Do you own a website or keep an eye on your company’s website? As you probably know, to do it right, you must analyse its performance. Fortunately, Google has several platforms to analyse and collect data from your page. 

Most definitely, you have heard of Google Search Console or Google Analytics. These are some of the best free tools for everyone managing a website and can give a lot of valuable insights about your page. 

In this article, we are going to look at how to master Google Search Console for SEO. Whether it’s for your page or you work at one of London’s SEO Agencies, there is always something to learn more about!

What is Google Search Console? 

Google Search Console is a free tool provided by Google which gives you a look into how the search engine is indexing and handling your website. It is crucial for any site owner that wants to understand how the page is performing.

It allows you to maintain and monitor your website’s presence in search results. Moreover, it allows you to fix problems that may come up and decrease your rankings. This tool lets website owners optimise their website’s visibility, check indexing status, and much more.

Creating an account for Google Search Console is not required to appear in search results. However, it’s very beneficial to use and understand what you can do to improve your website’s ranking.

Some of the benefits of using Google Search Console are:

• Content audit with the performance report
• Confirm that Google can see and crawl your content
• Problem notifications
• View queries that bring in the most traffic
• See page ranking
• See queries which bring the most traffic
• Improve visibility on search results

Key features in Google Search Console 

Google Search Console is an excellent tool with a range of features to allow you to keep track of your website.

We listed some of the most important ones which you should focus on

Performance 

In the performance tab, you can see which keywords and pages rank in Google. Remember that the data is displayed only from the moment you create your account.

By checking the performance tab regularly, you can easily see what pages and keywords need more attention and optimisation. Within the performance tab, you can view a list of Pages, Queries, Devices and Countries. Search appearance allows you to check how your rich results are doing in the search. Moreover, you can filter each section by the number of impressions, average position, average CTR and clicks.

URL Inspection

With the URL inspection, you can analyse specific URLs. It is recommended that you use it often because incorrect URLs will negatively impact the way your page is crawled. Moreover, you can view when and how Google crawled it and its state at that moment. Sometimes, it will give you a number of errors which might come up if Google couldn’t crawl your website correctly. 

Index 

In the Index Coverage tab, you can view the number of pages that have been in the index of Google since the last update, how many pages aren’t and which errors stopped Google from indexing.

Google recommends that you check this tab often to see what errors appear on your page. Fortunately, you can receive notifications when Google encounters new errors. Some of the most common errors are that Google found a broken code or a redirect that isn’t working properly.

When you click the link, you can analyse it to see what specific URLs need troubleshooting. When corrected, you should flag it as fixed to ensure that Google is going to test it again.

Enhancement tabs 

In the Enhancements section, you can view multiple tabs that you should keep track of. 

• AMP – AMP which means Accelerated Mobile Pages, allows for checking errors in Google Search Console. Within this section, you can see the AMP pages that are valid. If there are any errors or warnings, Google will list them for you to inspect further. 
• Speed – Here, you can view your website’s load speed both on desktop and mobile. What is more, it lists pages that have issues impacting performance. 

Rich results – Here, you can view which items have a good data structure attached and might potentially lead to a rich result. If you see green, then everything is fine, but if red appears, it means that there is an error that needs fixing. You can also see orange, which shows what you can improve. However, this one is not as critical as red errors.

Whether you are a website owner or manage one, Google Search Console is a great free tool that you should use. It will help you learn what can be optimised to improve performance and search results rankings.