Google search console provides data necessary to monitor website performance in search and improve search rankings, information that is exclusively available through Search Console. This makes it indispensable for online business and publishers that are keen to maximize success. Taking control of your search presence is easier to do when using the free tools and reports
What Is Google Search Console?
Google Search Console is a free web service hosted by Google that provides a way for publishers and search marketing professionals to monitor their overall site health and performance relative to Google search. It offers an overview of metrics related to search performance and user experience to help publishers improve their sites and generate more traffic.
Search Console also provides a way for Google to communicate when it discovers security issues (like hacking vulnerabilities) and if the search quality team has imposed a manual action penalty.
Important features:
Monitor indexing and crawling.
Identify and fix errors.
Overview of search performance.
Request indexing of updated pages.
Review internal and external links.
Verify Ownership
The first step to using Search Console is to verify site ownership. Google provides several different ways to accomplish site verification, depending on if you’re verifying a website, a domain, a Google site, or a Blogger-hosted site. Domains registered with Google domains are automatically verified by adding them to Search Console.
Go to the Search Console and open the Property Selector dropdown that’s visible in the top left-hand corner on any Search Console page.
Enter the URL of the site then click the Continue button.
Upload the HTML file to the root of your website.
Root means https://example.com/. So, if the downloaded file is called verification.html, then the uploaded file should be located at https://example.com/verification.html.
Finish the verification process by clicking Verify back in the Search Console.
URL Inspection
The URL Inspection tool provides information about Google’s indexed version of a specific page, and also allows you to test whether a URL might be indexable. Information includes details about structured data, video, linked AMP, and indexing/indexability.
There can be many reasons why a page hasn’t been indexed. URL Inspection can help troubleshoot some of them.
Search Results – This shows important metrics about how your site performs in Google Search results.
For example, See how your search traffic changes over time, where it’s coming from, and what search queries are most likely to show your site. Learn which queries are made on mobile devices, and use this to improve your mobile targeting. See which pages have the highest (and lowest) click-through rate from Google search results.
Discover – Shows important metrics about how your site performs on Discover. This report is visible only if your property has reached a minimum threshold of impressions in Discover.
Impression: Only one impression is counted per result per session; if a user scrolls past an item and then scrolls back, only one impression is recorded.
Click: The user clicked the Discover item. A click is not counted if the user shares the item, or performs any another action.
Pages – See which pages Google has found on your site, which pages have been indexed, and any indexing problems encountered.
Video Pages – The video indexing report shows how many indexed pages on your site contain one or more videos, and on how many of those pages a video could be indexed. Indexed videos can appear in Google search results. This report does not show a count of unique videos on your site.
Sitemaps – Use the Sitemaps report to tell Google about any new sitemaps for your property, to see your sitemap submission history, and to see any errors that Google encountered when parsing your submitted sitemaps. A sitemap is a file on your site that tells Google which pages on your site we should know about.
Removals – The Removals tool enables you to temporarily block pages from Google Search results on sites that you own, see a history of removal requests from both property owners and non-owners, and also to see any URLs on your site that were reported as containing adult content.
Page Experience – The Page Experience report provides a summary of the user experience of visitors to your site. Google evaluates page experience metrics for individual URLs on your site and will use them as a ranking signal for a URL in Google Search results. Learn more about page experience on Google.
Core Web Vitals – The Core Web Vitals report shows how your pages perform, based on real world usage data (sometimes called field data).
Mobile Usability – The Mobile Usability report shows which pages in your property have usability problems when viewed on mobile devices.
The top level view shows all pages with more than a threshold level of mobile usability issues. Click a specific issue to see issue details, including a sample list of pages affected by that issue, information about how to fix it, and a process to notify Google about your fixes.
Mobile Friendly Test
Breadcrumbs – A breadcrumb trail on a page indicates the page’s position in the site hierarchy, and it may help users understand and explore a site effectively. A user can navigate all the way up in the site hierarchy, one level at a time, by starting from the last breadcrumb in the breadcrumb trail.
Sitelinks Searchbox – A sitelinks search box is a quick way for people to search your site or app immediately on the search results page. The search box implements real-time suggestions and other features.
Unparsable Structured Data – This report lists structured data found on your site that could not be parsed because of a serious syntax error. The intended type of structured data (Job, Event, and so on) could not be determined because of the parsing error.
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Google Search Console - Basics - Visit Palm Springs
