What Is Google Search Console Used For

Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results. You don’t have to sign up for Search Console to be included in Google Search results, but Search Console helps you understand and improve how Google sees your site.

Search Console offers tools and reports for the following actions:

• Confirm that Google can find and crawl your site.
• Fix indexing problems and request re-indexing of new or updated content.
• View Google Search traffic data for your site: how often your site appears in Google Search, which search queries show your site, how often searchers click through for those queries, and more.
• Receive alerts when Google encounters indexing, spam, or other issues on your site.
• Show you which sites link to your website.
• Troubleshoot issues for AMP, mobile usability, and other Search features.

Who should use the Search Console?

• Business owners: Even if you won’t be using Search Console yourself, you should be aware of it, become familiar with the basics of optimizing your site for search engines, and know what features are available in Google Search.
• SEO specialists or marketers: As someone focused on online marketing, Search Console will help you monitor your website traffic, optimize your ranking, and make informed decisions about the appearance of your site’s search results. You can use the information in Search Console to influence technical decisions for the website and do sophisticated marketing analysis in conjunction with other Google tools like Analytics, Google Trends, and Google Ads.
• Site administrators: As a site admin, you care about the healthy operation of your site. Search Console lets you easily monitor and in some cases resolve server errors, site load issues, and security issues like hacking and malware. You can also use it to ensure any site maintenance or adjustments you make happen smoothly with respect to search performance.
• Web developers: If you are creating the actual markup and/or code for your site, Search Console helps you monitor and resolve common issues with markup, such as errors in structured data.

What can you do in the Google search console?

Google Search Console is a free service that lets you learn a great deal of information about your website and the people who visit it. You can use it to find out things like how many people are visiting your site and how they are finding it, whether more people are visiting your site on a mobile device or desktop computer, and which pages on your site are the most popular. It can also help you find and fix website errors, submit a sitemap, and create and check a robots.txt file.

• Adding and verifying a site in Google Search Console

If you’re new to Google Search Console, you’ll need to add and verify your site(s) before you can do anything else. Adding and verifying your site in Search Console proves to Google that you’re either a site’s owner, webmaster, or other authorized user. After all, Search Console provides you with all sorts of incredibly detailed information and insights about a site’s performance. Google doesn’t want to hand that kind of information over to anybody who asks for it.

• Adding an HTML tag

This verification method is best for users and site owners who have experience working with HTML code.

• Uploading an HTML file

To use this method, you must be able to upload files to a site’s root directory.

• Verifying via domain name provider

The domain name provider is the company you purchased a domain from or where your website is hosted. When you verify using your domain name provider, it not only proves you’re the owner of the main domain, but that you also own all of the subdomains and subdirectories associated with it. This is an excellent option if you have a large website.

• Adding Google Analytics code

If you already use Google Analytics (GA) to monitor your site’s traffic, this could be the easiest option for you. But first, you’ll need to be able to check the site’s HTML code to make sure the GA tracking code is placed within the <Head> section of your homepage’s code, not in the <Body> section. If the GA code is not already in the <Head> section, you’ll need to move it there for this method to work.

• Using Google Tag Manager

If you already use Google Tag Manager (GTM) for your site, this might be the easiest way to verify your site. If you’re going to try this method, you need to have “View, Edit, and Manage” permissions enabled for your account in GTM. Before trying this method, look at your site’s HTML code to make sure the GTM code is placed immediately after your site’s <Body> tag.

• To link Google Analytics with Google Search Console

Google Analytics and Google Search Console might seem like they offer the same information, but there are some key differences between these two Google products. GA is more about who is visiting your site—how many visitors you’re getting, how they’re getting to your site, how much time they’re spending on your site, and where your visitors are coming from (geographically-speaking). Google Search Console, in contrast, is geared more toward more internal information—who is linking to you, if there is malware or other problems on your site, and which keyword queries your site is appearing for in search results . Analytics and Search Console also do not treat some information in the exact same ways, so even if you think you’re looking at the same report, you might not be getting the exact same information in both places.

• Adding a sitemap

Sitemaps are files that give search engines and web crawlers important information about how your site is organized and the type of content available there. Sitemaps can include metadata, with details about your site such as information about images and video content, and how often your site is updated.

By submitting your sitemap to Google Search Console, you’re making Google’s job easier by ensuring they have the information they need to do their job more efficiently. Submitting a sitemap isn’t mandatory, though, 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, if you have a very large website, or if your site has many pages that aren’t thoroughly linked together.

• Checking a robots.txt file

Having a website doesn’t necessarily mean you want to have all of its pages or directories indexed by search engines. If there are certain things on your site you’d like to keep out of search engines, you can accomplish this by using a robots.txt file. A robots.txt file placed in the root of your site tells search engine robots (i.e., web crawlers) what you do and do not want indexed by using commands known as the robots Exclusion Standard.

• Fetch as Google and submit to index

If you’ve made significant changes to a website, the fastest way to get the updates indexed by Google is to submit it manually. This will allow any changes done to things such as on-page content or title tags to appear in search results as soon as possible.

• Site errors in Google Search Console

Nobody wants to have something wrong on their website, but sometimes you might not realize there’s a problem unless someone tells you. Instead of waiting for someone to tell you about a problem, Google Search Console can immediately notify you of any errors it finds on your site.