and stability), and interstitials (intrusive pop-up ads that interrupt user experience).
URL Inspection
The URL inspection tool gives you information about what an indexed page looks like. It also comes with important information on your website page’s indexing status, crawl errors, and possible issues affecting indexing. In addition to these things, the URL inspection tool provides these benefits:
- Canonicalization: Canonicalization is the process of specifying the URL to show in search results when multiple versions exist. This is crucial so that Google uses only one content version to show in search results to prevent confusion and a drop in search engine rankings.
- Request indexing for a website URL: If a page is not indexed, you can request to index so that Google can crawl the page.
- Structured data: Structured data refers to providing additional information to search engines so they can understand your website content better. There are various tools you can use for this, such as Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper, Schema.org, and JSON-LD. If the structured data is valid, it results in improved SEO, your website content featured in search results’ rich results, and enhanced user experience.
Enhancements
This section handles the structured data. Under this tab, you’ll see a variety of rich results (breadcrumbs, FAQs, how-tos, products, videos, etc.). In these structured data tabs, you’ll find the errors or warnings about the URLs in your website. Use this information to troubleshoot issues and make the necessary adjustments.
Sitemaps
A sitemap is a file that contains a list of URLs on your website. It tells search engines to crawl and index your pages so that they would appear on search results. Under the Sitemaps section in Search Console is where you can submit and manage your website’s sitemaps. You can use this section to:
- Submit sitemaps
- Check your sitemap’s status
- See indexing information
- Check sitemap errors
- Remove sitemaps
Shopping
You’ll have a Shopping tab in Search Console if you are recognized by Google as an online merchant. Through this, you can get insights and information about your product’s performance. Depending on what kind of structured data Google recognizes from your website, you can see one or more of the following segments:
- Product snippets
- Merchant listings
- Shopping tab listings
Links Report
Here, you can see how many external links are pointing to your website. Below is the information you can find for external and internal links:
External links:
- Highest linked pages (Pages on your website that are most linked to)
- Highest linking sites for a particular page
- Highest linking websites (Websites that link to you the most)
- Highest linking text (Most used text in links to your site)
- Backlinks from a given site to a particular page
Internal links:
- Which pages link to a particular page
- Highest linked pages from within your own website
Security Issues
This section shows you if Google found any security issues on your site, such as hacked content, malware, or phishing. It also gives details on how to fix the issue.
Manual Actions Report
A penalty is imposed for violating the webmaster quality guidelines. The Manual Actions section shows the penalties that have been imposed by Google on your website. Here are some of the reasons why manual actions get enabled on your Google Search Console:
- Unnatural links to and from your website
- Hidden text
- Keyword stuffing
- Cloaking and sneaky redirects
- Duplicate content
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