Increasing Visibility

Keeping your business website and SEO fresh is critical to maintaining a solid online presence. It can be tricky to know just how well your website is performing, but fortunately there are several tools available that provide tons of data useful for fine-tuning and monitoring your SEO. One of the most ubiquitous platforms is Google Search Console (GSC) which provides tons of free features for webmasters to take advantage of. But what exactly is Google Search Console and how does it work?

It’s a Control Center, Performance Dashboard, and Communication Channel

First and foremost, GSC is a control center for all things related to your business website. If you’ve ever worked on SEO, you know that the job of refining and improving your content is never really finished. GSC has all the tools you need to make the day-to-day management of your site simplified and streamlined. From monitoring XML sitemaps to error analysis and URL inspection, Google Search Console makes it easy to optimize your site’s performance in the search index. 

GSC also functions as the nerve center for performance statistics across a number of metrics. It’s full of useful information and data about how strong your SEO is and how well your site is ranking in the search index. The data Google Search Console provides can help businesses boost their traffic, discover new search engine ranking opportunities, and track how exactly people are finding their website. 

Google Search Console is also a comprehensive performance dashboard which provides invaluable data to webmasters. With GSC, you can generate mobile usability reports that will tell you of any errors when viewing the site from a mobile device. It also tracks all traffic and click-through views and displays them in a simple, easy to understand graph. You can break down and sort views by date, page, device used, search appearance, or country the visitor is from. It even shows you the average position your site appears in for Google searches, so as you fine tune your SEO you can actually see your search rankings improve. 

Speaking of data, Google Search Console is compatible with a number of plugins that allow you to export all of your performance statistics to other systems. You can import this data to Google Analytics for enhanced SEO keyword tracking, or link it to many of the other popular services such as Yoast, Wix, or HubSpot. This level of integration makes identifying and fixing errors easy and painless. 

Beyond its sheer utility, GSC also functions as the official way Google contacts and communicates with site owners. Google contacts webmasters directly through their GSC accounts for everything from site issues, errors, general notifications, or even penalties if their website is found to violate Google’s terms and conditions. Webmasters also use the GSC platform as the most direct avenue for reaching out to Google about bugs, site errors, or to request specific features.

In-Depth Reports on Performance Metrics

The primary way Google Search Console presents its data to webmasters is through a number of different reports. The ‘Performance Report’ displays metrics about any incoming organic traffic, broken down by URL. It tracks clicks, impressions, click-through rate (CTR), and average position in the search index. These are critically important pieces of data for measuring the success of a new SEO campaign or perfecting your current strategy. GSC helps SEO strategists discover which keywords are producing the highest click-through rate, which in turn gives insight into searcher habits and intent. From there, businesses can adjust their existing content or curate future content that better aligns with keywords that produce the highest CTR.

Another insightful report generated by GSC is the ‘Index Coverage Report’ which allows webmasters to track how strong their website’s presence is in the Google search index. This gives owners the ability to monitor just how much of their site has been indexed, ensuring they are as visible for SEO as possible. The report shows what pages (if any) have not been indexed due to an error, and even provides a description of the error to help diagnose problems with the site. The Index Coverage Report is extremely useful to businesses for monitoring the overall health of their website as it gives a sort of birds eye view of their general operations. 

In order to ensure your site is operating at peak performance with rapid load times, GSC also offers a ‘Core Web Vitals Report’ which gives insight into loading times. How quickly your pages load may seem like a minor detail but according to research conducted by Google, a page that takes 3 seconds to load sees bounce rates increase by 32%, with bounce rates growing by 106% if the page takes upwards of 6 seconds to load. Google also takes page load times into account when ranking your site in their search index, affecting both mobile and desktop search results. This means that if your pages aren’t snappy and responsive with a quick load time, your business could be missing out on a large number of potential customers. 

There are other useful reports as well, such as the ‘Mobile Usability Report’ and the ‘Manual Actions Report’ that notify you of your site’s overall mobile friendliness or if Google is taking actions against your account, respectively. Overall, GSC provides webmasters and business owners a centralized platform that makes maintaining your site and gauging its ongoing SEO performance as simple as possible.