SEO tools make our lives easier. They help us track and position the keywords we're interested in, using less time, effort, and resources. They also make sure your website is running properly and help you see or solve problems.
In this article we will talk about a must-have SEO tool to help keep your SEO and Inbound strategy under control: Google Search Console.
Google Search Console is a Google tool with multiple functionalities that measure your website's performance and search traffic, fix issues, and make your page stand out in Google search results.
For example, with Google Search Console you can…
To start using Google Search Console, you only need to follow these steps:
Now you’re ready! We recommend that before you start with the rest of the features, send your sitemap to Google as a first step.
Google Search Console details the keywords you position for, which keywords are linked to each of your URLs, and the impressions, clicks, average CTR, and average position of each one. Let's look at these features in more detail.
In Google Search Console, you can see search result performance in both Google and Google Discover.
In search results you can find the following information:
This information has a lot of super-useful apps for your SEO strategy, such as:
Discover is a list of topics that users can navigate to on their mobile devices and display summary pages on cards. When you tap one of those cards, users go to the source page of the corresponding Discover entry. Appearing in Discover depends entirely on Google's algorithm, there is no need to include structured data.
In this section of Google Search Console, you can see total impressions, clicks, and average CTR, as well as individualized data by pages, countries, Discover appearance, and dates.
URL inspection allows you to review your domain URLs for several different purposes, such as:
One of the most useful applications of Google Search Console is to be able to catch SEO errors in time, so that you can avoid losing positioning or being deindexed. Let's look at the sections where you can find this information.
In the Coverage section you will see the pages with errors, valid with warning, valid, or excluded.
In case there is an error, Search Console sends you an automatic email alert so you can correct it as soon as possible. The email explains the type of error and invites you to go and view it. Some common error types are 404 (the submitted URL could not be found), URLs labeled "noindex", and trace issues.
"Valid with warning" pages do not generate this automatic email, but it is important to go check on them as well. In the long run, if you accumulate too many it can penalize your positioning.
To stay on top of potential bugs and optimize your site's performance, it's also critical to keep your sitemap up-to-date. If you use Wordpress, Hubspot, or another tool that automatically generates site maps, it's hard to have an error in this section. However, as in the case of coverage errors, if one is detected, Google will send you an automatic email.
This is a fairly new section that is still in the experimental phase. It helps you consider the loading speed of your website, which is a very important factor in improving user experience and reducing the bounce rate.
To avoid errors in this section, the most important thing is to have a responsive website. At Cyberclick we have sometimes detected problems with too small images or texts that are difficult to read in the privacy policy, which we found out using this feature.
This is one of the most important sections if you have AMP pages associated with your website or blog.
AMPs or mobile-accelerated pages emerged thanks to a Google project to improve and speed up the operation of websites on different mobile devices, such as phones and tablets, which make up a large percentage of usage today.
The great advantage of AMP is that they load and render much faster than a regular page. However, today they make less and less sense, since responsive design already meets the goal of adapting to all kinds of devices and especially mobile devices. At Cyberclick we only have them in Numerical Blog.
In case you use AMP, we recommend that you review both errors (which generate an automatic email to your email) and "valid with warning" pages.
In the end, applying all these functions of Google Search Console allows you to do a real-time SEO optimization and improve your organic positioning by correcting your errors, improving the speed and indexing of your website and knowing the position of the keywords, in order to improve them.
Like any modern tool, Google Search Console contains a lot of information, so it's important to know how to prioritize. If you've just implemented it, my advice is to focus primarily on fixing bugs and trying to spot quick opportunities to improve your positioning from keyword and impression analysis.