Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free web service provided by Google with the single intent of search engine optimization (SEO). It helps website owners monitor, optimize, and troubleshoot their website's presence in Google search results, by providing valuable insights of the website's performance to improve your search rankings.
Introduction to Google Search Console
There are times where we might be wondering why our website is not appearing online. The reason maybe because of the following. Search engines utilise three ways to make your website appear and become visible. The three steps are called crawling, indexing and ranking. Sometimes, the bots would ignore websites. Google Search Console is the free tool that gives you all relevant information to the actions taken by search bots to your webpage. By keeping track of these analytics, you will certainly be able to make your website visible.
Getting started
1. Connect domain: Add your URL to google search console through their HTML tag
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2. Verify your domain
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3. Adding users and owners: Owners have total control whereas users can only see the data, so add people accordingly!
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4. Adding sitemaps
Understanding its Content
The Terminology
1. Index and crawl: When Google "indexes" a web page, it adds it to its database of known web pages. "Crawling" refers to the process of Google's bots visiting web pages to gather information about them.
2. Query: The search terms users used on google that generated impressions of your site page on a Google SERP
3. Impression: Each time a link URL appears in a search result, it generates an impression. Clicking on it is not required
4. Click: When the user selects a link that takes them outside of Google Search, that counts as one click.
5. Average position: Mean ranking of your page(s) for a query or queries.
6. CTR (click-through rate): Clicks divided by Impressions, multiplied by 100
The Reports
1. Performance Report
2. Index Coverage Report
3. Page Experience Report
4. URL Inspection Tool
5. Links Report
Using the Tools to Our Advantage
1. Improving clickthrough rate for underperforming keywords
2. Finding an analysing pages with high keyword ranking but low CTR
3. Finding any errors regarding sitemaps (checking whether your pages have been crawled/indexed)
4. Adding internal links to relevant pages
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From our friends at the Foundation for Shared Impact (FSI) is a step by step guide to set up Google Search Console, to access analytics, identify how people are finding you, and spot issues early.
Some Helpful Tutorials
First, let's help you verify your site ownership:
Now that it's verified, let's navigate and use the console:
Where to go next?
We've figured out how to get in front of your audience organically, let's look at how to run a successful ad campaign to amplify your reach.