Google Search Console | Google

Description Google Search Console

Search Console is a free tool provided by Google to help webmasters monitor the health of their website in the index. This tool is essential for any business with an online presence. Using an SEO tool to track the performance of your website is an asset to rank better on Google. But using the one developed by Google itself for the same purpose is even more interesting. Google search Console is a must when you have a website you are investing money and time on. It is a complete monitoring tool that the search engine makes available to webmarketers so that they can position their website well in the SERPs. We will allow ourselves to describe in this brief description some essential features of Google Search Console. 

What does Google Search Console?

Google Search Console allows anyone with a website to see how their site is performing in Google results. To break it down, Search Console provides information on how Google indexes, crawls, and chooses which websites to show up in searches.  Not only does Google’s console allow you to view performance, but it can also help you fix any issues that are preventing your website from ranking high in search results. It’s important to note that you don’t need to use Search Console to appear in Google searches.  However, using this tool will give you a better understanding of how Google sees and ranks your business in searches.  This allows you to better optimize your website to make it more indexable by Google during a search. Indeed, here is what you can do with Google Search Console:

Using Google Search Console for Traffic

Obviously, if you have a website that you invest money and energy into, the most valuable resource for you in the Search Console would certainly report on the performance of your site.  This feature of the tool allows you to discover the organic performance of your website at any time. This helps in tracking important KPIs for the success and continued growth of the business. Here are a few things you can get details on:

• Clicks

This statistic reflects the number of clicks from Google search that brought people to your website. Unlike Google Analytics, these clicks do not represent user sessions. In Google Search Console, any process that starts with a click is considered a ‘click’, which is why the number of clicks you see in Search Console almost never matches the sessions you see in the page report. Analytics

• Impressions 

A simpler way to describe it is that impressions are the number of times your site appears in search results, even if there are no clicks. Your results aren’t counted as impressions if they appear on the next page of search results that the user didn’t click on.

• The click-through rate 

A click-through rate (CTR) is the ratio of clicks to impressions on a mobile advertising campaign. CTRs are calculated by taking the number of clicks, dividing it by the total number of impressions, and then expressing the resulting number as a percentage.

• The average position 

In Google Search Console, the average position corresponds to the ranking of your pages in relevant searches. For example, if you ranked second for one search but eighth for another, your average position would be fifth.

Using the Console for Technical Site Health

There is another valuable aspect of Search Console that is important for digital businesses to be aware of.  In addition to statistical data that can help inform your marketing strategies, Search Console is also designed to ensure that your site’s presence in Google is unhindered. Here Google offers a few reports that can help websites ensure that they are not penalized for breaking Google’s rules and that they are free of errors that can prevent them from appearing at the top the SERPs: 

• The Index Coverage

Report The Coverage Report allows site owners to see how well their site is covered in the Google index.  Obviously, this way they can monitor how well their site has been indexed to ensure that they are also visible for SEO. In fact, here you can see four status messages in total for your site:

• Error: This indicates that your site’s pages are not indexed and you can find out the reasons;
• Warning: This means that the page is indexed by Google, but has a problem that may need to be fixed;
• Excluded: This would mean that the page is not indexed, but usually for a legitimate reason or because Google thinks the website owner does not want the site indexed;
• Valid: This corresponds to healthy and indexed pages.

This feature allows businesses to have a sort of overview of their presence in Google search results.

• The Sitemaps Report The Sitemaps

section of Search Console is used to submit a list of pages on a site so that Googlebot can crawl them more easily and quickly. You can use the “Sitemaps” to notify Google of new sitemaps for your domain, see how often they are crawled, and see any errors Google has encountered while analyzing your submitted sitemaps. It also gives you information on the number of new URLs discovered by Google directly from your sitemap.

• URL Inspection Tool

You can also check the status and function of each individual URL on your site by testing them in Search Console’s URL Inspection Tool. Specifically, the tool allows users to ensure that their page is in the Google index, they can also request indexing here as well.  Additionally, they can view a rendered version of the pages, test it to ensure that Googlebot can read the pages, and view loaded resources.

•  Manual Actions Report The Manual Actions

Report can alert you if your site has been subject to a sanction manually instituted by a human Google reviewer. In this case, some pages or the entire site may not appear in search results.