What is Google Search Console and How Does it Work?

Google Search Console is a communication tool with Google. Google can communicate to you and you can view the performance of your website within the search engine. In this blog we will explain what Google Search Console is and take you through the different reports. Do you prefer to read?

What is Google Search Console and How Does it Work? – A Pure Manual

Do you want to know what Google Search Console is, what you can do with it and how you can apply it for your company? Then keep watching! Hi my name is John Smith Geek and today I am going to take you into the wonderful world of Google Search Console.

What is Google Search Console?

Some may remember Google Search Console from its earlier name in the past when it was called Google Webmaster Tools. It has since been renamed Google Search Console years ago.

What it actually comes down to in one sentence is it is a means of communication with Google, that is how I would prefer to describe it. On the one hand, it is a way in which we can see what is happening in the search engine based on your results, but also a way in which Google can communicate why things are not going well, for example, or where things can be optimized or given attention. or in the worst case why they give you a penalty for example that you are really doing things wrong.

All that information is all in Google Search Console so that is a very useful tool to get a lot of information from. Today we will go through that information and I will also explain to you what you see and what you can do with it.

When you are logged into Google Search Console, many of you will undoubtedly have already done so, you will come to the first page and that is a general page with all overview data. You can choose some things you want to see here in terms of reports. Here you can see the basics in terms of clicks for origin. That is also a nice thing about Google Search Console that it is quite hard data so you can see quite nicely from ok what have been the real clicks from the organic results – almost forgot to tell – it is purely organic look at this.

By organic I mean all search results that are not ads, that is equally important to remember. So that’s what we’re talking about here with those clicks, for many people who may be used to working with SEA, they often think in terms of clicks on the ads, for example. Here we are really talking about the organic results, so the free search results. Well, you can already see the coverage here – we’ll talk about it later – and optimizations, so where in the past Search Console gave quite a lot of one direction, especially on data, so mainly tell what happened, look historically.

Over the years, more and more topics have been added to help you as a marketer / it’er etc. to really optimize your website. So you will see that in Search Console more and more – you can already see it here – optimizations are being made, more and more work is being done on mobile, site vitality, breadcrumbs which we will talk about later. It actually makes it easier to find where to optimize. It’s more up to you to estimate then hey where can I make the impact, because it is. It’s a lot of information, but you have to know how I’m going to actually win the competition with it. Well, more on that later.

Performance Report

Let’s just start with the top tab, performance. Well the word says it all, well I always think performance in Dutch is a bit different it’s performance of course in English in Dutch it’s just not quite right yes in my opinion the good name for it. But hey, anyway, performance. Here you can actually see at a glance what your organic visit has done based on clicks, also based on impressions. The difference of course with a click is the display of your search results in Google when someone has searched and the difference with this is the CTR.

And the nice thing about Search Console is what always makes me happy is the average position. So you can see excellently for keywords on which you have been found what an average position that has been and that is of course super valuable data. If you have a first position on certain keywords, that is of course super good, logically you often get the most traffic with that. This is the hard data, so all that work you do when optimizing, etc., you can see here quite well whether that is useful and you can also make choices. If you are in position 1 or 2,

Whether or not, here you can also see an example of different keywords. In addition, you see the number of clicks that have been, number of impressions we just talked about, the CTR that goes with it and the average position. What can be selected at the top is whether you can make that selection yourself for web, images (i.e. images), video files, news, etc. You can also compare if you want, so it is often quite interesting to see how that works. In addition, you have your date range, well by default it is always at three months, but you can of course play with it what you like. There too you can compare more etcetera and so you should also see a nice trend.

Then you have the search query itself and you can see it here on the left, the clicks that go with it, impressions, etc. that we just talked about and CTR. Well those are the searches and you could also zoom in on that at page level, so the actual page that belongs to it. You can also do it at country level, device level, search format which I will also show you. This in itself is also funny because you also see the difference between products, extensive result and video result. Video result does almost nothing here but I can imagine that it can be quite interesting for some websites.

What you sometimes have to search for in terms of user-friendliness is that you create these columns here, say with those check marks, so if you turn it off again like this, you only have your clicks, for example. if you want to see them all, check them here, that sometimes takes some searching in the beginning. So this is a handy tip to keep in mind.

URL Inspection

Then you will see url inspection on the left and then a field will also show above. This is always a nice way to know the status of a certain URL. So it can happen that, for example, you just have a very cool new product and you don’t see it anywhere in the index. By index we mean in this case Google. So one way to find out what this could be is to inspect the url here.

It may be that Google also indicates to you that it is blocked by an element, perhaps by the robots.txt or perhaps because there is a no-follow tag on it, that could be anything. With this url inspection tool you can easily find it that way, so it’s definitely worth using it.

The great thing about this is that you can try it again if you have adjusted things then it can test it live quite quickly. That’s the nice thing about that url inspection tool.

Coverage Report

Well the coverage, actually arguably (well arguably) one of the all-important reports out there within Google Search Console. With this you can see very well from hey where are the errors that we want to solve, you will automatically see them come back here.

The default setting is also always on the errors, now I have a great example with a very nice domain where that is not the issue, but here you can see the errors very well. In addition, Google also distinguishes between an error and valid with a warning. A warning are often things that may become an error in the future or that Google wants to pay some extra attention to. Those aren’t things that should have a higher priority than an error, but they are things that you may have to take into account in the future.

Of course also the valid urls and of course also the excluded urls and then you will think that there are also a lot in this case, but that can be due to many different reasons. Indeed because you have blocked that with robots, through no-follow, through a canonical, there can be all kinds of reasons why that is the case. In itself that number doesn’t say much either, but it is wise to look closely at it, hey there are no urls in between that I actually want to have indexed.

Then – and we don’t have time for that in this video so I won’t dwell on that either – you can see all the different errors here in the details. The great thing is that Google generally gives quite a bit of information why that error arises and if that is not the case and you can’t figure it out yourself, you could look up some specialism under which that is the case. You can already see some things that are common here. For example, an error is a redirect error, so a redirect error could be the wrong url or in a loop or whatever. You will find all of that here. We just talked about this, it is marked as index and that is therefore seen as an error. Suppose you really want to you could say ok but this is fine. That’s enough about the coverage for now.

Sitemaps

Then we go to the sitemaps section on the left, which again has a lot to do with the piece of coverage we just looked at, but here you can upload your own site map. What we often say is to split up your sitemaps from your site, especially if you have a webshop, for example, then you can analyze that very nicely separately. For example, you can separate your products, your other content pages and images. This way you can see very well what percentage of, for example, the urls that you would like to have indexed are already indexed or not.

Then you can start doing things with it again. In this example we have just grabbed one sitemap and the best thing is that you can also view the indexing status of it. So you click on it, then click on view indexing and then get exactly from that sitemap only the data that we just discussed. So also the errors, the validity with warning, which to be excluded and which are valid. You just saw in the first stage that we had thousands of urls that are excluded, but at sitemap level you can split that very nicely and you immediately only have that information available so here you see, for example, that there are only 239 in that case.

Suppose that the product page is then you could ask yourself hey how is it possible, that may not be correct and you can start analyzing it again. That is the great advantage of sitemaps. By the way, you can also just select those sitemaps here on the left if you are already at the coverage column.

Removals

Then we have the deletions tab. I would advise you to be a little careful with that, it is actually a tool to exclude content or pages that you no longer want to index from the search engine. We just talked about it at the beginning, it’s a means of communication with Google and this is one of the reverse ways so with this you can say hey I want this url or this piece of content – again at url level – I don’t want anymore index and then you can make request.

You will then also see the status of such a request and what happens to it. That can be useful in some cases, but be careful with it because it can also cause you to accidentally remove from the index that is already doing well, for example where you have good rankings or whatever. This wouldn’t necessarily be the first method to use but can be quite useful in some cases.

Optimizations in Google Search Console

Well then we talked about the indexing part, I also mentioned in the beginning that Search Console also provides a lot of information about optimization. They’ve been doing a lot of that, especially in recent years.

Here on the left we see site vitality, mobile usability, breadcrumbs, products (if you use them), and the sitelinks search box, among other things. The most important are actually these two, I just want to focus on that in this video.

Site Vitality

Site vitality indicates, especially on mobile, because on mobile I probably don’t have to tell you that if you keep the news a bit that mobile is becoming increasingly important for search engines like Google and that they are actually already mobile-first and more preferred give to mobile and then to desktop. You can also see that in this, we will also discuss it in the mobile usability tab.

With site vitality, other things are important. You’ve probably read about Google’s core web vitals update, which is also on the way, that user experience is becoming increasingly important. This is a tab with which you can analyze that. For example, if we open this report from mobile, you will also see one here, CLS problems. My colleague Casper has written an extensive blog about that and we will include that link in the bio of this video on how to optimize your CLS.

It actually comes down to the fact that this has a lot to do with the user-friendliness of your website. In this report you will also recognize all those errors again. For example, if we are talking about CLS, it will also show the urls to which it relates. Even better, we can also open it from here, but we can also say – in this case this relates to speed, I’ll lift a corner of the veil for the blog – you can also see that those also have similar urls that He will also point out the same issue. This way you can analyze in a nice way where a problem lies and immediately solve it with multiple urls.

That is actually what we have to think about here at site vitality, so we really thought from that user experience and what kind of things can we solve there.

Mobile Usability

So the second tab is mobile usability, in this example, we don’t see any errors here – a bit of a shame, huh, for the video – but here you will see things like elements that are much too close to each other, which makes you hit with a big finger. could quickly click two elements, those are also things that Google detects.

This also contains elements about speed, scalability of images, about mobile-friendliness of your page, for example. You will find all things that have to do with mobile user experience here. That is also super valuable information that you can use to optimize.

Penalty

Well, that’s actually – well I don’t want to say briefly – but at least succinctly the intro about Google Search Console. Think we can make more videos about that in the future, also related to penalties or things like that and we haven’t even talked about that yet. It’s good that I start about it because we haven’t opened it yet, because it is here with security problems, manual actions.

Here you will see if you are going to get a penalty. What we mean by a penalty, by the way, is something with which Google has signaled that you do not comply with the conditions set by Google, the Google guidelines. If you’re just trying to circumvent things a bit in the gray area – maybe even black area – so white text on a white background to improve SEO I’ll just name it. All that sort of thing is quite sensitive and if you exaggerate that – link network is also such a good example – then it may just be that Google is done with it and then they always give you a warning first, which you will find here.

If something really happens, so a penalty or whatever, then it will really be active and we will also find that here. I would advise you not to let it get to that point, but it could just be that it will be necessary at some point and then you can find more information about it here. And that also goes for security problems, they set it up in two things. It is also possible that you use your HTTP variant, for example, those kinds of things that they really find important now, they will also come back here.

Left

Of course, quite a few things have changed within Search Console over the years, one that is still here from the past is the links. In Search Console, like other tools like Majestic or Moz or whatever, you can see very well what links from other domains you have to your website.

You can also find it here in Search Console, but you can already see that it is a bit outdated so it could be that they give it an update or that they say goodbye to it completely because there are also other tools for that.

That was actually an intro to Google Search Console. As I said, we will probably pay more attention to this in the future, but I hope that you have now at least received enough information about it to start yourself and get your information out of it.