Data insights
17. marts 2022
What is Google Search Console? – and why should you care
Google Search Console (also called GSC) is a free analytics tool that helps you with the technical aspects of your website. GSC is therefore your trusted ally when it comes to maintenance, troubleshooting your website, understanding your organic traffic, and much more.
What can Google Search Console be used for?
GSC is not only a troubleshooting tool, but also a major—and important—tool for optimising your website from an SEO perspective. Therefore, all businesses can—and should—use GSC to gain a better understanding of how Google reads their website.
It should be emphasised right away that it is not necessary to sign up for GSC for your website to appear in search results. However, I strongly recommend that you do so, as it will be a great help for your ongoing SEO optimisation.
Which elements are important, and why?
Google Search Console consists of a wide range of metrics, reports, and tools that give you an overview of how your website is performing from a technical standpoint. The first thing you encounter in your GSC account is a broad overview of the various reports you can continuously gain insights from. But which tools should you consider as part of your SEO optimisation?
Search results
Search results provide a wealth of opportunities to analyse how your different pages are performing, based on the keywords that generated an impression. This allows you to quickly get an overview of:
- How many impressions the keyword has (impressions)
- How many clicks it has generated to your page
- What position your page has for the keyword
- Whether it is the right landing page for the keyword
- New keywords
Sitemap
Put simply, a sitemap is an overview of all the pages on your website. A sitemap tells Google which pages you have on your website that Google should be aware of. In some cases, you need to create a sitemap yourself; however, this depends on your web hosting service, which in some cases generates one automatically.
Page experience
Page experience provides a quick overview of how your website performs on desktop and mobile. After Google’s “Page Experience” update, Core Web Vitals, the focus on this area has increased. The update helps Google “measure” consumers’ experience on your website. Among other things, Google measures:
- Loading performance – LCP
- Interactivity – FID
- Visual stability – CLS
In addition to the elements above, you should always ensure that your website is optimised for mobile. Fortunately, the page experience feature is helpful and tells you where issues have occurred on your site. You will therefore be informed about what the “error” is and what type of error has occurred.
You can read the 8 most common optimisations that should be implemented in relation to Core Web Vitals here.
URL inspection (Indexing)
Indexing is essential for your page to be recognised by search engines. You should therefore request a new indexing of your website when you create new pages, update content, etc. You can also support indexing with the help of a sitemap, which is briefly explained above.
I hope it all makes at least a little sense, because GSC is a major part of your SEO. Yes, it is a bit difficult and technical, but trust me—you will be surprised by the insights you can gather through this tool, in terms of keywords, but also by gaining a general understanding of your website’s effectiveness.
You can create your own Google Search Console account via the link here.
