What Is Google Search Console? A Beginners Guide
What is Google Search Console?
Google Search Console (previously Google Webmaster Tools) is a free tool offered by Google that helps website owners, SEO professionals, and developers monitor and troubleshoot their website's presence in Google Search results. The tool provides valuable insights into how Google views a site and helps to identify issues that might affect a site's search performance.
Below is an example of how the performance dashboard looks in Google Search Console, where you can see how many clicks, impressions, and other metrics a website has received over a period of time:
Why is Google Search Console Important?
There are many reasons why using Google Search Console is important, outlined in the points below:
Identify and Fix Website Errors
Google Search Console alerts you about technical issues that can affect your website's ranking or performance in search results. This could include things like crawl errors, broken pages, or security issues.
Optimise Website Performance
The performance reports provided by Google Search Console give you valuable data about how your website is performing in Google Search results. This includes information about which keywords are driving traffic to your website, which pages are most popular, and how often your site appears in search results.
Understand Your Audience
Google Search Console provides data about how users interact with your site in search results. This can help you understand what kind of content attracts your audience and how you can optimize your site to meet their needs.
Improve Mobile Usability
With Google's shift towards mobile-first indexing, ensuring your site is mobile-friendly is more important than ever. The Mobile Usability report in Google Search Console can help you identify and fix any issues that could be negatively affecting your site's mobile performance.
Submit and Monitor Sitemaps
Sitemaps are crucial for helping Google understand the structure of your website and find all of your content. With Google Search Console, you can submit your sitemap directly to Google and monitor its status.
Identify and Resolve Security Issues
If Google detects any security issues on your site, such as hacking or malware, it will notify you through Search Console. This allows you to address these issues promptly and protect your site and its users.
See Your Website As Google Does
Google Search Console gives you insights into how Google sees your website, such as how it crawls and indexes your pages. This information can be crucial in optimizing your site for better visibility in search results.
Measure Core Web Vitals
With the Core Web Vitals report, you can measure the quality of user experience on your website. These metrics are important as they contribute to your site's ranking in search results.
How To Get Started with Google Search Console
We wrote a simple guide with step-by-step instructions on how to set up Google Search Console that will help you get started quickly and easily.
Hike + Google Search Console
Hike allows you to quickly integrate with your Google Search Console account so you can see all of your data within the platform as well as build custom reports that look visually stunning and are automatically sent to you regularly.
Instead of having to switch between tools, you can just stay within Hike and see all of your important & insightful data there.
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