The Ultimate Guide to Google Search Console

Search Console is a tool from Google that can help anyone with a website to understand how they are performing on Google Search, and what they can do to improve their appearance on search to bring more relevant traffic to their websites. Search Console provides information on how Google crawls, indexes, and serves websites. This can help website owners to monitor and optimize Search performance. By leveraging the programming knowledge and utilizing the features offered by Search Console, website owners can effectively analyze their website's performance and take targeted actions to improve their online presence.

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a free tool ostensibly designed to help brands monitor and maintain their site’s presence in search results. Launched in May 2015, replacing Google Webmaster Tools, and updated sporadically since, Google Search Console is one of the many tools that developers and SEOs use to monitor the performance of their sites.

Setting Up Search Console & Adding a Property

The page asks you to select a property type. What that means, at a basic level, is to tell Google what type of site, page, or entity you want them to track data for. Your choices are between a ‘Domain Property’ or a ‘URL Prefix Property’. The difference between these properties is easy to understand and important to know. You select a domain property when you want Google to track all URLs across all subdomains of a website.

Why Everyone should use Google Search Console

Google Search Console helps you track the performance of your website easily. You can get valuable insights from your Google Search Console account, which means you can see what part of your website needs work. This can be a technical part of your website, such as an increasing number of crawl errors that need to be fixed. This can also give a specific keyword more attention because the rankings or impressions are decreasing.

How to Verify your site in Google Search Console

After you've set up Google Search Console, the next step is to verify your website. Google adds verification measures to assure that no one else can create a Search Console account and claim to own someone else's website. The verification process is designed to prove that the person setting up Search Console has access to the back end of the site in question, and Google gives users a few options to complete the verification process.

The Performance Report

The Performance card gives you the overall performance of your website as it pertains to Google search results. The default overview is for 3 months, and you can see how many clicks your site received from organic search over that time period. If you click the Open Report link in the upper left corner of the card, you will see the full report for how your site performed in searches.

Google Discover report

Google discover let users discover new articles based on interest. This is available by default to anyone using the Google app on Android and iOS including the chrome app. According to the latest stats, almost 800 million users access Google discover and this is a really powerful way for your content to be discovered and seen by users who are more likely to interact with.