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Google Search Console – What it Tells You

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Google Search Console (GSC) is a free and beneficial tool that you can use to monitor and gauge the performance of your website. Google Search Console, especially when paired with Google Analytics, can provide valuable insight regarding the status of your domain in Google’s search index. It can also help you find and fix any potential issues and errors. Let’s explore how to set up GSC, its features, and what those features can tell you about your website.

Why Use Search Console?

There are several reasons to use Google Search Console to monitor your website performance. Some good reasons to consider using the search console include the following:
  • First, confirm that Google is indexing your website and crawling correctly.
  • Receive notifications of any page index issues.
  • View site traffic
  • View backlinks

The Features of Google Search Console (GSC) and What Can They Tell You?

The following are all areas of GSC that you should always be keeping a close watch on:
  • Performance
  • Index Coverage
  • Sitemaps
  • Links
  • Mobile Usability
  • Manual Actions
Let’s break these down in more detail and explore just what types of insights you can derive from the information presented in GSC.

Performance Tab

The performance tab is probably the one you’ll spend the most time on. It shows you what keywords each of the pages for your site ranks for. This information can help you make better decisions about what portions of your website need attention. In addition, the performance tab is handy for helping to optimize the content, meta titles, and meta descriptions of the pages and posts on your site. This tab is further broken into sub-tabs that provide detailed information about different metrics used to rank your site on Google. The different sub-tabs of the performance tab are broken up into:
  • Impressions
  • Clicks
  • Click-Through Rate (CTR)
  • Average Position
Let’s talk about these sections in a little more detail.

Impressions

The impressions sub-tab tells you how often your site is shown in search results on Google based on the query keyword. To view the impressions of a specific keyword, click on the keyword you wish to explore. This will show you which pages are displayed in search results based on which keyword was used in the search engine query. Armed with this information, you can determine whether the pages ranking for a keyword are the ones you want ranking for that keyword.

Clicks

The clicks sub-tab is pretty self-explanatory. It displays the number of times a searcher clicked on a link to your website from a Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page). This information is most often used to help optimize your meta titles and meta descriptions. For example, suppose you’re not getting the number of clicks you expect. In that case, changing your meta titles and meta descriptions can improve the number of clicks you receive.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Your website’s Click Through Rate (CTR) tells you the percentage of people that saw your site in a Google SERP and clicked through to your website. Like your Clicks rating mentioned above, the CTR’s information is an excellent opportunity to optimize your pages’ meta titles and descriptions. The better your titles and descriptions, the more likely a searcher will click through to your site.

Average Position

The average position tab of GSC tells you the average ranking position of specific keywords on your website over the period you selected. However, the Average Position of your site is not always the most reliable metric that GSC tracks. This is because users continually get different search results for the same search queries. But, just because the actual position of your site is not easily determined through GSC, that doesn’t mean that your Average Position doesn’t provide any helpful information. For example, the Average Position metric can help you determine whether or not any sudden changes in CTR, clicks, and impressions are explainable.

Index Coverage Tab

This tab shows how many pages are in Google’s index since your most recent update. It also shows warnings and errors, causing Google to have difficulty indexing your website. Since this tab is primarily used to show you any potential errors with the pages on your site, you should check it often. The faster you discover errors on your site, the quicker you can correct them, which can help prevent Google from penalizing your site. You can even click on a specific page to see exactly what caused the error to happen in the first place.

Sitemaps Tab

The sitemaps tab on Google Search Console is where you can submit an XML sitemap so that Google knows what pages and posts you wish to be indexed. To add a sitemap to Google Search Console, you have to provide the location URL, and it does the rest. You can generate one in several ways if you don’t know your XML sitemap URL. The easiest way is to use the Yoast SEO plug-in on WordPress sites to generate your sitemap for you. You can always create your sitemap manually or use an online generator if you don’t use Yoast SEO. Once you have an XML document with your URLs, you can upload it to your website and then submit the URL to Google Search Console, as we described above.

Links Tab

The links tab in Google Search Console tells you a lot about your website’s different types of links. There are a few different sub-tabs of the link section on GSC. They are the External Links section and the Internal Links section. The External Links section shows how many links are pointed at your site from other websites on the internet. You can also see the anchor text those sites used to link to your site. The Internal Links section tells you which of your website pages link to other pages on your website. This information can help you devise a clever internal linking structure to drive your site visitors toward the content you want them to see.

Mobile Usability

The Mobile Usability tab of Google Search Console is another pretty self-explanatory one. This tab shows you how accessible your site is to mobile users. Mobile searches are quickly becoming the most common user agent for Google searches. So, we highly recommend keeping a close eye on this section. If your website is not well-optimized for mobile use, mobile visitors will quickly leave your site.

Manual Actions

This is the only tab on Google Search Console that you never want to see anything in. However, this section of the tool provides you with information that Google wants you to take care of immediately. If you don’t take care of these issues, you risk blacklisting your website. In addition to errors showing up in the Manual Actions section of Google Search Console, Google will also send you an email with the same information. The most common manual actions issued by Google are:
  • Too many rich snippets (spammy structured markup)
  • Spam
  • Hiding things from Google
  • You got hacked
  • You bought links or have otherwise unnatural links on your website
If you see Manual Actions listed in this section, you need to take care of them immediately. You do not want to be blacklisted from the world’s most popular and commonly used search engine!

How to Set Up GSC

Before you can benefit from the information Google Search Console can provide you, you will first have to sign up and set up an account. Once an account is created, you must click the ‘add a new property’ button to add your site. Once you click the button, a window will pop up that prompts you to insert the URL of the website. There are two separate ways in which Google Search Console can track the information on your site. One way is by using the Domain Name and DNS of your website to verify that you’re the owner. The other way is by using the exact match URL for your site. But be careful here. You will always want to ensure that the URL you enter is an EXACT match for your site. For example, if you have an HTTPS site, you must ensure that ‘HTTPS://’ is included in the URL you submit to Google Search Console. After you have submitted your URL, you will need to move on to the next step: verifying ownership.

How to Verify Ownership of Your Site in Google Search Console

After you have submitted your URL to GSC, you will need to prove to Google that you are the actual owner of the website. There are a few different ways to do this, but the most common and easiest way is to use the Yoast SEO plug-in on your WordPress site. To verify ownership of your site using this method, you will need to select the ‘HTML tag’ method in the window that popped up after submitting your URL to GSC. Copy the code that appears in the dropdown box and paste it into the ‘Webmaster tools’ tab in the Yoast SEO plug-in. You will find it on the Dashboard of your WordPress site. Another simple way to verify your website’s owner is to upload the Google Search Console HTML document provided in the same window. Then, follow the instructions from the ‘Learn more’ link provided in the same popup window that appeared when you submitted your URL. Make sure you stay connected to GSC while it verifies your site through this method.

Contact Contractor-Advertising for Help With Google Search Console

Now that you know a little more about Google Search Console, you can start using it to keep track of your website’s performance. And, if you have noticed that you’re not performing as well as you’d like on Google, you can always contact the SEO professionals here at Contractor Advertising for help getting your website to meet Google’s rigorous standards. So, please fill out the form below to enlist the help of our SEO experts today!