How to use Google Search Console, official suggestions
The official Google Webmasters channel on YouTube is richer and richer in info and contents: in the last few weeks only we saw (and recounted) all the advice coming from the Search for beginners series on how to set the site’s goals or the work with a web developer; and from #AskGoogleWebmasters on speed or the Google Search News recap video. And no less, a few days ago turned up a very useful surprise: an introductive guide on how to effectively use the Search Console.
How to use Google Search Console
Daniel Waisberg is the person entrusted with today’s explanations: Search Advocate of the american company, on this first episode of the new series called Search Console Training clarifies the basic notions of the platform enclosing all webmaster tools. Even more valuable, he tells us how to use these tools to succeed on the search engine and the whole web in general despite our “role” and professional expertise, because the GSC (and these suggestions) are useful to everyone from small business owner, to anyone in charge of the creation and maintenance of big sites and even to SEO specialists.
What Google Search Console actually is
Before to proceed with the investigation of all several features, Weisberg takes a small step back by defining what Google Search Console actually is. GSC is a free tool with which any site owner, SEO professional and developer can understand the site’s performance on the Google Research system and get indications on how to enhance its visibility on the search engine in order to bring more and more relevant traffic to the project.
What is Google Search Console useful for
Mountain View’s Search Advocate highlights an important element: the Search Console is not a requirement or precondition in order to appear on organic search result pages. For sure, though, it helps to monitor and optimize the way Google performs the crawling and indexing of the site and then shows it to the public.
User’s guide to Search Console
Basically, Waisberg lists all of the main operations one can perform with this Google’s free tool:
- Verify how Google crawls, indexes and discovers web pages.
- Fix the errors Google finds on pages while crawling.
- Submit updated contents to the Google Index.
- Monitor performance trends on Google Search by studying queries, countries, pages and so on.
At this point, the Googler says, “you might be asking yourself how you should be using Search Console for your needs or what is the most relevant information for you”, and he then provides some ideas that might come useful from case to case.
Google Search Console for small sites
Owners or managers of small sites that are still not quite familiar with the work should “start simple”: check the organic traffic on the Performance Report, trying to understand which queries, pages and countries are currently bringing the most traffic to you.
Suggestions for big sites
For the owners or managers of big sites (from 500 pages and above, according to the official GSC guide), instead, the first fundamental step is to verify on Search Console if all pages are correctly indexed and there are no further errors. The tools to use are the Coverage report on index status, the Usability report on mobile devices, the AMP report on page status and other reports of enhancement relevant to the site.
Search Console’s SEO tools
If you are a SEO professional “you will have a lot of fun with GSC!”, closes Waisberg. A lot depends on one’s skills, but “whether you are focused on technical SEO, contents development and optimization, strategies or something else, you will find important insight inside the tool”.
