Google Search Console is a suite of tools from Google that helps you track your site’s performance, find issues, and help your site rank higher in Google. It is a powerful, but complex, tool.
What is Google Search Console Used For?
I consider Google Search Console to be a must-have tool for any site owner, but it’s often overlooked. That’s a shame because GSC can deliver some amazing results when used correctly.
Here are just a few of the benefits of using GSC:
- Ensure Google can access your site’s content
- Submit new URLs for crawling
- Monitor search performance
- Monitor and resolve spam issues
- Discover how Google sees your site
It’s one of the most comprehensive free SEO tools out there. In fact, it rivals many paid tools on the market. It’s not a replacement for all of them, but it’s an outstanding supplement to be used alongside other tools.
What Data Can You Pull From Google Search Console?
Once you’ve added and verified your website, you’ll be able to see tons of information about your site’s performance in GSC.
Google Search Console Overview
When you visit your website in GSC, you will first see your Overview.
This is an overview of the important data within Google Search Console. You can visit specific areas such as your Crawl Errors, Performance Reports, and Sitemaps from this screen by clicking on the applicable links.
Performance Search Results
In the left sidebar, you’ll see Performance Search Results.
This section gives you an overview of how your site appears in Search Engine Results Pages, including total clicks, impressions, position, click-through rate, and what queries your site shows up for.
The filters at the top allow you to sort data based on location, date, type of search, and much more. This data is crucial to understanding the impact of your SEO efforts.
Here’s what each of them does:
The Clicks filter shows you how many clicks you’ve gotten from the SERPs.
The Impressions filter shows you how many SERP results people have seen. Google counts these impressions differently based on certain factors, but that’s really all you need to know.
The CTR (click-through rate) is probably a metric you’re familiar with. Google has a standardized formula for this: the click count divided by the impression count.
The Position filter gives you the average position of the topmost result of your site.
Together, these four filters give you a wide range of data.
The options in the next box allow you to refine your results further. These are grouping options that categorize the data for you.
Index Coverage Report
This report gives you data about the URLs Google has tried to index on your selected property and any problems Google has had.
As Googlebot crawls the internet, it processes each page it comes across to compile an index of every word it sees on every page.
It also looks at content tags and attributes like your titles or alt texts.
Don’t worry too much if you have fewer indexed pages than you think you should. Googlebot filters out the URLs it sees as duplicate, non-canonical, or those with a no index meta tag.
You’ll also notice a number of URLs your robots.txt file has disallowed from crawling.
And you can also check how many URLs you’ve removed with the Removal Tool. This will most likely always be a low value.
Sitemaps
In GSC, under Sitemaps, you will see information about your sitemap, including whether you have one and when it was last updated.
If you notice the last date your sitemap was downloaded is not recent, you might want to submit your sitemap to refresh the number of URLs submitted.
Otherwise, this helps you track how Google is reading your sitemap and whether all your pages are viewed as you want them to be.
Removals
If you need to temporarily block a page from Google’s search results for some reason, head to Removals.
You can hide a page for approximately 90 days before this wears off.
If you want to permanently remove a page from Google’s crawling, you’ll have to do it on your actual website.
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals is a set of metrics that impact your search ranking. They include speed, usability, and visual stability. These are now ranking signals, so you’ll want to pay attention to them.
Some of the key metrics that comprise Core Web Vitals include:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This is the time that a page takes to load. A good score is 2.5 seconds or less. Note this includes large items like images or headers.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This covers the visual stability of a site, particularly how much the layout changes after it loads.
First Input Delay (FID): This is the amount of time between when a user performs an action on your site and when the browser responds.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
Accelerated Mobile Pages is an open-source initiative designed to provide fast-loading mobile websites that work with slow connection speeds.
You can go here to get started creating your first page if you don’t have one already.
You’ll get a boilerplate piece of code you can customize to your site.
Links to Your Site
Curious about your backlinks?
GSC shows you the domains that link to you the most, as well as the pages on your website with the most links. Scroll down in the left sidebar until you see Links. Click, and you’ll see a full report of links to your site.
Manual Actions
The Manual Actions tab is where you can find out if any of your pages are not compliant with Google’s webmaster quality guidelines.
It’s one of the ways that Google has taken action against web spamming.
Mobile Usability
On the Mobile Usability tab, you can make sure all your website’s pages are aligned with what Google considers best practice.
You can have issues with text size, viewport settings, or even the proximity of your clickable elements.
Crawl Stats
For a more in-depth analysis of how often Googlebot is looking at your site, you can use the Crawl Stats report under Settings > Crawl stats.
Here, you’ll see how often your site’s pages are crawled, how many kilobytes are downloaded per day, and your site’s download times.
URL Inspection (Previously Called Fetch As Google)
This tool is helpful as it lets you actually do a test run of how Google crawls and renders a specific URL on your site.
It’s a helpful way to make sure that Googlebot can access a page that might otherwise be left to guesswork.
If you’re successful, the page will render, and you’ll be able to see if any resources are blocked to Googlebot.
If you want access to the code of your site, click View Tested Page to see the HTML, a screenshot, and any crawl errors. (Note: Crawl errors used to be its own report; now it’s located in URL inspection under Coverage.)
Robots.txt Tester
If you’re using a robots.txt file to block Google’s crawlers from a specific resource, this tool allows you to double-check that everything is working.
So if you have an image you don’t want to appear in a Google Image Search, you can test your robots.txt here to make sure that your image isn’t popping up where you don’t want it.
When you test, you’ll either receive an Accepted or Blocked message, and you can edit accordingly.
URL Parameters
Google itself recommends using this tool sparingly, as an incorrect URL parameter can negatively impact how your site is crawled.
When you do use them, this tool will help you keep tabs on their performance and make sure they’re not pointing Googlebot in the wrong direction.
Best SEO tools (March 2023)
The best SEO tools make it simpler and easier to ensure that your website is optimized for performance, as well as manage and monitor your search engine rankings. At its heart, SEO developed as an extension to web accessibility by following HTML4 guidelines, in order to help better identify the purpose and content of a document.
This meant ensuring that web pages had unique page titles that properly reflected their content, as well as keyword headings to highlight the content of individual pages, and that other tags were treated the same accordingly. This was necessary, not least because web developers were often only focused on coding issues rather than the user experience, let alone following web publishing guidelines.
This slowly changed as it became increasingly known that search engines used these “on-page” signals to provide their “Search Engine Results Pages” (SERPs) – and that there was an advantage to ranking higher on these to tap into free and natural organic traffic.
- SEMrush
Excellent SEO tool for small and midsized businesses
SEMrush SEO toolkit offers a fully comprehensive set of SEO tools. You can view detailed keyword analysis reports as well as a summary of any domains you manage.
More crucially, the SEO toolkit allows you to compare the performance of your pages to see how you rank against the competition. For instance, you can analyze backlinks from other websites to yours. (this process is sometimes called ‘link building’).
Traffic analytics helps to identify your competitors’ principal sources of web traffics, such as the top referring sites. This enables you to drill down to the fine details of how both your and your competitors’ sites measure up in terms of average session duration and bounce rates. Additionally, “Traffic Sources Comparison” gives you an overview of digital marketing channels for a bunch of rivals at once. For those new to SEO slang ‘bounce rates’ are the percentage of visitors who visit a website and then leave without accessing any other pages on the same site.
The domain overview does much more than provide a summation of your competitors’ SEO strategies. You can also detect specific keywords they’ve targeted as well as access the relative performance of your domains on both desktop and mobile devices.
Over time, SEMrush added a few more tools to its offerings: a writer marketplace, a traffic-boosting tool, a toolset for agencies, and even a white-glove service for PR agencies.
- Ahrefs
Powerful SEO tool with good price points and great web index
Since its initial release in 2011, Ahrefs has quickly become one of the most popular SEO tools on the market, and it is used by web developers and content creators around the world to grow their online presence.
Ahrefs boasts the largest backlink index of top SEO tools, with over 295 billion indexed pages and more than 16 trillion backlinks. Throw in an upgraded keywords explorer, tools for monitoring the competition, plus a serious amount of user documentation, and Ahrefs may be the tool you need to rank better and increase traffic.
Ahrefs comes with all the tools you need to explore and grow your online presence. A central dashboard gives you an overview of your projects’ ranking, traffic, and backlinking. From the landing page, you can easily access each of the five core Ahrefs elements.
Ahrefs boasts a number of powerful features that help set it apart, including a proprietary web crawler second only to Google in size and speed. While price points are broadly aligned with those of similar products, best-in-class link analysis, powerful research tools, and knowledgeable user support help make Ahrefs one of the best options for understanding and improving your domain’s online presence.
- Moz Pro
User-friendly SEO tool for SEO professionals
Moz Pro is a platform of SEO tools that aims to help you increase traffic, rankings, and visibility across search engine results.
Key tools include the ability to audit your own site using the Moz Pro spider, which should highlight potential issues and recommend actionable insights. There’s also the ability to track your site rankings over hundreds or even thousands of keywords per website.
There’s also a keyword research tool to help determine which keywords and keyword combinations may be the best for targeting, and there’s also a backlink analysis tool that mixes a combination of metrics including anchor text in links as well as estimated domain authority.
Pricing for Moz Pro begins at $99 per month for the Standard plan which covers the basic tools. The Medium plan offers a wider range of features for $179 per month and a free trial is available. Note that plans come with a 20% discount if paid for annually. Additional plans are available for agency and enterprise needs, and there are additional paid-for tools for local listings and STAT data analysis.
- Majestic SEO Tools
Great SEO tool for tracking links
Majestic SEO tools has consistently received praise from SEO veterans since its inception in 2011. This also makes it one of the oldest SEO tools available today.
The tool’s main focus is on backlinks, which represent links between one website and another. This has a significant influence on SEO performance and as such, Majestic has a huge amount of backlink data.
Users can search both a ‘Fresh Index’ which is crawled and updated throughout the day, in addition to a ‘Historic Index’ which has been praised online for its lightning retrieval speed. One of the most popular features is the ‘Majestic Million’ which displays a ranking of the top 1 million websites.
The ‘Lite’ version of Majestic incorporates useful features such as a bulk backlink checker, a record of referring domains, IPs, and subnets as well as Majestic’s integrated ‘Site Explorer’. This feature which is designed to give you an overview of your online store has received some negative comments due to looking a little dated. Majestic also has no Google Analytics integration.
