As a small business owner you’ve more than likely heard of Google Analytics™ but I’m guessing you probably haven’t heard of Google Search Console.
For me, it’s probably the most important tool that I use on a daily basis. Google Analytics concentrates on how people get to your website and what they do when they get there, Google Search Console basically monitors your websites’ health.
So here is the answer to what is Google Search Console and why you should use it!
WHAT IS GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE?
As previously mentioned it monitors your website health. It’s a free tool from Google that helps you monitor your websites’ presence in it’s SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
You could spend all the money in the world on SEO improvements – but if your basic website health isn’t up to scratch then your efforts won’t matter one bit!
Car owners have to have an MOT test by law once a year to make sure the car is functioning safely, all the required parts are there and nothing is causing trouble.
As a website owner wouldn’t you want to do the same for your website (but on much more regular basis of course!).
WHAT GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE MONITORS
Quite a lot actually!
I’ll be covering each section in more detail on future hub posts but for now here is a brief overview:
- Dashboard – the most important of your website metrics at a glance. New messages from Google, crawl errors, clicks to your site and your sitemap
- Messages – all messages from Google regarding your site
- Search appearance – how Google sees your site. It includes any Structured Data and Rich Cards found, a Data Highlighter to implement them, any HTML improvements Google thinks you should make and any Accelerated Mobile Pages it’s found
- Search traffic – how people get to your site. It includes search analytics (page impressions, clicks, average rank position, search queries and click through rates), other websites that link to you, your website pages that link to each other, actions that Google has taken to restrict your site in search results, what languages and countries you want to target and any error with your site on mobile devices
- Google index – how many of your website pages have been indexed (listed) by Google, any data on your site that can’t be accessed by Google and how to temporarily ask Google to remove URL’s from their listings
- Crawl – any problems that Google has accessing your site, Google’s activity on your website in the last 90 days, how to see your website the same as Google does, if any parts of your site are being restricted, your sitemaps and parameters
- Security issues – notifications that your site may have been hacked
- Web tools – additional tools from Google to help you adhere to their requirements
WHY YOU SHOULD USE GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE™
Well if the above info hasn’t given you enough reason to use Search Console then how about this:
- One of the UK’s biggest flower delivery companies had their website wiped of the face of the SERPs after their link building strategy went terribly, terribly wrong (article here)
- It’s a quick and easy way to find out some of your (not provided) search terms
- Allows you to easily introduce Rich Data to your website which will improve your search rankings