The Importance of Google Search Console

Why use Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a piece of software that should be set-up with the launch of any website. We’ve listed the features we think are the most important to any website:

Add your Sitemap

One of the first things you should do with the launch of your website is add your xml sitemap into your Google Search Console. This makes Google’s job easier by ensuring they have the information they need to crawl your website. Submitting a sitemap isn’t compulsory, and your site won’t be penalized if you don’t submit a sitemap. But there’s certainly no harm in submitting one, especially if your site is very new and not many other sites are linking to it.

Fetch as Google

You can get Google to fetch and render your website. This is great for if you’ve made any major changes to your website, the fastest way to get the updates indexed by Google is to submit it manually. This will allow Google to make note of any changes done such as new pages added, content or title tags.

Check your site errors

You don’t want there to be something wrong on your website; you don’t always know there’s a problem unless it is brought to your attention. Instead of waiting for someone to tell you about a problem, Google Search Console can immediately notify you of any errors it finds on on your site such as 404 errors or robots files.

Search Analytics

This is a great section of Google Search Console to gain insight into how your website is performing. You can look at metrics such as clicks, impressions, CTR and position as well as comparing month on month, and year on year progress of these metrics.

You can find out what keywords your website is appearing for, and how many clicks have come from that keyword. This really helps with your SEO strategy as you can see what keyword is driving traffic and the associated CTR of that keyword. This can help you generate more relevant and rich content to your audience helping you to rank for more long tail terms. You can then align your PPC strategy by bidding on keywords that are high performing.

Links to your Site

By using the ‘links to your site’ section of Google Search Console, this allows you to see what websites are linking to your website. This is key to find out if you have any ‘spammy’ websites linking to you which could lead to a penalty in Google. If you see any spammy links, you will need to disavow these links with the disavow tool.

Google Search Console is a great way to find new errors as well as monitor website performance. For any help in setting up a Search Console account or training on how to work Google Search Console, get in touch today.