How To Use Google Search Console?

Everybody who has a website can use the Search Console service from Google to learn how they are doing on Google Search and what they can do to increase their visibility on a search to drive more relevant traffic to their websites. Data on Google's website indexing, serving, and crawling processes are available through Search Console. The performance of Search may be monitored and improved with the support of this. You don't have to sign in to the tool every day. You'll get a message from Search Console warning you if Google discovers any new problems with your website. To ensure the data is stable, you may want to verify your account once a month or whenever you make changes to the site's content.

The benefits of using Google Search Console

You can quickly monitor the effectiveness of your website using Google Search Console. Your Google Search Console account can provide you with useful information, allowing you to identify the areas of your website that want improvement. A technical aspect of your website, such as an increase in crawl problems that need to be resolved, maybe the cause of this. Also, if the ranks or impressions are dropping, this may draw additional attention to a certain keyword.

In addition to viewing this information, you will receive email alerts whenever Google Search Console discovers new issues. These warnings make you aware of problems you need to address right away. Anybody who has a website should therefore understand how to use it.

Sections of the Search Console

There are various sections in Search Console, and as Google introduces further, they continue to grow:

• URL Analysis: You may learn more about certain URLs and how Google views and indexes them by using the URL Inspection tool. Also, you may determine if the page qualifies for rich results.
• Effectiveness: You can find out how your site is performing in the standard search results, on Discover, and Google News, if your site qualifies for those, under the Performance area.
• Indexing: you can find all the information you need to understand how Google finds and indexes your pages in the Indexing section.
• Discover: The Page Experience, Core Web Vitals, and mobile usability metrics in the Experience section provide you with an insight into how Google values your page's functionality.
• Shopping: Whether you run an online store or sell anything else, you can learn more about how Google views your products on the Shopping tab.
• Optimization: All of the structured data that Google discovered on your website is listed in the Optimizations area, along with a note about whether or not it qualifies for rich outcomes.
• Safety & Manual Procedures: The Security & Manual Actions page shouldn't be frequently visited because it contains a list of security flaws that Google has discovered or whenever it takes manual action against your website.
• Links: The internal and external links on your site are listed in the Links section.

Creating an account

To use Google Search Console, you must first establish an account. You can click "create a new property" in the top bar of Google Search Console:

By selecting the "Add property" button, you may add the website you desire. On selecting the new Domain option all that is required is the domain name itself no www or subdomains. Anything linked to that domain is tracked by this setting. If you choose the "old" URL prefix option, you must enter the right URL, either with or without the "www," and with "HTTPS" your website is HTTPS. It's crucial to include the correct version to gather accurate data.

Enhance Yoast SEO

Get the verification code using the "HTML tag" technique from the Ownership settings in Search Console for WordPress users who use Yoast SEO. The lengthy string of characters should be copied.

This code is simple to copy and paste into the Google field in the Yoast SEO plugin's settings under the "Site connections" tab:

You can go back to Google Search Console after saving this and click the "Verify" button to confirm. If everything goes according to plan, GSC will begin gathering data for your website and you'll receive a success message.

Google Search Console functionalities

What would be the next move once your account has been created? So let's look at some of your data now! In the remaining sections of this essay, we'll examine some of the reports and data provided.

Procedure Tab

You can view the pages and keywords your website ranks for in Google under the Performance tab. Reports on the effectiveness of your material can also be found on Google News and Google Discover if you're qualified for those services. Not that long ago, you could only see the data going back 90 days, but today, you can access the data going as far back as 16 months.

Always being the method for attaining will make it easy to rapidly identify which keywords or pages require additional improvement. Where do I start, then? You can view a list of "queries," "pages," "countries," or "devices" under the performance tab. You may monitor how well your rich results are doing in searches using "search appearance." Each component can be sorted based on the quantity of "clicks," "impressions," "average CTR," or "average position."

1. Click: How frequently people clicked on your website in Google's search results is indicated by the number of clicks. If only a small amount of people click on your result, your result could not stand out in the search results, which can reveal something about how well your page titles and Meta descriptions are performing. Seeing the results that are presented around you can be useful for figuring out how to make your snippet more effective. The quantity of clicks is also influenced by the position of the search result. Your page will inevitably receive more clicks if it comes in the top three results on Google's first result page than a page that appears on the second page of search results.

2. Number of Views: The number of views reveals how frequently a particular page or your website appears in the search results. How frequently Google displays our website for a certain keyword in its search engine results is indicated by the number of views following that keyword. The page that ranks for that keyword is still a mystery to you. Next, you may click the "Pages" tab to see which pages are listed for this keyword. Do you want those pages to rank for that keyword? If not, you may need to optimize the page for search engine results. Consider improving the page's content to include the keyword, including internal links from related pages or posts, enhancing page speed, etc.

3. Standard CTR: You may find out how many of the searchers who saw your website in the results went through to visit it by looking at your CTR, or click-through rate. Very likely, you are aware that better ranks generally result in increased click-through rates. To improve the CTR, you can also take action on your own. For instance, you may improve the appeal of your page title and Meta description. More visitors are likely to click on your result and your CTR will rise if your site's title and description stand out from the other results. Keep in mind that if you're not currently ranking on the top page, this won't have a big effect on you. To raise your ranking, you might need to do other things first.

4. Average position: The "Average position" is the last item on this list. This information provides the typical position for a certain term or page throughout the given time frame. In the course, given that more and more people seem to receive varying search results, this assertion isn't necessarily valid. Google appears to be getting better at knowing which results are most appropriate for each visitor. This metric nevertheless reveals the explaining ability of clicks, impressions, and average CTR.

Indexing

A more technical but valuable component 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 issues as well as alerts that prevented Google from properly indexing your sites. In addition to gathering your ordinary pages and video pages, Google divided this section into divisions and provided a home for your XML sitemap and the deletions sections.

If Google is crawling your website, the index report will let you know. It will also let you know if any issues are preventing your pages from being indexed. When you open the report, a straightforward chart showing variations in the number of indexed pages will be shown (in the last 90 days).

To observe what issues and cautions are displayed on your website, advise you to frequently check the tab. Also receive notifications when Google discovers new mistakes, though. When you receive such a message, kindly double-check the error. If a redirect doesn't appear to be working properly or Google discovers faulty code or error pages in your theme, for example, you can discover that problems are the result. Google provides a comprehensive list of potential causes for why pages aren't indexed as well as solutions. By selecting one of the problems, you may learn more about the error and see which particular URLs are impacted. Once the problem has been resolved, you can designate the URL as fixed so that Google will test it once more:

Each status is represented by one of four colors:

• Red: Error 
• Yellow: Valid with caution
• Green: Fully acceptable
• Grey: Excluded

Therefore, since errors are the greatest hurdle to your material being indexed, you should address them first.

Reporting on Experience

You may get information on the user experience of your website's visitors in the Experience report. Google looks at experience metrics for certain URLs on your website in this report and utilizes them as performance cues for URLs in search results.

Google bases its decisions on these standards:

• Core Web Vitals: Evaluate the accessibility, reliability, as well as performance of your website. You may receive a Good, Needs Improvement, or Bad ranking.
• Mobile Usability: The mobile URL cannot have any mistakes that affect mobile usability to score for a "Good" status on mobile devices.
• HTTPS Usage: For a page to rank as "Good" in Google search, it must be delivered via HTTPS.

Report on Security Problems

The Security Problems report displays any data that could indicate your website has been hacked or if it is functioning in a way that might be dangerous to a visitor. Google uses the phrase "behaving suspiciously" to describe phishing scams and the placement of malware on website visitors' computers. There will often be a warning label in the search results or a warning page when people try to enter your page if it has security issues.

Security concerns can be divided into three groups:

• Material on your website that was posted without your consent is referred to as "hacked content."
• Software designed to damage a visitor's device is known as malware or unwanted software.
• Hazardous content that could lead visitors to take a harmful action is known as social engineering (e.g. revealing personal information).

Manual Actions 

Whether there have been any manual measures taken against your website is indicated by this report, called manual actions. Or, if any web pages violate Google's webmaster standard addition and are thus shadow-banned from search results. You will be alerted in the Search Console message center if a manual activity does affect one of your pages.

Report on Links

All of the links connecting to your website are included in the Links report. You should be aware that this analysis does not highlight links that affect where your website appears in search results. It exclusively concentrates on links that are detrimental to the SERP rank. The report has columns for both internal and external links.

There are three reports available for external links: Top Linked Pages, Top Linking Sites, and Top Linking Text.

There is just one report available for internal links: Top Connected Pages.

Each of these reports contains a link that can be clicked to access more findings. For example, by expanding the Top Connected Pages report, we may view the Top Target Pages.

Tips when using Google Search Console for SEO

After going through some of the fundamentals of Google Search Console, let's look at some advice from the SEOs we polled.

Here are some of the top Google Search Console SEO ideas that we learned from speaking with more than 100 marketers.

• Use Search Console to Find Keywords
• For specific questions, check your average position.
• Check for issues with website coverage
• Recognize Crawl Issues and Inaccessible Pages
• Website Page Optimization for Mobile Search
• Examine Your Backlinks
• Check for Penalties on Your Site
• Utilize the International Targeting Report to Give a Certain Country Priority in Search Results
• Evaluate desktop versus mobile traffic to avoid keyword cannibalization problems
• Examine the Canonical Domain Options.
• Adapt Meta Tags and Evaluate the Effect on CTR
• Track high CTR keywords and focus your optimization on them.
• Discover Explosive Topics
• Identify opportunities for internal linking
• Compare the results of your search to earlier times.
• Identify Which Pages Are Using Up Your Money for the Crawl
• Find Negative Keywords to Lower Your Bounce Rate
• Increase Google's knowledge of your website without using structured data
• Using RegEx, locate FAQs in Google Search Console

To sum up

In conclusion, Google Search Console emerges as an indispensable tool for website owners and SEO enthusiasts alike. It empowers users to gauge their performance in Google Search, offering invaluable insights into areas requiring enhancement. The various sections within the console, including URL Analysis, Effectiveness, Indexing, and more, furnish comprehensive data to improve a website's visibility and user experience. The tool also functions proactively, alerting users to potential issues, ensuring that your online presence remains optimal. By following the suggested tips and leveraging the console's capabilities, website owners can optimize their web presence, enhance search rankings, and ultimately, drive more relevant traffic to their websites. Understanding and utilizing Google Search Console is not just a recommendation; it's a vital component of managing a successful online presence.