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Another wonderful tool that bloggers should be using is Google Search Console, formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools.
It’s completely free and is a goldmine of information for your business.
If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a tool that will show you how much traffic you’re getting from Google, any important messages Google wants you to know, and so much more.
In this Google Search Console for beginners guide, I’m going to walk you through each of the Google Search Console tools and how to use them.
Setting up Google Search Console
To get started, you’ll need a Gmail account. Once you have that, visit this page and get to work verifying ownership of your site. There are several ways you can do this and they are:
- HTML file upload
- HTML tag
- Google Analytics tracking code
- Google Tag Manager
- Domain name provider
I always choose the last option and email my host the DNS TXT record and they take care of it for me. This is one of the reasons I highly recommend Managed WordPress Hosting for established blogs. They take care of the more technical aspects for me.
Performance Report
When you first log in, you’ll be presented with this report. Click Full report to get access to additional information. This report is the one that I spend the most time looking at.
It tells me how many clicks and impressions my site is getting, my average CTR (click through rate, which is calculated by dividing clicks by impressions), and average position for the date range of my choice.
An impression is recorded when your site is included in the Google search results when someone searches, even if it doesn’t appear on the first page. A click is recorded when someone using Google search clicks your website from the search results.
Below the graph, you can also see the queries, pages, countries, and devices that are driving the most clicks and impressions. Viewing this information is going to help you understand how well your content is performing over time.
Related Content: Ultimate Guide To Google Analytics For Beginners
URL Inspection Tool
I don’t use this feature often, but it can come in handy if you are trying to figure out why your site doesn’t get as much Google traffic as you think it should.
By using the URL inspection tool, you can check the current index status of your page, test a live URL, ask Google to crawl a page, view information about the page’s loaded resources, and more!
Index Coverage Report
The Coverage report will tell you which of your pages have been crawled and indexed by Google and let you know if any errors have been found in that process.
Sitemaps
According to Google, “a sitemap is a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them.”
If you’re using the WordPress.org platform and the Yoast SEO plugin, then your sitemap URL is: https://www.yourdomainname.com/sitemap_index.xml
Submitting your XML sitemap to Google via your Google Search Console account will give the Google spiders all of this information. Submit your sitemap today if you haven’t already done so!
Removals
I haven’t had to use this, but I want to mention it in case you run into a situation where it would be helpful for you. Whenever I don’t want an article on my site, I either noindex it through the Yoast plugin or delete it altogether.
When I do either of these, it will take Google up to 4 weeks to remove it from their search results. If you wanted the page out of the index immediately, the Removal tool is what you’ll use to do that.
Page Experience
In 2021, Google rolled out their Page Experience update. Because it’s a ranking factor, you’ll want to make sure your site is up to par.
Core Web Vitals
The Page Experience section of Google Search Console includes core web vitals, https, and mobile usability. These are areas that Google really cares about.
Core Web Vitals assign each page of your site a score in three major categories for both mobile and desktop. You may notice that you have a different score for each device. This has to do with the WordPress theme you’re using.
Thankfully Google Search Console simplifies all of this by simply telling you if your URLs are poor, need improvement, or good.
If you really want to get into it and understand it on a highly technical level, I would recommend reading Brian Dean’s in depth post about it.
HTTPS
There’s not much to this section other than Google is telling you whether or not you’re using HTTPS. This is also known as an SSL.
These days it’s pretty standard for a hosting company to give you a free SSL. This is what gives your domain the HTTPs. According to Cloudflare, HTTPS is a “secure way to send data between a web server and a web browser.”
It’s important to have because it’s a Google ranking factor and we all want as much free Google traffic we can get our hands on!
Mobile Usability Issues
This report will tell you if your web pages are mobile friendly. This is also of upmost importance because nowadays pretty much everyone has a smartphone. A few years ago the mobile traffic surpassed desktop traffic.
Mobile is where the vast majority of internet users are. If you have a Google Analytics property set up, then you can actually see what percentage of your traffic is mobile.
To give you an idea, Liz’s fashion blog is getting 78% of its traffic from mobile devices, whereas only 19% is from desktops.
You can find this information in Google Analytics by following this path: Audience > Mobile > Overview.
Links
If you’ve ever wondered what sites link to you, then you’ll find this section very helpful. You can see who links to you, the anchor text that is being used, the top pages being linked to, and internal links.
As you go through the links to your site, you’ll most likely run into links that bother you. You may be tempted to disavow these links. To disavow a link means to discard harmful links pointing to your site.
It’s unnecessary because in 2017 a Google engineer said, “you don’t need to worry about disavowing links unless you have a manual action penalty.”
Security Issues & Manual Actions
If you use the Google Chrome browser, you might have noticed before that Google will warn you when a site is not safe to use. Google wants to protect its users.
When Google detects that your site has been hacked, you will receive a message in your Google Search Console. This is a very handy feature that I wish existed when I started blogging back in 2010.
A manual action is something you don’t ever want to have given to you. It’s when a Google employee has found that your site violates the Google webmaster quality guidelines.
I will touch on this more in a future article, but for now make sure that your site has the essential pages on your site. Doing so will help your site look more credible in Google’s eyes.
Conclusion
By spending some time going through each of the reports offered in Google Search Console you’ll learn a lot about what Google thinks of your site and what you can improve to get more traffic from Google.
Are there any questions about Google Search Console that you’d like me to answer? I’m happy to help and I hope this guide to Google search console for beginners was helpful! Comment below.
