Guides · · Davi Netto
Complete guide to Google Search Console (2022)
Learn all about the features and benefits of Google Search Console in a step-by-step guide with pictures.
Summary
This is a guide to Google Search Console, a free tool that lets site owners monitor how their sites perform in Google’s organic search results. It describes how to connect Search Console to your site and the tool’s main features: overview, URL inspection, search results, coverage, sitemaps, removals, page experience, Core Web Vitals, mobile usability, enhancements and links. It concludes that Search Console is a valuable tool for understanding your site’s health and performance, but that other, subjective considerations, such as image quality and brand identity, also matter for a good user experience.
What is Google Search Console?
Google Search Console is a tool that gives you a simple, direct view of how your site performs in Google’s organic search results.
The benefits of Google Search Console
How much would you pay to know what’s on your customers’ minds before they even interact with your brand? Google Search Console can give you those answers for free.
The information ranges from the words people use in their searches and your site’s loading speed to which other sites on the internet are sending you visitors. This is extremely valuable for business owners and digital marketers to focus their efforts in the right direction.
How do I connect Google Search Console to my site?
To start using Google Search Console, you need a Google account. Once you’ve signed up, follow these steps:
- Go to Google Search Console
- Click Add property
- Follow the on-screen instructions
Once it’s linked, it will take Google 24 to 72 hours before you start seeing your site’s information in the tool’s dashboard.
Main features
Overview
Here you can follow some simpler reports on your site’s performance in Google searches, such as the number of clicks your site gets on Google, the number of your site’s pages Google shows in its results, the user experience on the site and some possible improvements.
URL inspection
By default, Google Search Console reports show data for the site as a whole, adding up the visits to all of your site’s subpages.
The “URL inspection” option lets you filter the statistics to see the reports for a specific page, for example:
www.yoursite.com/contact
www.yoursite.com/about-us
www.yoursite.com/privacy-policy
Search results
This report shows your site’s search performance in more detail. The four main metrics are:
- Total clicks: The number of times someone clicked through to your site from a Google search.
- Total impressions: The number of times your site appeared in people’s searches
- Average CTR: The average CTR is the ratio between the clicks and the impressions your site received. If total clicks are 7 and total impressions are 100, your average CTR is 7%.
- Average position: Your site’s average ranking in Google searches.
On the same screen, you can also see the terms searched on Google that lead people to find your site. You can see the clicks, impressions and CTR for each search term. This can really help you understand what the people who reach your site are looking for.
Coverage
Before Google can show your site to people, it needs to crawl your site’s pages and make sure they’re working properly.
The coverage report shows which of your site’s pages were validated, which have warnings and which have errors:
- Valid pages: Google can read and index your page to show it in searches.
- Pages with warnings: Google can read and index your page, but has some recommendations and improvements.
- Pages with errors: Google can’t index your page
- Excluded pages: Intentionally hidden pages that won’t be shown in the results. Example: internal pages of the site’s admin panel.
The details give a breakdown of the errors each page has. This information is useful because it helps your development team fix the problems found.
Sitemaps
The sitemap is a file the site’s developers generate containing all of your site’s subpages. It’s as if we literally handed Google a map so it knows where it needs to go.
This file helps Google and other search engines find your site’s subpages and update their search results faster. So it’s very important to submit this file and make sure its status shows no errors.
Removals
The removals tab lets you ask Google to take a specific page of your site out of the search results. This can be used after a mistaken update, or if inappropriate content was published on the site.
Page experience
The page experience tab gives tips on improvements you can make to each of your site’s pages to improve the visitor experience.
Each page of your site is assessed separately for mobile and desktop, and all the errors are detailed so your developer can fix them more easily.
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are a diagnostic created by Google to assess the quality of web pages.
The report covers 3 main metrics:
LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)
Measures the page’s loading speed, from the moment the user clicks on it until relevant content is displayed on their screen.
LCP is an essential metric for understanding the site’s perceived speed.
FID (First Input Delay)
Ever noticed that on some sites, even if the page looks 100% loaded, it still takes a few seconds before you can interact with it? The time it stays “frozen” is the FID (First Input Delay).
FID is a very important metric of your site’s interactivity.
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)
Have you ever gone to click a button or link when suddenly an image appeared and pushed all the site’s content down? This behavior tends to make users furious, and Google knows it!
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) measures the site’s visual stability. Pages whose content moves around while loading score badly on this metric.
Mobile usability
Most web browsing happens on phones, which is why they get a tab with dedicated diagnostics. Here we can detect some common problems when browsing on a phone, such as:
- Text too small to read
- Clickable elements too close together
- Content wider than the screen
Fixing these problems will let your site’s visitors browse more smoothly and intuitively, making them more likely to stay.
Enhancements
The enhancements section is a diagnostic exclusively for pages with structured data. Structured data can help Google catalogue, in an orderly way, information about your company, products, services, service locations, people and more.
The tabs suggest improvements so Google understands your site even better and can show it more accurately in its searches.
Links
This report shows a list of the sites on the web that have links sending people to your site. These links help visitors from other sites reach your page.
You can work with business partners so they mention your company in posts and articles, and you get even more qualified visitors on your site.
Conclusion
Google Search Console shows your site’s health and performance in an easy-to-understand way. Someone without technical marketing or development skills can benefit from its diagnostics.
Of course, we need to understand that metrics, important as they are, aren’t the only criterion separating a good site from a bad one. Many subjective factors, such as image quality, clear writing and brand identity, contribute to a good experience. It’s up to us to make conscious choices about how we want to present ourselves to our visitors.
