What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console shows what's happening on Google

If you have a website and you want it ranked on Google, then you should definitely be using Google Search Console. Whereas Google Analytics shows you what is happening on your website, Search Console shows you how your website is performing on Google. Better still, not only does it show how your site is performing, but it also acts as your gateway with Google; so before we get into the reports etc you can get, let's discuss this important function.

Google Search Console as a Google gateway

When you decide to start digital marketing, one of the first steps you should take is to set up Google Search Console. This involves adding a verification script to your website to show that you have ownership of it. If you've already set up Google Analytics then you can generally use this tag to verify ownership, so no need for an additional tag. 

Once you've got a website, you can easily submit your website's sitemap. A sitemap is list of all the pages on your website that you want indexed and makes it very easy for Google to crawl your website to start indexing and ranking the pages. Whilst submitting a sitemap isn't critical for SEO, it definitely helps to get your website crawled and indexed.

Now your website is indexed on Google, Search Console will show you any issues or errors with it. These may be a page showing an error, a page with broken schema or even a page that isn't responsive for mobile devices. It will even show you pages that Google decided not to index and the general reason why. You can use these lists to fix these errors and ensure your website is displaying the best it can. Once you're happy with the page, you can even resubmit this with Google for indexing.

Googe Search Console Reports

Whilst there are quite a few different reports, let's just focus on a few of the key ones.

Performance on Search Results

This report shows what searches your website was shown for, how many searches there were, how many people clicked through to view your website and where it ranked for that search.

Page Experience

This report shows the percentage of pages on your site have a good page experience. Here it is looking at page responsiveness and load times.

Coverage

The last report we are going to look at is the coverage report. This is where Google shows you what pages are indexed, which ones have errors and which ones aren't indexed and why. A stated above, you should go through these and fix any errors and try re-submitting any pages that aren't indexed and are important (after fixing the reason why).

There is a lot more information you can get from Google Search Console, but these are the main reports you should at the very leats be paying attention to.

So if you're serious about Digital Marketing and you don't have Google Analytics and Search Console installed; you should have.