SEO: Google Search Console – How to Use and Configure It
Google Search Console is a free Google tool that is probably used by almost all search engine optimizers. With Search Console’s tools and reports, you can measure your site’s search traffic, site performance and usability, and easily find errors that are preventing your site from being indexed.
With a quick glance at Search Console, you can see the overall status of your site’s search engine visibility. You can also examine the search phrases that users use to find your page on Google.
This page is part of the Search Engine Optimization Guide, which you can find here: SEO Guide – Ztips.org.
Adding your site to Google Search Console
Setting up Google Search Console is as simple as logging in to a Google account (e.g. somebody984@gmail.com). Once logged in, you can add your site to the service. To add a site, you need to verify it, for example by transferring a file named by Google to the root of your site using FTP or via the control panel of your domain using file transfer.
You can then use the Google Search Console to add a sitemap to your site, which will greatly help Google to index the pages on your site. For example, the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress will automatically generate the sitemap. For example, the sitemap for this Ztips.org site can be found here.
If for some reason Google doesn’t start indexing your pages within a few days, you can try adding pages one by one by requesting page indexing in Google Search Console.
On the URL verification page, select “request crawl”. If the page passes the quick test for immediately detectable directory errors, it will be added to the directory queue. Now you just have to wait for the Googlebots to find your page.
The main things that Google Search Console shows you
Google Search Console will show you any errors on your site (for example, if your site is too small for mobile devices), the pages indexed, different user experiences, enhancements and of course how many visitors are visiting your site, which pages are most popular and what keywords have been used to reach your site via Google search.
Google Search Console menus
- Overview: performance, indexing (indexed pages and not indexed pages), experience, enhancements
- Performance: (total clicks, total impressions, average CTR, average position), queries, countries, devices, search appearance, dates
- URL inspection
- Indexing: pages, sitemaps, removals
- Experience: page experience, core web vitals, mobile usability
- Enhancements: breadcrumbs, sitelinks searchbox
- Security and manual actions
- Legacy tools and reports: links, settings
You don’t necessarily need to understand much of the above, it’s just important to add your site to Google Search Console and add a sitemap for your site. Adding a sitemap only needs to be done once. Google will often check your sitemap automatically.
This page is part of the Search Engine Optimization Guide, which you can find here: SEO Guide – Ztips.org.
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