Google Search Console – Google’s former Webmaster Tools

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Google Search Console is also known as the former Webmaster Tools is one of the most important tools for business owners and for SEO professionals. This tool is an official tool of Google and allows us to get information about our site and its visibility in the search engine.

This Webmaster Tool provides official and reliable Google information including spam alerts, inbound links, internal links, how the site is reviewed, and other important information that we can learn from to improve the site.

Why use the Google Search Console tool?

You should use the Google Search Console tool to monitor and maintain your site and its visibility in the Google search engine. The tool also allows:

To know whether Google has access to the site and its content.
Submitting a crawl to content.
Removing content from the search engine.
Checking site malware and spam management.
Which sites link to you.
Is the site optimized for mobile.
And more.

Google’s tool is free and you can see how your site appears there. But it provides us with raw material and analytical information with which we need to work, in other words, you should learn SEO or let a professional company promote your website.

How to add Google Search Console to your site?

Once you sign up for a Google service, you’ll see several options for verifying your site. The following is the breakdown:

Google Analytics – If Google Analytics is installed on your website and you have at least an “edit” permission, then it is one of the simplest and fastest solutions. Select this method and click Verify.
HTML file – Another method is to upload an HTML file to the Google management interface and install it on your server in the main folder.
Meta Tag – Another method is to upload a meta tag to your website and it should appear in the <head> before <body>.
Google Tag Manager – If you use Google Tag Manager and have management access, you can verify your site.

What can I do with Google Search Console?

The Search Console tool is very extensive and needs to be studied in depth, but we’ll explain it by categories:

1. Search Appearance

In this section Google allows us to know how our site appears in the search results, including:

Structured data – Has any structured data been installed on the site.
Rich cards – Whether Google can recognize rich site cards such as events, products, etc.
Data Highlighter – Another option to mark up data on your site.
HTML Improvements– Allows you to know whether there are contents with identical descriptions, missing title labels, and more.
Accelerated Mobile Pages – Have your site installed accelerated mobile pages and are there any problems.

2. Search traffic

Here you can see links and search data on your site, including:

Search analytics

This is one of the most important parts of the tool that allows you to get analytical information and insights about how users search for the content of the site. The tool lets you know some important things:

Clicks – How many clicks from the search results led to the page on your site.
Impressions – How many times the site appeared when users entered the search term.
CTR – The ratio of clicks to impressions (including internal pages), the number appears in percentages, and is based on an average.
Position – The average position of your site when you search on Google.
Search query – The search term that users enter on Google where your site appears.
Other – Other settings like specific pages, countries, devices, and more. You can dig deeper into the content.

Links to your site

Here you can find all the links that come to your site, the information is divided by domain name, then which pages on the site have an inbound link and then the specific page that leads to the link.

You can also find out what is the most linked content on your site and how the data is linked (anchor text).

Internal links

Here all the links on your site appear, clicking on them, you can get all the other links on your site that refer to the link you chose.

Manual Actions

Whether your site has been spammed, including link fraud, cloaking, and so on. Learn more about invalid website SEO activities in our article.

International targeting

This is about targeting your site to a relevant audience. If you have one or more websites that are targeted to a specific audience that speaks a language, you should mark the site so that it leads to relevant people. The site should be associated with language and/or country by the hreflang tag.

Mobile Usability

Here you can know how convenient it is to use your website while surfing on a mobile device. Google will show you the issues that can affect your site.

3. Google index

In this section, you can know how Google indexes your site, how many pages are indexed, and other important details:

Index status – How many pages of your site have been indexed by Google in total. The information appears over a year back.
Blocked resources – different domains and links that cannot be crawled. In this case, they will not appear in Google search because the Google crawler can not access them.
Remove URLs – Here you can temporarily remove sites from search results.

4. Crawl

Here you can tell if Google has access to crawl your site, rescan, and more.

Crawler errors – all links that Google’s crawler tried to access and encountered any errors.
Crawl stats – how and what Google crawled on your website in the last 90 days (statistical information only).
Fetch as Google – How the Google crawler sees your site and you can submit a reconsideration request.
Robots.txt tester – here you can see a file that tells Google’s crawlers and others what is allowed to crawl on the site and what is not allowed.
Sitemaps – Here you can submit sitemaps to Google and see what has been submitted and what types of content exist.
URL parameters – If the URL has parameters that generate duplicate content, if any, you can see them here or add new ones.

5. Security issues

Google lets you know if there are security issues on your site. For example, if your site has been hacked, malware has been installed, and so on. You can see it here, in this case, it is necessary to deal with it immediately and quickly (and this is what a professional company knows how to do) so that the damage will be as small as possible.

6. Site Tool

Additional tools to use that change from time to time and are not suitable for any site, so we will not list them here.