Table of Contents
What is Google Search Console?
Google’s Search Console is an accumulation of tools. These tools are perfect for the webmasters, web marketers, website owners, and SEO experts to monitor the performance of website in the search index of Google. The functionality includes search traffic, crawl data, technical status updates, search appearance, index coverage, AMP status, and Job posting reports, and various additional resources like educational. Formerly Google Search Console was famed as Google Webmaster Central and then it was re-names as Google Webmaster Tools until it took its current name in 2015.
Google search console will let you do and know the following:
- Shows which websites link to your website
- Control crawling and indexing of the website
- A lot of options for Technical SEO
- See how the search engine is indexing a website
- Compare the website’s performance across different countries
- Find broken links to the website
- Identify ranking increases and decreases
- Troubleshoot issues for mobile usability, AMP, and other search features
- Identify your highest-traffic queries
- Submit your website to Google search
- Learn how many of your pages have been indexed
- Fix indexing problems and request re-indexing of new or updated content
Google search console acts as a communication channel between a website and Google. If anything is wrong with the website like a situation where Google is unable to crawl it, or someone files a DMCA complaint, only via Google search console, you will get to know this.
How Important Is Google’s PageSpeed Insights For Your Website?
How to add a website to Google Search Console?
Step 1. Sign into your Google account and ensure that it is a business (not personal) account if it’s a business website.
Step 2. Go to Google Webmaster Tools and Click “Add a property.”
Step 3. Choose “Website” from the drop-down menu and enter the URL of your site and Click “Continue.”
Step 4. Verify you own your website via HTML tag, domain name provider, HTML file upload, GA tracking code, or GTM container snippet.
Step 5. In case the website supports both http:// and https://, add both of them.
Step 6. Google starts tracking data as soon as you add it to GSC. The best part is you will be the owner before it’s verified.
Before you begin:
- If either of the passwords site-wide or page password are enabled, remove them as they Google from indexing your content.
- If you own have third-party domain, make sure it’s connected properly.
- Wait for 72 hours when you are connecting to the domain before verifying it with Google Search Console.
- Be aware that verification won’t work on trial sites with Google Search Console as they are hidden from search engines. If the website is on trial, publish the site before starting.
- A Google account is needed to sign up for the tool.
- Visit adding keywords for SEO to add keywords to your site.
How to make most out of Google Search Console?
Google Search Console is a powerful free tool, unfortunately, most of the businesses don’t know how to effectively use its full power to increase website traffic. So, here are tricks to maximize our use of this tool’s powerhouse.
1. Add a Search Console Property: Google Search Console must be used after adding something to track. Click on the “Add a property” button and type in the name of the property and click the Add button.
2. Find out what keywords your site/content ranks for: Google Search Console’s report of performance comprises many of the primary pieces of data which you’ll need to rely on for the SEO purposes. One of such elements is the keywords which the website and pages rank for, called “queries” within the tool.
3. Indicate a preferred domain: Indicate a preferred domain as it will indicate the Google whether you want your site listed as https://www or https:. Keep in mind that choosing one over the other is not going to give any kind of advantage in organic search.
4. Identify the most popular pages: We all know that every website have the pages that perform better in the search engines than others. The tool helps to determine which of the web pages is bringing the most people to your website. You are able to know the most popular pages in the same section.
5. Submit a Sitemap: If you aren’t sure if you have a sitemap, first head to example.com/sitemap.xml. And, you don’t find anything there, you don’t have one. Now that, you need to have a sitemap what will you submit to Search Console.
Below mentioned are some sitemap generation best practices:
- Generate multiple sitemaps if you have more than 50,000 URLs
- File size: Less than 50 MB
- Only include canonical URLs
- Exclude URLs you’ve disallowed with robots.txt
- Common CMS (Content Management Systems) like WordPress and Drupal have plugins that help you generate sitemaps.
Search Console is helpful for?
Now that we have discussed what search console can do and what it is. Let’s look into for whom the search console is useful for. The answer to this query is, anybody with a website! Be it a generalist or a specialist, from a new one to the advanced, Search Console will definitely help you.
1. Business owners: If you are a business owner and not using the Search Console yourself, you must be at least aware of it. You should become well-known with the fundamentals to optimize your website.
2. SEO specialists: Being a person who is centered on marketing online, this tool will not only help you to monitor your website traffic, but also optimize the rankings, and make advised decisions.
3. Site administrators: Healthy operation of your site is important for you as a site admin. Search Console enables you to easily monitor and in few situations resolving server errors, security issues and site load issues.
4. Web developers: For the developers who are making the original markup and/or code for the website, Search Console helps you to monitor and resolve the common issues.
