Google Search Console Guide: How to use It for SEO?

What is Google Search Console?

As one of the top search engines around, Google is who you should be looking to impress when it comes to your SEO. Luckily for us, Google has many different tools that can be used to measure metrics and make adjustments when it comes to on-page, off-page and technical SEO elements that the search engine monitors, ensuring that you are able to optimise your content specifically so that it is in line with what Google wants to see! One of the most useful tools that Google offers is Google Search Console! So what is Google Search Console used for and how can it help you? Google Search Console is a tool that is able to measure the effectiveness of your content and measure how Google is ranking your webpage. This kind of information is vital when it comes to SEO, as having information about your ranking and the effects that changes have on your website can help you to better plan and structure your website to be more in line with what Google, and your users, are wanting to see! With insight into what Google crawlers are indexing your page and the elements that they are measuring, you can be sure that you are equipped with all the information you would need to optimise your webpage and increase your rankings on search engine results pages! If you are concerned with SEO and are hoping to improve the amount of organic traffic making its way to your website from Google, Google Search Console is one of the best tools to use. 

What Does Google Search Console Do?

Now that you have a better idea of what this tool is, it is important to understand what is Google Search Console used for and how it can improve your websites overall performance. Google Search Console provides information about your website that can help you to improve your SEO and increase rankings on search engine results pages. This free tool monitors metrics and allows you insight into how search engine crawlers work and the different aspects of your page that they measure and use to rank your webpage. You are also able to add users to Google Search Console, ensuring that your account can be monitored by your entire team. While you cannot make direct changes to your website through Google Search Console, you can submit pages to the tool and see how your content is doing and whether there are any issues with it! From keyword research to measuring organic traffic, this tool is capable of a ton of different things, and mastering it will help you improve the quality and health of your webpage, while also ensuring that you rank as highly as possible on search engine results pages! 

Is Google Search Console Free For Users?

Since Google Search Console is a tool provided by Google itself, it is entirely free to use! This free tool offers a great way for marketers, business owners, bloggers and anyone who runs a website to know the ins and outs of SEO! Many smaller brands and businesses, and those who are just starting out, would benefit from this tool as the free software ensures that you are able to gain insight into how Google ranks websites and understand the elements that this search engine will look at when ranking your webpage. Many other tools often cost a ton of money, meaning that smaller businesses are often not equipped with the information they need to succeed. Understanding all the best ways to use the Google Search Console tool to your advantage will help better equip your website with all it needs to succeed and help you to better market to your own audience! 

What are The Features of Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a tool that has many unique features, all of which are designed to help improve your ranking and overall SEO effectiveness. Understanding the best features that this tool offers and knowing how to use them correctly will help you to better equip your site with all that it needs to succeed. The following are just a few of the most used and most useful kinds of features offered on Google Search Console! 

URL Inspection

One of the most useful features on Google Search Console is the URL inspection tool. This handy feature will allow you to enter in a URL from your domain and it will report back to you about certain elements and whether or not they are optimised to their full capacity. The console will report back its findings, letting you know what is helping to improve your SEO and the health of the website and what is seen to be causing issues. The live testing feature also offers you the chance to update Google directly on the changes and updates that are made through using this information, ensuring that the page is indexed again by search engine crawlers! The URL inspection tool is especially handy for those who are looking to update an old or out of date page and offers insights into what is going wrong and how these issues can be rectified! 

Enhancement Tabs

Rich results and additional spots on search engine results pages can help you to increase the organic traffic that makes its way to your webpage. In order to ensure that you have done all that you need to to get yourself the best shot at ranking on rich results, Google Search Console has created enhancement tabs. These tabs appear on Google Search Console as you implement structured data that will help you appear on rich results. By using the clearly laid out graph, you can manage your rich results, giving you the best chance of appearing on them! 

Sitemaps

Google Search Console allows for you to submit a sitemap of all of your URLs that you want to appear on your website. Sitemaps help search engines to better understand the structure of your website, letting Google know which of the pages on your website are the most important. Google Search Console will provide you with the index and the date that a specific sitemap has been uploaded, ensuring you are kept up to date with the latest ranking data. 

Links

Links are extremely important when it comes to your SEO and Google Search Console provides you with information on both your internal and external links. Internal links refer to the links that join your web pages together, and having them well-structured and functioning optimally is imperative to receiving a good rank on results pages.Google Search Console internal links are important to monitor as they are how users, and search engines, are able to make their way through your website. External links, or backlinks, refer to links that are leading from another website to your own, with dofollow links passing on the authority that a webpage holds. To ensure that all of your links are working well and that your backlinks are coming from reputable websites, the Google Search Console ensures that you are kept up to date with each link and can monitor as new backlinks are added. 

Mobile Usability

As users become more prone to using the internet on their mobile devices, it is important that you ensure that your website is able to correctly display your content on these smaller devices. Optimising your content so that it is mobile-friendly and gaining information on how many of your users are accessing your website on mobile devices can help you to ensure that you are optimising your content for the type of device that is used most often, and are looking to secure the best structure for the types of users who most often visit and use your website. 

Manual Actions

Being aware of the issues that users are having with your website will ensure that you are made aware of any updates or changes that need to be made to different features on your website. Manual actions are when a person from Google looks through your website and notes that something on your website is not following Google’s strict quality guidelines. When running a manual actions check, if everything is alright with your website you will be notified that no issues were detected, but if something is wrong Google Search Console will let you know. dealing with these issues quickly will ensure that your overall SEO is not affected by the issue, so be sure to resolve any problems that are found immediately. 

Performance Tab

The performance tab is there to let you know how much organic traffic your website is receiving by measuring clicks, positioning and impressions that your page is receiving. Having this data on hand will allow you to monitor the effectiveness of the content you are placing on your website and it will offer insight into which pages are more preferred by your users. This information can then be used to better your marketing strategy! This is one of the most commonly used features on Google Search Console and using it can be very beneficial to improving SEO! 

What Are The Relationships Between Google Search Console and SEO?

Google Search Console can help brands and businesses improve their overall SEO and ensure that the health of their website is in top form. When it comes to SEO, Google Search Console has a number of amazing features that can help keep you up to date with your position on search engine results pages while helping you to better the content on your webpage. Understanding the metrics that support your site and looking for ways that they can be optimised to enhance performance is vital to the increase of your ranking on search engine results pages and the overall health of your SEO! 

What are The Effects of Google Search Console On Your SEO Strategy?

Google Search Console can help improve your SEO strategy with the information and data that it provides to you. With information about the amount of traffic, most visited pages and the types of devices that your users are most often using, you can be sure that the optimization tactics that you are using are specific to your target audience. This will not just help you to increase revenue and site traffic, but it will also ensure that your SEO improves and that search engines associate your website as one with high authority. Google Search Console is designed to provide you with information and data that you can use to monitor your metrics, helping improve the quality and effectiveness of your content and website. Completing a Google Search Console SEO audit will ensure that each of the SEO elements on your website is properly and accurately optimised to enhance the user experience and your rankings on search engine results pages. Understanding how to use Google Search Console for SEO is extremely important for the overall functioning and health of your website. If you are a brand or business that is looking to improve the performance of your website, Google Search Console is a brilliant tool to use!

How To Add Your Website To Google Search Console?

When looking at how to use Google Search Console and the best features to use to optimise your webpage, it is important that you correctly set up each of the settings and different additions correctly. The following is a brief look at how to add your site to Google Search Console. 

1. Sign Into Your Google Account: When setting up your Google Search Console registration, you will need to be signed in to your Google account, this can be logged into by using your Gmail address and password. Logging in through your own account will ensure that your privacy is upheld and that no other person can access important information about your site unless you have given them permission through the tool. 
2. Go to Google Webmaster Tools: the next step in the process is finding the Google webmaster tools, which will help you to create your property and add your website to Google Search Console. 
3. Click “Add a property”: On one account you can monitor different websites and so it is important that the different sites you are registering for fall under the same account but are still differentiated. This is why Google Search Console has come up with what they have called properties. These different properties will lead to different websites through their URLs. 
4. Choose “Website” From The Drop-Down Menu And Enter The URL of Your Site: It is important that you ensure that the URL you are pasting into this menu is exactly correct and from your own website. Be sure to carefully analyse the URL before heading to the next step of the process. 
5. Pick a Way to Verify You Own Your Website: In order to be sure that you are the owner of the website being tracked through Google Search Console, it is important that you verify yourself as the owner of the website. There are different methods and ways that you can complete this verification process, but you should be sure that the documents you are uploading are correct!

How to Use Google Search Console?

With so many different features and additions to Google Search Console, it can be tricky knowing where to even begin. It is important that you understand the different features and tools on offer as this will ensure that you use each one to its full potential. The following are a few tips on how to properly set up and use the Google Search Console tool! 

Verify Site Ownership

In order to obtain all the data that Google collects about your website, you will need to verify that you are the owner of it and can receive this often sensitive information. This is to avoid anyone being able to access sensitive data about your website and ensures that while competitors can do research on your website, they will not be able to access all of the information that Google collects. With this ownership, you can give access to certain people, with only those being able to see your full site being the people who have been granted access to a portion of the information available. 

Make Sure Google Can Find And Read Your Pages

Ensuring that Google is able to access the web pages on your website is imperative to them being able to index and rank them. The index report will offer up information on the different web pages on your website, ensuring that you are aware of which pages the search engine is indexing and ranking on search engine results pages. Within this report, you are able to determine if there are any issues with the pages on your website and fix them before they impact your SEO! 

Review Mobile Usability Errors Google Found On Your Site

Ensuring that your website is mobile-friendly is an important part of SEO, and with Google Search Consoles mobile usability report, you will be able to see any issues that may occur when your users use your mobile platform. 

Consider Submitting a Sitemap To Search Console

The sitemap report helps Google to quickly recognise and index your page, and while this would happen without using this tool to submit your sitemap, it does speed up the process. A sitemap is extremely important and it gives Google an idea of which pages are the most important to index and lets search engines know the structure of your site. upload your  sitemap to Google Search Console to find out more information about it and the things you could do to improve it and the quality of your website. 

Monitor Your Site’s Performance

With the performance tab, you can easily keep up with the performance of your website and track the number of visits and clicks you are receiving. Monitoring these different trends can help you to understand what your audience is enjoying, helping you to better structure your content strategy! 

How Markethinkers Can Help You To Use Google Search Console?

As a marketing agency that is equipped with knowledge about SEO and how it impacts a website, Marjethinkers is able to help you find and master the perfect tools, helping you to set up your account and generate leads almost immediately! For those who are unsure of each of the elements and features that this handy SEO tool offers, having a team of professional SEO consulting and SEO copywriting experts to help you understand how to use each feature to its full potential will ensure that you are equipped with the knowledge to grow your SEO strategy. Along with providing insight into how you can use a tool like Google Search Console, our experts are also able to take over your SEO for you, and run the platform for you! With a highly expert team of Markethinkers on your team, you can be sure that your SEO is in the best possible hands!