Google Search Console: An Introduction to the Power Tool

Google Search Console is a powerful tool to help you analyze your website’s performance, crawl it more effectively, and track which pages are most important for your SEO strategy. In this blog post we’ll explain what Google Search Console is, why you should care about the insights it gives you, how to get started with it, and how you can use it to improve your Google search rankings.

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a tool for tracking the health of your website’s backlinks and crawling. It shows you which pages are getting crawled and indexed by Google, which is useful for a lot of reasons, but the most important one is that it will give you an idea of the quality of your backlinks: if a particular page is only getting crawled a few times and none of them is from authoritative sources, it might be a problem for your SEO strategy. Apart from backlinks, you can track the performance of your website’s pages through Google Search Console, and you can also see the state of Googlebot to make sure the pages aren’t being blocked by robots.txt.

How to Use Google Search Console

You can access Google Search Console on any web browser by navigating to https://search.google.com/search-console Google provides a clean and intuitive interface to help you get started with your SEO audit. First of all, you’ll need to log in to your Google account, if you don’t have one yet. Next, navigate to the “Search Traffic” section on the left menu and click “Admin > Browsers.” Here you can see a list of your Google web browser accounts, which are grouped by the country where the user is located. You can also see the device type, operating system, and screen size of each browser. Click on the “Add another account” button at the top of the interface and then you can add as many accounts as you want.

Key Features of Google Search Console

Here are the main features of Google Search Console:

– Visibility & Click data: You can see how many times each URL from your site has been crawled and click-throughs from Google.

– Links: You can see how many external pages and domains have a link to your site.

– Browsers: You can see how often your site is being accessed by each type of browser. This can help you identify broken links and improve your site’s accessibility.

– Googlebot: To make sure that pages aren’t being blocked by robots.txt, you can see the state of Googlebot.

– Pages: You can see the crawled pages of your site, which you can use to track how they’re performing in Google.

– Errors: You can see the errors that are preventing Googlebot from crawling your pages.

Limitations of Google Search Console

Of course, Google Search Console is a very powerful tool, but it has certain limitations you should remember about.

– Indexation: The crawling and indexation of your pages are entirely up to Google’s software, so if there’s a technical issue with a particular page, it won’t be indexed. You can see the state of indexation of your pages in Google Search Console, but there’s not much you can do about it.

– Page Crawl: You can also see the pages that have been crawled by Googlebot, but you can’t see the pages that have been saved by Google’s software and don’t show up in Search Console. So you can’t use it to track the pages that are still being processed.

Final Words: Should You Care about Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is an incredibly powerful tool, but it’s also a bit overwhelming if you don’t know what to look for. It’s not recommended to extend your SEO audit just to use Search Console, but it’s great to get an overview of the health of your website’s backlinks and crawl. If you know your way around the tool, you can easily see which pages aren’t getting crawled and blocked by robots.txt and you can use this information to improve the crawling and indexation of those pages.