Google Search Console: Everything you need to know to improve your SEO

By using Google Search Console (and the data provided) you can make optimizing your website a lot easier.

Ready to start?

If you haven't signed up for Google Search Console yet, now is the time to do it and set up your site.

Getting started with Google Search Console

In this section you will learn:

• How to set up Google Search Console for your site
• How to verify your site
• The differences between the old and new Google Search Console
• How to connect Google Search Console to Google Analytics
• How to add a sitemap
• What are the different types of permissions
• How to add and remove users

Sounds good? To work!

Set up Google Search Console in 5 steps

Step 1 — Sign in to your Google account

First of all: make sure you are logged in to your Google account. If you have both a business and personal account, make sure you're using the Google account you want to link to your website.

Step 2 — Open Google Search Console

Go to Google Search Console and click on “Start now” :

Step 3 — Add a new website to Google Search Console

If this is the first website you set up in Google Search Console, you may see this welcome message (just click “ Start ”):

Or click in the drop-down menu on “ + Add property “:

Step 4 — Add your domain

Choose Domain as the property type and then enter your site's URL. Make sure to use the exact URL (check how it appears in the browser bar). When you're done with this, click Continue.

Step 5 — Verify your account (+ Alternative methods)

Now you need to verify your website . Copy the tokenized DNS TXT record from Google Search Console and add it to your registrar to verify domain ownership.

Don't worry if you don't want to (or can't) verify your domain this way. Go back to the menu where you can select property type and choose URL prefix :

Note: If you're trying to register a new domain on the old Google Search Console, you'll need to use the option from above (URL prefix). Domain properties only work in the new version.

You can verify ownership in a number of different ways :

• HTML file : upload an HTML file to your website
• HTML tag : add a meta tag to the homepage of your site
• Google Analytics : use your Google Analytics account
• Google Tag Manager: Use your Google Tag Manager account

Search Console is now all set up.

Sidenote: Old Search Console vs New Search Console

In 2018, Google launched their new Google Search Console . Most data and features of the old version have been improved and are also more accessible in the new version.

However, some parts have been removed.

New reports & tools

Here's a quick overview of all the new features:

• Performance Report: This is a new tool and replaces Search Analytics from the old Google Search Console.
• Index Coverage report: This is a new tool and replaces Index Status and Crawl Errors.
• URL Inspection: This is a new feature that replaces Fetch as Google, Crawl Errors and Blocked Resources.

Updated/replaced features

Not all Search Console features and reports are new. This is what has been updated in the new version:

• Links to your site and internal links > Links.
• Sitemap report > Sitemaps .
• Accelerated Mobile Pages > AMP status .
• Mobile usability has remained the same
• Security Issues > Security Issues report .

Deleted

Also, a number of features of the old version of Search Console have been completely removed:

• HTML Improvements
• Property Sets
• Android Apps

In Limbo

At the time of writing, there are still some features that have not been updated or removed. They are stuck in Google limbo until their release. Google has admitted that they still have to decide how (and in what order) the following tools and tasks will be added to the new Google Search Console:

• Crawl Stats data
• Robots.txt tester
• Manage URL parameters in Google Search
• International targeting
• Data highlighter tool
• Read and manage your messages
• Change of address tool
• Set a preferred domain
• Link your Search Console property to an Analytics property
• Reject links
• Remove obsolete content from the index
• Report on blocked resources
• Report on structured data

How to use the old Google Search Console (Webmaster Tools)

Although the new Google Search Console is well designed, it lacks a number of features compared to the old version. Fortunately, if you do want to use them, it's quite easy.

Click on “Go to the old version” in the menu on the left.

You will now see all the features that are missing from the new Google Search Console:

This is how you link Google Analytics with Search Console

By linking Search Console to your Google Analytics, you can collect keyword data directly within Analytics.

Of course you first have to make sure that Google Analytics is set up correctly . If so, here's how you can link it to Google Search Console:

Step 1

Open Google Analytics and go to the property you want to link to Google Search Console.

Step 2

Click on the “Admin” button at the bottom of the left menu and select according to the link “Property Settings” :

Step 3

Scroll down and here you will see the “Adjust Search Console” button . Click on this.

Step 4

Now select “Add”:

Step 5

Now select your website and make sure to check the box. Now click on “Save”. Now you should see this popup, so click OK :

And that's it, you're all set now. Analytics and Search Console are now successfully connected.

Then give it time to pass all the data. To see the Google Search Console data in Analytics, go to Acquisition in the left menu and then go to the Search Console dropdown:

How to add a sitemap in Google Search Console

Search engines use sitemaps to crawl your website . They act as a “map” of your website, helping the crawlers find all your pages.

Sitemaps must have an XML file type and contain few errors (or ideally none), otherwise you risk crawlers ignoring them and (some) pages not crawling.

Fortunately, Search Console can tell you if your sitemap has errors. In the left pane, under Index, click on Sitemaps where you will see a list of the XML sitemaps you have submitted:

Creating and submitting a sitemap is even easier.

First of all you have to create an XML sitemap. Creating a sitemap on WordPress is easy with, for example, the Yoast plugin .

Note: You can check if you already have an existing sitemap by going to yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. If you have one, it can usually be found here.

Once you have created one, you can submit it to Google via Google Search Console. This is a fairly simple process:

From the left sidebar go to the Sitemaps tool and paste the XML page there. Click Submit .

Google Search Console permissions: explanation of users and owners

There are two roles in Google Search Console. Both have different permission levels: Users and Owners .

Let's discuss them below.

Owner

Owner

An owner has full control over all of their properties in Google Search Console. They can:

• add and remove other users
• change settings
• see all dates
• use any tool

There are two types of owners: verified owners and delegated owners . The difference between the two is subtle. Verified owners have completed the Google Search Console configuration process for verifying properties, while delegated owners have been added (by a verified owner).

Note: delegated owners can add other delegated owners.

User

A user can see all Google Console data, but cannot add new users to the property. Full users can see almost all data, but restricted users can only view selected data.

Add and remove owners/users in Google Search Console

Now that you know the difference between owners and users, it might be good to know how to add (and remove) them in Google Search Console:

1. In the left pane, go to Settings .
2. Click on “ Users and permissions”
3. If the account you are using has the correct permissions, you can add a user here by clicking on “Add User”.
4. Then add their email address and choose their permission level (Full or Restricted)
5. Finally, click on “ Add ”.

To remove a User, click on the three dots next to their profile and on “ Remove access ” (if you have the right permissions).

Features of Google Search Console

Now that you've set up Google Search Console, what's next?

Research the data to improve your SEO . Here are some reports you can explore in the new Google Search Console:

• Index report: how well Google indexes your site
• Overview report: the overall performance of your site.
• URL inspection: the performance of specific pages from a technical point of view.
• Performance report: how your pages are performing
• Link report: your external and internal links

Before we go into more detail about these reports, it is important that you have an idea of ​​the statistics/metrics (metrics) and data (data) they contain.

What data can you get in Google Search Console?

Before we start using Google Search Console, it's important to understand a few terms and statistics. Go to the Performance tab. Here you should see four stats/metrics along with some colorful graphs.

Note: Any of the metric boxes can be clicked to allow you to toggle things on and off as desired.

This performance tab shows you the data for your queries (queries) and pages. This is what they mean:

Queries

If you scroll down a bit, you will see a table with searches in it. This is in fact a search term (or keyword) with which your site/page has received a number of impressions on a results page of a Google search engine. Note: This data can only be found in Search Console and will not be found in Google Analytics.

Pages

This one is pretty simple: this is the page that shows up in Google's results.

impressions

Every time your site's URL is shown in a search result, it generates an impression. A user doesn't necessarily have to actually see your site (e.g. by scrolling down) to count the view.

clicks

If a user clicks on a link that brings them from Google Search to your site, that counts as one click. However, if the user clicks on a link, then presses the back button and clicks the link again, it will still be counted as one click. However, if they click on another link, it will count as two clicks. Note: Paid Google results are not counted.

Average position

This is the average position of your page for a query or searches (query).

Average CTR

CTR stands for click-through rate and says something about the number of users who click on your site within their search result. It is calculated by dividing the number of clicks by the number of views multiplied by 100 and is shown as a percentage.

Using Search Console Statistics

To get the most out of the Google Search Console performance report, you'll need to change the groupings to make it easier to find the data you're looking for. Remember that you can always export the data to a spreadsheet if you want to do more with it.

Don't worry, later in this guide we'll tell you how to get your hands on the most useful data.

How to use Google Search Console

Hopefully you now have a better idea of ​​what the different Google Search Console statistics mean. You should also have all properties set up correctly and they have been verified. But what now? Well, now you can use Google Search Console to improve your site (and your SEO).

With Search Console you can do many things to improve your site.

Let's take a look at it.

Checking the health of your site with Google Search Console

Want to learn more about how Google crawls your site and if there are any issues preventing your pages from getting indexed?

For this you need the Index coverage report.

This report will let you know if Google is having trouble indexing your site's content.

When you view this report, you'll see a colorful graph showing you the changes in the number of pages indexed over the past 90 days.

Note: Like the Performance report, clicking on it allows you to toggle the statistics on and off.

Each bar in the graph (which represents the status of that day) is colored as follows:

• Error/Error (red)
• Valid with Warning/Valid with warning (yellow)
• Valid/Valid (green)
• Excluded/Excluded (grey)

Below you will find more information about each status. We recommend tackling the Errors (Red) first . For this you need the Index coverage report.

Causes of Errors/Errors

As far as Google Search Console errors go, these are the most common:

• Redirect Error: This occurs when a redirect to a page is not working properly. Check your .htaccess file and your redirect rules to resolve these errors.
• Submitted URL Not Found (404): When a page is not accessible. If you try to reach this page you will get a 404 error .
• Submitted URL seems to be a Soft 404: This is what you see if the webpage could not be found. Sometimes it's worth checking to see if there's a temporary bug that's causing this.
• Submitted URL has crawl issue: Sometimes your Robot.txt can cause crawlers to be blocked - although this is not always the reason for this error. Sometimes it can be something completely different. So you will have to go to the page and examine it.
• Server Errors (5XX): Google's crawlers couldn't reach your web server . This is often caused by maintenance . Keep an eye on this to make sure you don't have any issues with your hosting provider.

This is how you solve 404 errors

Google Search Console will probably show you several 404 errors. 404 error messages usually appear when the URL is no longer accessible. This often happens when a page no longer exists or when the URL has changed. This can happen.

Here's how to find and fix 404 errors in Google Search Console:

Go to “Index” and then to “Coverage” . Here's a list of issues found on your site. If you click on a “problem” you will see the URLs involved.

Google Search Console reports all 404 pages of your website – both past and present. So make sure you research 404 pages that exist. It may just be that they are just old pages that you have already deleted yourself.

Due to the way Google crawls the sites, 404 errors that have been fixed may continue to appear in this report.

The easiest way to fix a 404 is to fix the problem that caused the page to stop working or by redirecting the page . When redirecting, make sure you point it to content on your site that resembles the page you deleted. Use 301 permanent redirects and not 307 temporary redirects . This is the best solution because you're sending users to an alternate page that (hopefully) still meets their needs.

See how Google views a URL

Using the URL inspection tool , you can find out how Google actually sees your page. You can use it if you don't see your page at all or if it doesn't show up properly in the search results.

Enter the URL of the page and press enter. Just make sure it's part of the property you're currently looking at:

Now you'll see the results for the page and if the URL is indexed and showing up in Google Search:

You can click the drop-down arrow to open the Index coverage report to learn more about how Google sees the URL, including:

• Sitemaps pointing to this URL
• Referring pages that led Googlebot to this URL
• The last time Googlebot crawled this URL
• Whether Googlebot can crawl this URL
• Whether Googlebot can actually fetch this URL
• Whether the page does not allow indexing
• Canonical URL set for this page
• Canonical URL that Google selected for this page.

Using the Overview report

The Overview report is useful to get a snapshot of how your website is performing technically in the search engines and if there is anything holding it back that can be fixed.

See how many pages are indexed

Here's how to see how many of your pages are indexed and how many have errors.

1. In the left pane, go to “Overview”
2. Scroll down to Index summary labeled “ Coverage” .
3. Look at the number of “ Valid pages ”.

Check for indexing errors

You can also click on the Open Report link to see more details about your coverage:

Make sure to select “Error”, “Valid with warning”, “Valid” and “Excluded” all so you can see them.

The total number of pages indexed on your site should gradually increase over time as you publish new blog articles , create new pages, and fix indexing errors.

What to watch out for is if you suddenly see a large and sudden increase in indexing errors. This could be due to changes to your site template or sitemap errors that prevent Google from crawling certain URLs.

Try to diagnose the problem as soon as possible by looking at excluded pages in these reports.

Finding problems with mobile usability

With Google's commitment to mobile-first indexing , you want to make sure your site works well for users on smartphones. Here's how to fix mobile usability issues, also known as mobile usability, in Google Search Console:

1. Click on “ Mobile Usability” (under Enhancements)
2. Make sure you have selected “Error”
3. If there are errors, you can go to the Details box to see which Errors are causing problems on mobile devices
4. You can double click on any Error type to view the respective page URL.

Using the Performance Report

The Performance report shows important statistics about how your site is performing in Google. This includes how often it is displayed, the average position and the click-through rates.

Find the pages with the most traffic

Here's how to find the pages on your site that get the most clicks in Google:

1. Click on “ Performance ”
2. Then go to the “Page” tab (to the right of Queries)
3. Change the date range to “ Last 12 months ” to get a better overview of your traffic
4. Make sure you have selected “ Total clicks ”
5. Now click on the little arrow pointing down – next to “Clicks” – to select your pages from top to bottom.

Find searches with the highest CTR

Here's how to find the searches to your site with the highest click-through rates:

1. Click Performance
2. Go to the “ Queries ” tab
3. Change the date range to “ Last 12 months ”
4. Make sure the “Average CTR” stat is visible
5. Now select the little arrow (next to “CTR”) to sort from highest to lowest.

How to find your highest (and lowest) ranked pages

Here's how to find the highest and lowest ranked pages on your site:

1. Click Performance
2. Go to the “ Page” tab
3. Change the period to “Last 28 days”
4. Select “ Average position ”
5. Now you will see a small arrow next to “Position” that allows you to change the ranking from low to high and vice versa. Remember: in terms of rankings, low = good and high = bad.

Find and compare drops/rises in rankings

Here's how to compare how rankings performed in two time periods:

1. Click on “ Performance ”
2. Go to the “ Query ” tab
3. Make sure you 've selected Average position
4. Now click on “Date range”, change the dates and then click on the “ Compare ” tab to choose two time ranges . Now click on “Apply”
5. Now see how the rankings have changed.

Find the searches with the most traffic

Here's how to find the searches that generate the most traffic for your site:

1. Go to the “ Performance ” report
2. Click on the “ Query ” tab
3. Choose the date range in “ Date range ”
4. Make sure you have selected “ Total clicks ”
5. Click the small downward arrow next to “ Clicks ” to sort from highest to lowest.

Compare how the site performs across devices

Here's how the site performs on different devices:

1. Click on “ Performance”
2. Now go to the “ Devices ” tab
3. Make sure all stats are selected
4. Now you can see how your site is performing on different devices.

Compare how the site performs in different countries

Here's how you can see how your site performs when you compare different countries:

1. Click on “ Performance ”
2. Go to the “Countries” tab
3. Make sure all stats are selected
4. Now you can see how your site performs in the different countries.

Using the Link Report

In addition to helping diagnose technical SEO issues and find top-performing pages, Google Search Console is also a useful tool for viewing internal links and backlink data: which sites link to yours and what link text they use.

Find out how many backlinks your site has in Google Search Console

Here's how you can see the total number of backlinks/external links your site has:

1. Click on “ Links ” in the left pane .
2. Now open the report “ Top linked pages ” under “ External links ”
3. Look for the box labeled “ Total external links ”
4. Click here on the little arrow to “ Incoming links ” to sort the backlinks from highest to lowest. You can also export them as a spreadsheet.

Backlinks are signals to Google that the content of your site is reliable. Think of them as "votes" for your site. The more backlinks, the better. However, quality and relevance are very important when it comes to backlinks. A link from a site with authority within your niche is without exception better than lots of low-quality links from unrelated sites.

To see which sites link to one of your pages, double-click the URL in the report.

Find out which URL has the most links

You can view the most linked pages as follows:

1. Click on “ Links ” in the left pane .
2. Open the report “ Top linked pages ” under External links
3. Now click on the little arrow to “ Incoming links ” to sort the backlinks from highest to lowest
4. Click on any of the links to find out which sites link to it

A good SEO tip is to add a lot of internal links to pages that receive a lot of backlinks. These internal links ideally lead to pages that you want to rank higher. These backlinks give the URL page authority, which you can pass to other pages on your site via internal links.

Find URLs with the most internal links

Here's how to see which pages on your site have the most internal links:

1. Click on “ Links ” in the left pane
2. Go to “ Top linked pages ” (under the heading Internal links)
3. Click “ More ” at the bottom of this list .

Internal links are hyperlinks from one page on your site to another. They are useful for directing users and search engines to and within your site.

It is normal for some URLs to have more internal links than others. However, keep an eye out for pages that get a lot more links than the rest as there may be an opportunity to add inbound links and pass some “link juice”.