Google Search Console, formerly Google Webmaster Tools, is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results. You don’t have to sign up for Search Console to be included in Google Search results, but Search Console helps you understand and improve how Google sees your site.
Why is it important?
Google Search console has become one of the most important Google SEO tools around. SEO is an ever-changing landscape, so it’s crucial to have tools that keep you up to speed with the latest algorithms and allow you to monitor your site’s progress. Search Console is also where you’ll receive messages directly from Google regarding any issues with, or actions taken against your website. This could be something like a detected hack attack, a malware warning, a manual penalty for bad linking practices or other technical notices which the search engine may send.
What does it offer?
Search Console offers tools and reports that allow you to:
— Confirm that Google can find and crawl your site.
— Fix indexing problems and request re-indexing of new or updated content.
— View Google Search traffic data for your site: how often your site appears in Google Search, which search queries show your site, how often searchers click through for those queries, and more.
— Receive alerts when Google encounters indexing, spam, or other issues on your site.
— Show you which sites link to your website.
— Troubleshoot issues for AMP, mobile usability, and other Search features.
Who should use Search Console?
SEO specialists or marketers use Search Console to assist their online marketing through monitoring site traffic and optimising their site’s ranking.
Site administrators use the tool to help them monitor and, where necessary, reserve server errors, site load issues, and security issues like hacking and malware. Administrators can also find Search Console effective in ensuring any site maintenance or adjustments made happen smoothly.
Web/app developers who are creating the actual markup and/or code for their site can add deep linking to their apps (which allows app pages to show up in users’ mobile search results), connect their app with a website, handle crawl errors and more. Search Console also helps monitor and resolve common issues with markup, such as errors in structured data.
What features should I know about?
URL inspection: allows you to inspect individual web pages within a website. The results page shows quickly shows you whether the URL is on the Google Index, along with information about coverage and mobile usage.
Manual actions report: which allows you to view various issues found on your webpage. If issues are found, you can request a review from Google once it has been optimised. This means you can find issues much quicker compared to using website audit tools and helps to ensure that your website performs at its best, and resolving any issues can be done more efficiently.
To find out more about Google Search Console get in touch with us at info@helloslate.co.uk
Posted: June 2020
Author: Slate
