A Complete Google Search Console Guide

Introduction

Welcome to the world of search engine optimization. While Google Search Console is a powerful tool for much more than just SEO, it’s an indispensable resource for anyone who wants their website to rank highly on Google. It provides you with a treasure trove of information about how well your site performs from an SEO perspective—and that can help you make adjustments and improve in ways that will boost your rankings.

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a webmaster tool for monitoring and optimizing your website’s performance in Google Search results. The service helps you to diagnose issues, track changes and keep on top of any potential problems with your site’s visibility in Google Search.

Google Search Console is a free service provided by Google to help webmasters better understand their websites’ presence in Google Search results. The console provides consolidated reports about how well each site performs across search engines as well as other useful information about the way Google crawls pages on the site, including which pages were crawled, when they were last crawled.

Why should you use Google Search Console?

Google Search Console (GSC) is a free service provided by Google to help you track your website’s performance in Google’s search results.

You can use GSC to:

• See how many people visit your site and where they come from. Look at the number of pages you have indexed, or the number of visits to each page on your site. Also check out lists of top keywords that are driving traffic to your domain, as well as links and social shares for each page on your site.
• See what users are searching for when they come across one of your pages in the search results. Look at historical data on trends related to keywords, phrases, topics—and even competitors!
• Monitor how competitors are performing online with this information tool; compare rankings between websites easily with our comparison tool by simply entering any 2 domains for comparison purposes (e.g., www vs .com).

How to sign up for Google Search Console

On the left side of your browser, click on “Add a property”.

• You’ll be taken to a page that looks like this.
• On the next page, you’ll be asked to enter your website’s domain name. Type in your domain name and click “add”.

How to verify your site

To verify your website and create a listing, you’ll need to add one of the following tags to one of the following areas of your site:

• Meta tag (head section)
• Meta tag (body section)
• Meta tag (footer section)

To add the meta tag, use any code editor or text editor and open up your element in the HTML file that you want to add it too.

How to add a website or app

To add a new website or app, you’ll need the following:

• A valid Google Webmaster Tools account (if you don’t have one yet, sign up here)
• A website or an app that uses HTTPS protocol (e.g., https://www.example.com)

Dashboard overview

When you log in to Google Search Console, the first thing you’ll see is your Dashboard. This is where all of your reports, data and insights are organized into three sections: Overview, Traffic and Search Analytics.

• The Overview section provides an overview of information like search queries and impressions over time, as well as a summary view of site performance metrics.
• The Traffic section contains detailed information about user behavior on your site: how many people visit it each month; how much time they spend there; what pages they view most often; which keywords bring them back again and again…the list goes on! It also includes a report on Googlebot activity over the past 30 days (including crawl errors).
• And finally – but perhaps most importantly – there is a section dedicated entirely to Search Analytics. In here you’ll find data from both organic search results (i.e., those visible when someone searches for something) as well as paid ads (such as Adwords campaigns).

Performance report

The performance report shows you how your site appears in Google search results. It tells you the number of clicks and impressions your site gets from Google search results, as well as how many pages are indexed by Google.

Here’s what to look for:

• Total number of searches for a particular query (you can see this by clicking on “Search Queries”)
• Top Keywords (these might be keywords that are related to the content on your site, or they could simply be related to its name)
• Clicks (this is an indication of how many people clicked through from a search result to visit your website)

Index coverage report

The index coverage report shows the number of pages Google has indexed. It will show you:

• The total number of pages that have been indexed, including errors and those that haven’t been indexed. This is a great way to get an overview of your site’s SEO health and see what work needs to be done.
• A breakdown by all the possible causes for crawl errors—such as duplicate meta descriptions or redirects—so you can fix them one at a time if necessary instead of going after every single issue at once (and getting overwhelmed).
• The number of pages that have been crawled in the last 30 days, which will give you an idea about whether or not Google is continuing to find new content on your site on a regular basis.

AMP report

• AMP reports are only available for AMP-enabled domains.
• AMP reports show you how your AMP pages are doing. This includes the number of pages you have, and how many are indexed by Google.
• You need to enable AMP reports in order to see them. Go to Search Console > Crawl > Fetch as Google

Next, click the “AMP” button under “Format” on the left side of your fetch as Google results:

You can then select whichever view type you’d like (e.g., index status) and click “Fetch.”

Mobile usability report

The mobile usability report is a section of Google Search Console that provides insights into how users interact with your site on their phones. The report shows you how well you’re meeting their needs, and it uses two metrics to help you see what improvements can be made:

• Mobile Usability Score – A score between 0 and 100 that indicates how usable your site is for search users on a mobile device. This score takes into account things such as load time, page responsiveness (how fast pages respond to user interaction), content indexing, and crawl errors. A higher score indicates better performance on these factors and improved overall user experience.
• Mobile Usability Grade – An indicator showing whether or not your site meets basic criteria for good mobile usability (A+). It’s based on the same points used in calculating the above-mentioned Mobile Usability Score; however, this grade does not have any numeric value associated with it because sites can only receive an A+ if they perform well across all areas evaluated by Google’s algorithm for determining its assessment of overall quality of content available online

Google Search Console is an essential tool for improving your search rankings.

Google Search Console is a free tool that helps you monitor and improve your search performance. It helps you track your site’s performance in search results, including clicks on your site from Google, impressions and click through rates for specific queries, navigation details about how users find your pages and more.

Google Search Console also has tools for diagnosing problems with crawling, indexing or ranking issues. You can see the status of each of your pages as well as errors that may be impacting how they appear in search results. With this information, you’ll be able to quickly identify areas where improvements should be made to ensure better visibility in Google Search results on both desktop and mobile devices — which are growing at an incredible rate!

Conclusion

Google Search Console is an essential tool for improving your search rankings. In this guide, we have explained everything you need to know about this tool, including how to use it and how it can help improve your ranking. If you want higher rankings on Google then you should definitely try out this tool today!