How To Use Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools)
Delve deeper into your search engine performance with Google Search Console.
Your website is finally ready and it‘s time to ride the waves of the online world. Perhaps you‘ve already started working on some search engine optimisation for your site or blog. But once things are up and running how will you access the valuable data regarding what search terms your website comes up for? How will you know which pages Google is indexing? To delve into these statistics and much more, you will need a Google Search Console account.
First off, it will help if you already have a Google Analytics account set up. If you don‘t, we recommend you register for one now, which you can do by clicking here.
How to set up a Search Console account
Once you‘ve logged into your Google account, go to the Search Console (formerly known as Webmaster Tools) page. Here you can set up the account. It will need you to verify ownership of your domain, and there are two ways of doing so: Firstly, you can verify ownership via your Google Analytics account (told you it was worth signing up!), or alternatively you can embed a short section of code (follow the on-screen instructions as to where to place it). Then, once Google has crawled your website, the verification status will show as verified. If an error occurs it could be that you inserted the verification code in the wrong file in your file manager. If you get stuck there is a support section in Search Console.
What features does Google Search Console offer?
Once you‘ve successfully verified ownership of your domain, there is a whole bunch of interesting data metrics to have a look at. Of course, it might take a little while before data becomes accessible and sufficient for you to start seeing patterns or be able to make comparisons.
On the Dashboard you will see any changes or additions of owners for your domain, and of course you can click on these and make any edits as needed. One note, if you do not perform the verification process yourself, for example if a developer does it for you, just make sure he or she adds you as an owner with full permissions so that you have control over your account.
The Current Status of your website is also displayed showing any crawl errors Google might have come across on your site. This includes any DNS issues and server connectivity. Clicking on the Crawl Stats will provide you with a whole sub menu of details of the daily crawls, url errors and sitemap access.
The second summary on the dashboard are the Search Analytics. These give you a full insight into which search terms your website comes up for, which terms people are using and how many clicks per term land on your pages. You can further refine for clicks, impressions, CTR and positions. In the submenu you can also check for all links to your site. This is important for SEO to know which links exist, and to check for their relevance and status. In case anyone does some search engine optimisation for you, this is where you check for the back links.
The third dashboard section is Sitemaps. Submitting a sitemap is very important as it effectively tells Google and other search engines how your website is organised. It includes all of the pages of your website and how they are linked and structured as a whole. The sitemap also contains metadata for the pages listed, including information about page updates, page changes, and the relevance of a page to the other urls in the site. The main advantage for new websites is that Google bots crawl the internet following links from one site to another, so if you do not have many back links yet then it might take a long time before the bots discover your site. If you submit a sitemap, Google is immediately informed of all of your pages within your website.
Another important feature of Google Search Console is the Security Issues tab. This feature checks for malware and possible hacking activity. Every site owner should have a malware and malicious login attempt protection feature installed on their site. You‘d be surprised as to how many such malicious attempts actually occur even on relatively new websites.
Finally Google Search Console offers Other Resources to its account holders. This includes testing tools relating to Google understanding and displaying content of your website correctly, validating HTML emails, Business help on how to be displayed properly on Maps and searches, page speed insights, and a webmaster academy to learn how to use the full potential of Google Webmasters to optimise your website to the max!
For more useful webmaster tricks to up your site’s performance check out The UK2 Blog.