Google Search Console, previously known as Google Webmaster Tool, is a tool provided by Google to help SEO experts and digital marketers manage the search function on their client’s (or their own) website.
It includes tools, reports, and other information that can help SEO professionals fix errors on their website and also develop strategies to optimize their rankings. Proper usage of this powerful tool can take a poorly ranked website and move it up the list, bringing in more visitors and converting them to customers.
Features on GSC include information about search appearance, search traffic, technical status updates, crawl data, and additional educational resources.
Performance report (Search)
This report allows users to see important metrics regarding a site’s performance on a google search. The key features being: how often a site comes up; average position in search results; click through rate; and any special features (such as rich results) associated with your results. Users can even choose which data to see, read charts and compare different dimensions.
Some of the areas this search performance report can help in are:
- Seeing what search queries are most likely to show your site, where the traffic comes from and the way your search traffic has changed over time.
- Improving mobile targeting by learning which queries are made on smartphones.
Performance report (Discover)
The Discover feed shows users news items and topics related to what interests them based on their personal search history and cookies. The key metrics that users can analyze are similar to that of the search performance report.
Some of the areas this search performance report can help in are:
- Seeing how large the traffic is and how often the site is shown in users’ Discover.
- Understanding how your content performs differently in Discover in comparison to traditional search results.
Users should keep in mind that this report is only available if the property reaches a threshold number of Discover impressions in the past 16 months.
For those who have never used the GSC feature before, Google has recently developed a training playlist that you can watch on Youtube for free!
- Intro to Google Search Console
- 7 ways to verify site ownership
- Performance reports in Search Console
- URL Inspection Tool
- Monitoring Rich Results in Search Console
- AMP status report in Search Console