A Complete Guide to Google Search Console 

A Complete Guide to Google Search Console : Google search console helps you improve your site’s performance in search engines. It is one of the tools google to improve your site traffic and performance fix issue and helps in ranking. It provides data regarding website performance and user experience, it also helps discover security issues, and is a free tool.

• An important feature of the google search console
• Identifying and fixing errors
• Provides an overview of the search performance report
• Indexing of updated pages
• Reviews internal and external links
• Monitoring indexing and crawling

Features of Google search console

the search console provides performance reports and insights that can be explored in four search types web, image, video, and news. By default, the web search type is automatically shown but one can change their search type by clicking the search type button.

Metrics shown in the performance reports

Impression: the no of times a website appeared in the search result. Impressions don’t consider when a user clicks on them. If the URL appears at the bottom of the page and the user does not scroll down it will still be called an impression. High impressions are an indicator that google is showing the site in google search results.

 Clicks indicate metrics that show how often users click the website from the search result. A high number of clicks and a high number of impressions are regarded as good. The low number of clicks and the high number of impressions indicates that the site needs improvement to gain more traffic.

Average Position: as the name suggests it shows the average position in search results. If your website ranks 1 through 10 in average position then it is considered great. If your average position ranks between 20-29 that means that the site is appearing on two or three google search results. It means the site needs improvement to rank higher. If your site ranks lower than 30 it means it needs a significant amount of improvement. It might need improvement on SEO or there might be a content gap or certain keywords aren’t strong enough.

Average CTR stands for click-through rate it represents how often users click from the search result to the website. This metric along with average position helps gain more meaning to the metric. A higher click-through rate means your site is performing well. A lower click-through rate means the visits from the google search engine are low and need improvement.

Getting Started 

The first step in using google search console is to verify your site’s ownership. Google allows four methods to verify the site which are

• HTML file upload
• Meta Tag
• Google Analytics tracking code
• Google Tag Manager

These methods will allow verifying a website, domain, google, or blogger site. Usually, domains registered with google are automatically verified by adding them to the search console.

How to upload an HTML file

1. Go to Google search console and open from the top left-hand of the search console page open the property selector from the dropdown
2. In the popup, label select property type and enter the URL of the site and select the continue button.
3. Select the HTML file upload and download the HTML file
4. Upload the file to the root of the website you own
5. Finish the verification process by verifying back through the google search console by clicking verify.

Ranking in Google’s search engine depends on googles capability to crawl and index webpages. The guide to Google Search Console warns about the issue regarding crawling and indexing before it becomes a major problem and pages start dropping off from the search result.

URL Inspection tool

It provides information on whether a URL is eligible to be shown in the search result and whether a URL is indexed. A user can use the URL inspection tool for Indexing a webpage, viewing the last crawl date, checking mobile usability status, and enhancements. It is also used for checking whether google is using a canonical URL and how google discovers the webpage( sitemaps and internal pages).

Coverage

This section shows how google discovered the URL. the coverage section can be reached through the left-hand menu under the index dropdown. Crawl shows whether it faced difficulty crawling the URL and if it doesn’t face a problem it also provides the reason, and Enhancements provides the structure data status.

Coverage Error reports these reports to suggest that the indexing can be improved. the 403 error means that the google bot is forbidden from crawling these URLs of the server. This happens because Googlebot is blocked from crawling the members’ page of a web forum. 

Performance Report 

After scrolling through the second part of the performance page you can find dimensions that reveal the websites performance data

There are a total of six dimensions

1. Queries: it shows the clicks and impressions of the top search queries regarding each keyword.
2. Pages: indicates top-performing pages that gain the most clicks and impressions.
3. Countries: indicates top countries from the website visit.
4. Devices: classify the website of the device that is gaining attraction from like mobile, desktop, and tablet.
5. Search Appearance: it shows the various kinds of rich results that the website was displayed in, it displays web light results and video results along with clicks and impressions.
6. Gates: it assembles the tabs clicked according to date and time and can be viewed in increasing or decreasing order. 

Keywords 

It is one of the dimensions shown in the query of the performance report. It helps to review the low-performing keyword which can be changed and help to increase traffic to the website. 

Links  

A Guide to Google Search Console provides a list of links that bring to the website. these links might not be helpful to the website or might be invalid links, and these links do not help the site ranking. The link report can be seen at the bottom of the left-hand menu. The link has two divisions external links (links that weren’t present on your website and came from other sources) and internal links (links that were generated within the website and link to some other page on your website).

Sitemaps

It is an XML file that has a group of URLs that help search engines discover various forms of content on the site. It is extremely useful for large sites, that have content adding up frequently and are difficult to crawl. It helps in discovering pages for search engines.

This is all the information one need to understand and know on how to use google search console, how to generate reports and what reports are significant, and mostly what changes would help in the betterment of the website.