When we speak to our clients, we realise that many of them have heard of the Google Search Console, but very few actually know what it is. So, as ever, we are here to help you understand.
Google Search Console is a fantastic free tool that helps website owners understand how their website is performing in Google Search results. The tool helps users monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot a website’s presence.
The Search Console is sometimes confused with Google Analytics (GA4). Although both provide valuable information and insights into your website, they are quite different. As mentioned, Google Search Console helps manage your website’s presence in Google, whereas GA4 helps you track, analyse and explore website traffic and user behaviour.
Likewise, where GA4 gathers data from an Analytics tracking code that is installed on your website, Google Search Console gets its data directly from Google Search.
So, read on to learn more about what the Google Search Console is used for, and the benefits that come with it.
Google Search Console Jargon –
Throughout this blog we will use certain terms several times, so to make it easier for you, here are what they mean:
- Impressions – When a link URL appears in a search result, this is an impression. The user doesn’t necessarily have to scroll down to see the result for the impression to register
- Clicks – When a user clicks the link that the search generates and takes them away from Google Search
- CTR – Click-through-rate is the percentage of clicks versus impressions. For example, if a link shows up in 100 searches and generates 50 clicks, the CTR would be 50%
- Crawling – This is the discovery process in which Google discovers new and updated content. The robots that discover content are known as ‘crawlers’
- Indexing – This refers to the process that Google takes when organising and storing content in its database
What is the Google Search Console Used For?
The Search Console can help your business’s website with a range of things, including:
- Monitoring overall website performance – This includes the number of impressions and clicks, most popular pages, best performing keywords, and devices and locations that your visitors use for accessing your site
- Sitemap submissions – If Google Search can’t find your page, or hasn’t indexed it, then it won’t be able to find it when conducting searches. You can use the Search Console to request indexing by submitting a sitemap to tell Google about your site and its important pages
- Technical Issues – Technical issues can have massively negative impacts on your website’s search results. Google Search Console can alert you if Google Search is facing any trouble crawling your website. This is invaluable for search visibility
- Backlinks – Backlinks are links from other websites back to your business, and they are great for boosting SEO. Google Search Console can identify how many you have, and if any of them are spam. (Spam or negative backlinks can have a negative impact on your SEO)
There are far more uses than this for Google Search Console, but we don’t want to overwhelm or get too technical.
Making use of this tool also comes with numerous benefits.
What are the Benefits of Google Search Console?
It’s one thing being aware of what the Google Search Console is used for, but it’s another using this information to benefit your digital strategy.
So, here are some of the areas that we find the tool most useful for:
Enhancing Organic Visibility –
As we know, organic visibility is how visible your website is in the organic search results. Analysing these results and where your pages rank organically is key to improving it.
By identifying crawl errors, checking backlink profiles, researching your average position for specific queries, seeing if your site has any penalties or optimising your page for mobile, the Search Console can help improve your site’s organic visibility.
There are dozens of other ways it can help this too. Its helpful, however, to use Google Search Console as part of your on-going daily monitoring. An occasional more in-depth look into the data is also recommended.
Top Performing Pages –
The top performing pages feature in Google Search Console is one of our favourites. By knowing which pages are performing best on your website you can create content based around this in order to attract more traffic.
Not only does it help know what users are enjoying, it also helps to realise what they are not!
Keywords –
For anybody that is a regular reader of this blog, you will know the importance of using well researched, accurate keywords.
Understanding keyword performance is essential.
The top queries tab in the Search Console allows you to sort keyword data by clicks, impressions and CTR, allowing real-time and precise insights into the keyword that are driving the most traffic.
Indexing & Crawling Insights
Search Console delivers detailed and up-to-date information about how Google crawls and indexes your website.
Services to make use of viewing the number of indexed pages, monitoring crawl errors, and identifying issues that could prevent Google from properly accessing your business’s website.
Mobile-Compatibility Testing
With over 60% of website traffic now coming from mobile devices, having a mobile-friendly website is crucial.
The Search Console provides a Mobile Usability report that presents any issues that could impact mobile users on your site.
Let The Professionals Help
As we can clearly see, regularly using Google Search Console brings numerous benefits to your website and is a great way to help you plan out content and make decisions on how to develop your business’s site.
We haven’t been able to include every single benefit here. Realistically, to get the most from Google Search Console, letting an agency such as us at WADEDIGITAL check the tool for you is going to give you the best insights possible.
If you would like to speak to us about Google Search Console, or anything else in this blog, please get in touch and we’ll be happy to assist.
