Google Search Console – what is it and what is it for?
Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools in 2015) is a free platform created for website owners and administrators. Other common names for this tool include Google Console, GWT, GSC, and Search Console. With this tool, every verified website user can:
- check whether Google is able to find, index and show your website to search engine users,
- analyze statistics related to the popularity of your website,
- find out what other websites have links to the website being analyzed,
- check the correctness of structured data,
- check correct operation on mobile,
- add a sitemap to help Google robots navigate the site,
- remove the page from the Google index,
- check whether the website does not violate Google guidelines and has not been penalized with "manual actions",
- verify your website speed along with the latest factors that influence speed ratings.
Using the tool is free , you only need to go through a verification process to confirm the credibility of the website administrator.
How to add a website to Google Search Console?
First, make sure you have a Google account. After visiting https://search.google.com/search-console/about , select "Get Started," then click the drop-down menu in the upper left corner and select "Add a service." You have two options:
- Domain – analyzes all URLs in all subdomains and versions (with www, without www, with m., with blog.).
- URL prefix – analyzes the website located at a given URL – i.e. only the subpages contained in the entered website address, without taking into account any other versions of the domain.
If you want to use global website analysis, you must use DNS (Domain Name System) authentication, which you can perform using a TXT verification record. To use the tool's second option, select one of five verification paths:
(The rest of the article can be found below the form)
- Upload the HTML file to your website -> Download the file and upload it to the server where your website files are stored. You can use a program like Filezilla.
- HTML tag -> copy and paste the generated meta tag in the section website code or in the appropriate field of your Content Management System, e.g. WordPress.
- Google Analytics -> if you are already a verified user in Google Analytics for a given website, just click "verify".
- Google Tag Manager -> use a Google Tag Manager account (you must use the container code).
- Domain name provider -> you need to copy the generated TXT record and associate it in the panel of your domain provider.
If authorization is positive, you can check in the settings what type of access you have:
Uploading an HTML file and DNS authentication are considered the most reliable by GSC and immediately provide the ability to manage the tool as an "Owner." Below is a screenshot from the "Settings" -> "Ownership Verification" tab after successfully completing the entire process.
How do I add another user to GSC?
Verified website owners can grant permissions to other users directly from GSC by going to "Settings" -> "Users and permissions" -> "Add user", selecting full or limited access level for them.
Can I check competitor data in Google Search Console?
Google Search Console only allows users who are site administrators and have successfully passed the verification process to access website statistics . Therefore, there's no way for GSC to "suspect the competition ." To analyze the SEO of a company that directly competes with yours in the e-commerce market, it's worth using tools like Semstorm, Senuto, ScreamingFrog, or Ahrefs.
GSC Performance Reports – An Irreplaceable SEO Resource
" Performance" is one of the most important tabs in Google's GSC, allowing you to check statistics on: impressions, click-through rates, device types, page popularity, and the type of search queries leading to your website. It's worth reminding yourself of the basic variables that generate reports:
- Total Clicks -> Captivating clicks generate organic traffic to your website. After entering interesting keywords into the search engine window, the user receives a list of results. Statistics indicate how many people decided to click the link and go to your website to explore the topic further.
- Total views -> the number of times someone saw a link to your website while searching search results.
- Average CTR (Click Through Rate) -> Also known as click-through rate, it is the percentage of total impressions divided by the total clicks.
- Average position -> average position of all or selected queries identified by Google Search Console.
How to check the words for which a website is positioned?
It couldn't be simpler! Simply go to the "Performance" section (as shown in the screenshot above), and then to the "Queries" tab at the bottom of the page (open by default). You can analyze the keywords that users enter into the search engine and end up on your domain.
After selecting a specific "Query," you'll get graphs showing the word's visibility and click-through rate over the selected time period ( the default setting is 3 months, the maximum is 16 months ). After switching to the "Pages" tab, you'll see which page on your website users land on after entering that phrase.
How do you compare the effectiveness of a website over time?
This is a particularly useful feature for businesses where it is useful to relate SEO results to the seasonality of a product or service.
If you want to compare SEO effectiveness on a quarterly or annual basis, click "Date: last 3 months" -> "Compare" and "Compare last 3 months with the previous period" or "Compare last 3 months year-on-year".
The dashed lines indicate click-throughs and impressions for the previous year. Below, you'll see a side-by-side comparison of the same queries and pages, along with data for the sorted time period.
How to check the effectiveness of selected subpages and keywords?
In this tab, you can analyze the visibility of a selected subpage or keyword. This could be a link (product, category, blog post, homepage) or a keyword you value in SEO.
At the top of the report, click the "+ new" field -> "Page" or "Query" and "Apply".
After completing the selected filter type, Google Console will generate personalized statistics for the entered query or URL. This option also allows you to view the position history of selected keywords or subpages.
This is one of the most valuable reports that will help you verify the popularity of specific keyword phrases leading to your services.
How do I exclude a brand-related phrase from my report?
You can also easily exclude phrases from your statistics, which often don't directly translate to SEO benefits . An example is when a user types a brand name into a search engine. The user wants to reach a specific page, but the search engine simply helps them navigate directly to the domain by typing the entire name and correcting typos.
Simply select "Queries not containing" in the filter discussed above and enter the name of your brand.
The same principle will apply to URLs when we want to exclude, for example, the home page or a category from reports.
How do I check traffic from Google News or Google Discover?
If your article, news, blog post or other content has ever been displayed in Google News or Google Discover, an additional tab will appear informing you about the effectiveness of a given Google communication channel.
After accessing the generated reports, you'll learn which subpage brought traffic to your website from sources other than search results. Learn more about the potential for Google News and Google Discover in our articles:
How to generate a report from GSC to Excel, CSV or Google Sheets?
If you're in the "Effectiveness" tab, simply click "Export" in the upper right corner and select the report format you're interested in. This allows you to conduct deeper analysis by sorting and modifying the data according to your needs.
URL Checker - Crawl Reports
To see the indexing status of a selected subpage, simply paste the URL by clicking the "URL Checker" tab.
To view a report on the indexing of pages across the entire site, click "Pages" in the left menu (located in the "Index" category, formerly "Status"). There are many reasons why pages might be excluded from the index; it's worth considering the most common ones:
- The page contains a redirect
The page has been successfully redirected and excluded from the index ( a 301 redirect is often recommended ). This is a good way to avoid problems with 404 errors or links leading to outdated pages.
- The page has been scanned but not indexed yet
Web crawlers analyzing the site have noticed the page but haven't yet added it to their index. The page is well on its way to being indexed and appearing in search results.
- Page blocked by robots.txt file
The page was intentionally blocked by a robots.txt command. These are typically URLs related to payments, login, content management systems, internal search engines, and so on.
This is a common action that signals search engine robots not to waste time analyzing a page for content that is not useful for SEO.
Check the file Twojastrona.pl/robots.txt and the links under the "disallow" command.
- Duplicate, the submitted URL was not marked as a canonical page
The absence of a canonical tag, which indicates the preferred URL for a given page, means that Google considers the page to be a copy of content also found at another URL.
Implement canonical links on your website to signal the original version of each page for SEO purposes.
- Page detected - currently not indexed
The page was detected by Google, but indexing was delayed. It's likely that the page is too unimportant for users to view in the browser's eyes.
Add more content, products to your website, or acquire links from other websites so that the algorithm considers it more valuable.
Error 404, meaning the page has gone to history or has an invalid URL.
Check the subpages generated by GSC and implement 301 redirects to working pages with similar themes or functionality.
Create a 404 subpage that includes a link to your internal search engine or allows for an easy return to the home page. Make sure your 404 page is user-friendly.
- Duplicate, Google search engine chose a different canonical page than the user
The canonical link provided by the site administrator was incorrectly specified and Google deemed another page containing the same content to be more useful.
- An alternate page containing the correct canonical page tag
Note from Google: This page is a duplicate of a page recognized by Google as canonical.
This page correctly points to the canonical page, so you don't need to do anything.
- Page excluded with the “noindex” tag
Subpage excluded from indexing by implementing the tag in the head section:
Check the list of subpages generated by GSC. There may be pages there that you want to rank. If so, remove the above tag from the section. .
Errors that may appear in the report include:
- incorrect redirects,
- the submitted URL contains indexing errors,
- server errors (5xx).
Sitemaps – How do I upload a sitemap.xml file?
A sitemap is a list of URLs that we want to point out to crawlers. XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a universal markup language that allows for the description of data that can be read independently of the system. In other words, a sitemap is a sitemap that is friendly to web crawlers that index the page.
To upload a sitemap.xml file to GSC, simply go to "Sitemaps" and under "Add a new sitemap," enter the exact name of the sitemap file you previously uploaded to the server's root directory (e.g., via Filezilla). After clicking "Upload," GSC will generate a message about the success or failure of the file upload, along with the date, type, status, and number of detected URLs.
How to unindex a subpage in GSC?
In the left menu, find "Index" -> "Removals" and click "New Request." There, you can remove a single link or a link starting with a specific prefix from the search engine.
Remember!
Indexing a page means it won't be visible in search results for phrases related to it. Before removing it from the index, use the Google Console performance report to analyze the link's visibility and keywords.
Core Web Metrics - Website Performance Report
This report provides information on website performance metrics related to website speed.
GSC takes into account 3 factors that influence performance evaluation:
- LCP (largest content rendering),
- IN (delay on first load),
- CLS (cumulative system shift).
The screenshot above shows that several hundred URLs require LCP and CLS improvements. In this case, it's worth sending a report to the IT department responsible for the website's operation.
Mobile Report – Support on mobile devices
This is one of the most important features of Google Search Console. It reports any issues with displaying your website on smartphones. According to numerous studies (and performance reports), over half of internet users use mobile phones. Therefore, it's crucial that this tab is error-free. The most common errors include:
- content wider than the screen,
- clickable elements too close to each other,
- small font makes the text difficult to read.
In the case of errors on mobile, Google may vary the ranking for individual phrases depending on the device type. Web developers are aware of this fact, and they are increasingly creating websites with a "mobile-first" approach.
Link Profile Report Analysis
In the left menu, in the “Links” tab, you can check what sources and under what terms the links leading to your website come from.
- External links (Most linked subpages)
Google Search Console identifies subpages within a website that are most frequently linked from external sources (other websites). Clicking on one of the links displays information about the number of websites from which the links originate. Of course, it's common for a single domain to contain several, a dozen, or even hundreds of links pointing to the website being analyzed.
Links within the page with links to other tabs within your service.
- Sites with the most inbound links
Ranking of pages that link to the website most often.
- Text with the most incoming links
These are "anchors," or links hidden within a given word. An example is Verseo SEO.
Summary
Thanks to the many possibilities offered by the Google Console, every website owner can perform simple and complex analyses, depending on their strategy. Google Search Console is the free and most reliable source of information about search engine traffic . It's an essential tool not only for SEO specialists and webmasters, but also for anyone who wants to build a presence online, increasing the visibility and effectiveness of their services!
Google Search Console FAQs
Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) is a free tool from Google for website owners and administrators. It allows you to monitor a website's visibility in search results, check whether it's indexed correctly, analyze organic traffic from Google, verify errors, and submit sitemaps.
To start using GSC, you need to add your service by choosing one of two options:
- Domain: includes all subdomains and address versions (requires DNS record verification).
- URL prefix: applies only to a specific version of the address (verification by, among others, an HTML file, HTML tag, Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager).
No. GSC is a diagnostic tool designed solely for analyzing your own website. Only verified owners of the property and those with appropriate permissions in the dashboard have access to traffic, impressions, and click data.
The "Effectiveness" report is the most important section for SEO professionals. It allows for the analysis of search engine traffic: it shows the number of clicks, impressions, average position (CTR), and the specific keyword phrases (queries) that brought users to your site.
A sitemap is added in the "Sitemaps" tab by entering the file address (usually sitemap.xml) and clicking "Submit." Submitting a sitemap serves as a guide for Google's crawlers, significantly speeding up the process of finding, scanning, and indexing new or updated pages on your website.
Summary
The above article covers the following topics:
- Google Search Console: the role of the tool,
- Registering your website in Google Search Console,
- Access management: adding users in GSC,
- Access to competitor data in GSC,
- Using the performance report for SEO,
- Uploading the sitemap.xml file to GSC,
- Indexing the subpage in Google Search Console,
- Web metrics: page speed rating,
- Backlink analysis in Search Console,
- Summary of the Search Console guide.
