Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) is the most important tool there is for search engine optimization on Google, and it is the first place to look for where a site stands in the Google index. In this article we will teach you the tool you can use free of charge to optimize your own website, and how it serves your SEO work.
Search Console is without doubt the most important SEO tool, because it gives you definite feedback on how Google, the largest search engine there is, evaluates a page. We can see whether there are problems with indexing and which search terms are doing particularly well.
For this and many other reasons the tool is compulsory for any SEO specialist who does not want to fly blind on the internet.
What Is Search Console?
Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool that helps you monitor your site’s search performance and its technical SEO health.
It reports a range of metrics to site owners, from search appearance to user experience. Those reports can help you improve your site and take more traffic from Google.
More Clarity, Similar Functions
In essence Search Console is made up of these: performance, page indexing, sitemaps, experience reports (Core Web Vitals and HTTPS) and links.
Under “Performance” (formerly search analytics) a webmaster can see how often Google shows a page in search, what position it takes on average, total impressions, click through rate (CTR) and total clicks.
Performance is not only about search results: if your site produces data there, “Discover” and “Google News” tabs open up as well.
Under “Pages” (formerly “Index coverage”) you can find out whether a page can be indexed correctly, or see that pages are set to “noindex” and so will not be published to Google search.
If you see the message “New issue with index coverage on the website”, you have to act and check which pages are not indexed and for what reason.
1. Identify and Solve Indexing Problems
Look a little further down and you will find the pages that were not indexed, listed with the reasons. If one of them is a page you want in the index and it is not there, find the reason and fix it.
The information here lets you understand in detail how Google interprets a website.
Some of These Errors
- Alternate page with proper canonical tag
- Page with redirect
- Excluded by “noindex” tag
- Not found (404)
- Blocked due to another 4xx issue
- Server error (5xx)
- Duplicate without user selected canonical
- Crawled – currently not indexed
- Discovered – currently not indexed
- Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user
There is no rule that says every page has to be listed in Google search. In some cases setting those pages to noindex makes sense. As a principle: index only the pages you genuinely want found on Google.
2. Use Search Analysis for Search Engine Optimization
Search Console shows site operators all of their rankings on Google, including exact position, click through rates and impressions. That data is extremely important for finding out which content is already being found well and which is generating no clicks at all.
Here are step by step instructions for the search analysis:
1. You Get to All the General Data.
Click “Performance”, then “Search results”, pick the period you want to examine (one month, for instance) and turn on all the colored areas: clicks, impressions, click through rate and position. What we are showing here is www.turksem.com data.
2. Now You Can See a List of Every Keyword and Where It Sits on Google.
- Clicks: how often were the search snippets clicked?
- Impressions: how often did Google display the pages?
- CTR: how good is the click through rate?
- Position: what is the keyword’s average position in the Google index?
These figures on their own do not get you far. The exciting part is where the values are listed for the search terms people used to reach your site.
3. Now Ask Yourself These Questions:
- Which keywords do you already hold particularly good positions for on Google (1 to 5)?
- Which keywords show a particularly high search volume (impressions)?
- Which search terms matter most to my company for reaching new customers?
Those are the keywords and the pages that deserve special attention from you.
4. Now compare your click through rate against the average click through rates for that position.
Is your click through rate well below the average for that position? Then the meta content definitely has to be revised and optimized.
The title and the meta description in particular have a serious effect on click through rates. Watch which posts are placed ahead of yours as well, and compare their title and meta description with your own. Making your title more striking may be what serves you right now.
3. Update and Optimize Underperforming Pages, or Delete Them
- In the next step, sort by pages and analyze which pages took no clicks at all last month.
- Check whether those pages are still relevant to how things are today, and update them if they need it.
- Be sensible: if a page’s content is not interesting enough, deleting it usually gives you a better result. Expecting good rankings for unappealing, irrelevant content is a mistake. We went through this at length in how to update old pages and what to do with them.
4. Analyze the Search Terms People Used
To see which search terms were used to reach an article, follow these steps:
- Click “Performance”
- Select clicks, impressions, CTR and position so that they are highlighted in color.
- Choose the “New > Page” tab
- Enter the page whose keywords you want to see into the box. For instance, /seo
- Click “Apply”
- With “Date” you can analyze current trends (“period: last 7 days”) or see every search term used for the page (period: last 12 months) and sort them by impressions.
5. Submit Your Sitemaps
To make crawling easier for Google, you can submit a sitemap to Search Console listing all the URLs on a domain. Many content management systems offer the option of generating sitemap files automatically.
In the Türk SEM SEO tools you can check which sitemaps your site has and find the ones that are missing.
Error checking: if you are getting an error in your sitemap file, you can use the sitemap error checker.
6. Page Experience
This section sums up the real, field measured experience of your site: your Core Web Vitals figures and your HTTPS status. One warning: Google removed the mobile usability report and the mobile-friendly test tool from Search Console. Mobile friendliness did not stop mattering, it just moved out of here, and from now on you check it with Lighthouse or a measurement tool of your own.
7. Check Your Links
Under Links you can find out which pages get linked to most often and which anchor texts are used for them. You can use that information to improve your links or to remove suspicious link sources with the disavow tool.
Conclusion: Search Console Is Compulsory for Anyone Running a Website or Doing SEO
- Pages taking high numbers of clicks and impressions should be optimized continuously and designed consistently to be user friendly. They should be refreshed with new information and kept current.
- Pages that can be found in the top 10 positions on Google should be optimized further and checked in detail so that they represent the best search result for that term.
- Terms sitting between positions 10 and 20 have the best chance of moving into the top 10. Keep control of the work, and update and improve those articles consistently.
- The page experience screen should be checked regularly.
- Link sources and anchor texts should be checked at regular intervals so that the threat of negative SEO gets caught early.
With all of this in view, you can discover the pages worth making a move on to get to number 1 for the search terms that matter.
