Do you have your own website that you maintain, or possibly one for the company you work for? To make sure that you get sufficient traction, you need to keep an eye on the website’s performance. This is where the magic of Google Search Console comes in! In essence, GSC is free of charge (yay!) and gives you valuable insights into the ins and outs of your site. Want to learn more? Continue reading!
Why should I use Google Search Console?
If you are wondering why you should use this console, just know that Google Search Console was created with the goal of tracking the performance of your website while ensuring the minimum hassle. With GSC, you can understand what aspects of your website need to be improved. When GSC notices new errors on your site you will immediately receive notifications via email, which will allow you to fix the issues immediately. This is why everyone who maintains a website must use GSC!
What are the features of GSC?
- Performance Tab: Under this tab, you can monitor the pages and keywords your website ranks for in Google. This data is available for a period up to 16 months. When you monitor this tab on a regular basis, you can understand what pages and keywords need more attention and enhancement than others.
- Clicks: The number of clicks you get indicates how often users have clicked on your site on Google’s results page. This number is symbolic of the performance of aspects like the “title of your page” and the “meta descriptions” associated with it. Furthermore, where your page is positioned on Google’s search results also affects the number of clicks your site gets.
- Impressions: The impressions tab tells you how often your website or a specific page from your site appears on Google’s search results.
- Average CTR: CTR (click-through-rate) indicates the percentage of people who have seen your site in Google’s search results and have clicked through it. To increase your CTR, you could rewrite your page title and meta description to be more appealing; when the title and description of your webpage is more attractive than other pages, more people are likely to click on it, thereby increasing your CTR.
- URL Inspection: This tool aids you in analyzing specific URLs. You can also find some technical information, such as the day/time and the method in which Google crawled it, and how it looked before and after the crawling.
- Enhancement Tabs: As the name suggests, you can find here whatever you must know in order to enhance your site’s performance. Aspects such as site speed, mobile usability, AMP usage, and structured data enhancements can be retrieved from this tab.
- Speed: This tab gives insight into how fast/slow your page loads on mobile and desktop platforms. It also shows the pages that are problematic or the issues that prevent your pages from loading swiftly.
- Links: Here, you can track how many links from other websites point to yours. You can also monitor how many websites contain this link to your site, and what anchor texts are used to direct links to your site.
With the internal links section, you can scrutinize what pages of your site are most linked from other spots on your website. - Mobile Usability: This section gives an indication of the usability problems that mobile users may have with specific pages of your site. Note: if your website is not mobile user-friendly, many visitors will quickly lose interest.
- Manual Actions: This is one of those tabs in which you hope to see nothing – as it will mainly indicate the penalties that your site has gathered. This can include: your links being unnatural or bought links that are unrelated to your site, your site being hacked by a third party, you cloaking (intentionally depicting data that is for the purpose of deceiving your users), or spams present on your site.
- Security Issues: As the name suggests, this tab will indicate when your webpage encounters security issues.
In order to make sure that your website remains on top of search results and attracts users, GSC has proven to be the most useful but often underused tool. Are you convinced of the usage of Google Search Console yet? Get in touch with us to know how you can best use GSC to your website’s advantage!
