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This is a universal and free tool that allows the owner (administrator) to analyze the performance of a website. Thanks to it you will learn a lot of useful information such as: check the indexation status of the site in the search engine, links leading to the site, check the effectiveness of the subpages and queries to which your site is visible, along with the click-through rate and CTR.
In this tutorial, we will show you how many features are waiting for you in the panel, how they can help you take care of the most traffic and conversions.
Table of Contents :
Google Search Console is even an invaluable support for webmasters, website and online store owners, bloggers or SEO specialists. It presents a lot of detailed analytical and technical data that allows you to optimize your site, which in turn will translate into the number of hits. Another advantage is that access to GSC is completely free. A simple login to the panel is enough to see dozens of interesting data. GSC analysis is also used when conducting an SEO audit of a website
Before you install Google Search Console, you need to add a site and verify it. This will confirm that you are its owner or another person who has the right to access the detailed data. Remember that GSC does not allow you to preview your competitors' sites. This is a unique space for authorized persons only.
Logging into the panel
You will use the link https://search.google.com/search-console to log in.
You can use two types of services:
Once you have selected the appropriate option, the verification process will take place:
If the Google Search Console account was created for the first time, verification may take up to a few days. Remember that as the site owner, you can grant access to other users. You'll do this in the Settings panel, under Users and Permissions. Those with full permissions can change settings, while limited permissions will only allow you to view reports.
What benefits will you get from linking the site?
Popular GSC will make you learn information topics:
Below we will discuss the basic functionality that you should know in order to check the status of your site in the search engine yourself and be able to diagnose potential problems. Each time you update, optimize a page to be visible in search results, it must be visited again by Google's robot. It is worth knowing the functions that will allow you to report the updated sub-page again for checking.
See also the simple and easy Google Analytics guide and find out who your customers are. Where are they coming to your site from and which pages rank best in the search engine.
Google Search Console is a platform that will allow you to determine the quality of your site. Under this term there are many analytical nuances that are collected from metrics and clicks. Among the most important parameters are:
Total number of clicks (1) determines how many people clicked on a search engine link that leads to your site in a given time.
Total number of impressions (2) is the number of search results that drive traffic to your site and showed up to Internet users using Google's search engine.
Click-through rate (CTR) (3) is the ratio of the number of impressions to the number of clicks on the link, expressed as a percentage.
Average position (4) determines the average place in Google search obtained for a given query. However, if several results are obtained for a single domain, the highest one counts.
While numbers are a very important indicator, even more details will be presented by the dimensions, or elements, that these numbers relate to (5). Clicking on the individual bars gives us specific information about the site like:
That is, how to add a website to Google?
This very simple to use, yet extremely useful tool checks how Google's robot sees your site. You only need to enter the URL (1) to find out if you are sure the robot is able to access all the information and, most importantly, if the site is on Google.
In case everything is fine we will get a confirmation that the address can display in search results. The result of the check will be marked with a green color (as in the following screenshot).
After submitting the page, we get several reports on the reported URL, i.e:
Status (2), you will find details about the indexing of the site. This report is divided into different sections:
Improvements (3) is a report that presents information on optimizing the site for mobile devices, and title enhancements in the form of navigation menus, products, opinion pieces, and search boxes included in links to subpages.
Checking the URL of the active version (4) allows you to check the elements associated with visiting the current version of a particular subpage.
The idea is to respond quickly to any problems with indexing or the correctness of reading the page. Remember, if your site is not indexed, you can submit it for indexing.
When to report a sub-page and when to report a whole domain?
You can submit for indexation single URLs as well as an entire domain by typing it in the field in the space : 'Check any URL in ....'.
Reporting a single address:
We use in situations where
Declaring the entire domain:
Makes sense in the case of:
The error report indicates the problems the robots encountered while indexing the site.
If you add, check or update a page or subpages using 'check URL', Google may already return error messages at the check stage. Otherwise, it's a good idea to visit the 'Status' tab.
A big plus of adding a site to the GSC is that you can get email notifications in the form of messages when there are problems on the site. If you receive such a message, go immediately to this part of the GSC and check how the site status report looks.
After entering the status report, we see four tiles segregating the sub-pages accordingly, these are:
In the case of problems, each tile will specify the number of subpages having a certain set of problems.
Worth knowing:
The error report is one of the most helpful elements we mention in this Google Search Console tutorial. However, in order to get the most benefit from it, it's a good idea to look there on a regular basis. This will help you quickly react to errors and get your site under control.
See how to troubleshoot duplicate message user did not mark canonical page
In this section of the panel we can upload a site map and help the google robot find all the sub-pages of our site. This also has a positive effect on the speed of indexation.
Another extremely simple to use, yet indispensable element of Google Search Console is the report that shows the speed and quality of URLs, and this is about all indexed sub-pages.
The speed report is divided into two segments, two reports respectively checking the versions of the page for:
When we click on the 'open report' button on the right side of the section, we will go to a detailed site report with a dedicated view filtering sub-pages for (1) poor quality, (2) needing improvement, (3) dob, respectively:
After selecting a specific group of subpages, i.e.; clicking one of the three groups of subpages (kafe), we can go below to the listed group of errors that need to be corrected.
You can also verify technical and performance parameters manually through the PageSpeed Insights tool https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/.
Core Web Vitals or Core Web Metrics are information that describes the speed and quality of a website. Google's introduction of them will help to face the problem of website performance. The indicators in question are :
FCP and FID indicators
Google Search Console classifies subpages into specific groups based on the following indicators:
FCP - first loaded content. The elapsed time between the user's request to view the page and the appearance of the first of the items in the browser.
FID - first activity delay. The time elapsed between the first interaction on a page and the browser's response to the interaction.
Remember that page speed not only affects the intuitive user experience, but also translates into conversions.
Here in the panel you will find possible problems of your site on mobile devices. The principle of error checking is the same as for troubleshooting the speed and quality indicators of the site.
Google is not just robots. Employees of the Mountain View giant are responsible for looking for unregulated elements that go beyond Google's guidelines for webmasters. If something raises their concerns, they will impose a penalty of lowering the site's position in search results.
You can receive penalties for, among other things:
With advanced tools, you can detect links that are responsible for violations. The popular Ahrefs, for example, will serve you for this purpose, although this is only one of the many solutions available. Keep in mind that one misstep can mean a penalty that will result in a drop in impressions.
An extremely important issue is the analysis of inbound links to your site / so-called links /.
The value of the site in terms of offsite factors / off-site factors /.
It is the links, or links to your site from other sites, that are responsible for how Google will judge the value of your site based on this parameter. Note that more important is their quality than quantity, as well as where the link is placed and whether it contains a keyword. If valuable pages link to your site, the robots will rank it highly. Here are the elements you can analyze with the report:
External links
Most linked sites – you will find out which subpages have the most inbound links from other sites. In addition, you can check which domains the links to a particular subpage come from.
Websites with the most inbound links - here you will find a list of domains that link to your site.
Text with the most inbound links - here you will find the anchors of the texts that appear most often in inbound links.
Internal links
Most linked sites – Pages grouped based on most frequently linked internally.
Link profile analysis. Is Search Console enough?
Keep in mind, however, that Google Search Console presents link information in a rather limited way. In addition, there may be discrepancies between GSC and paid tools. However, the free solution can be very useful for owners of smaller sites. On the other hand, online stores and owners of fast-growing sites should bet on, for example, site analysis programs such as: ahref.com, majesticseo.com, semrush.com.
Summary of our guide
With Google Search Console, you can take control of your own website. All you need to do is familiarize yourself with all the necessary reports and react to any errors in real time. It is also crucial to understand the site map and the basics, which you will find in the section related to site effectiveness.
Even a novice user should be able to handle GSC without too much trouble. Keep in mind that monitoring the reports will allow you to enjoy a fast and flawless website, which in turn will increase conversions. In our Google Search Console tutorial, we have only covered the basics, as the tool discussed is extremely rich. We will definitely come back to the details!
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