Google Search Console

Google Search Console tools and reports will help measure your site’s search traffic and performance, fix issues, and make your site shine in Google Search results.  The new updated interface of GSC allows you to view changes to structure rich snippets and schema markup.

The Google search engine tools are critical to your success. Optimize your content with Search Analytics. See what brings people to your site and generate new keyword ideas from Google Ads. Discover where they are coming from and how they found you.

What Is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is several items in one. First and foremost, it is a tool that measures the health and performance of your website. 

Previously called Google Webmaster Central and then renamed Google Webmaster Tools, it took the name of Google Search Console in 2015. 

Google Search Console serves as a conduit between you and your website. If you have errors on your site, if Google cannot crawl your site correctly, or if you have issues with the mobile version of your site, GSC will tell you.

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Google Crawling

Google Search Console Features

Google Search Console is a powerful tool from which every website benefits. If you are unfamiliar with its workings or how to set it up, SEO Design Chicago can help you get everything activated for you properly. 

Some of the top Google Search Console features are:

  • Make sure that Google can find, crawl, and index your website

  • Have Google crawl pages and reindex if necessary

  • Fix problems with crawling and indexing

  • Identify websites that link to your site

  • Review security concerns

  • Troubleshoot mobility problems

  • View quantity of Google SERP impressions

  • Find out which searches include your website

Ten Ways to Use Google Search Console

There are a good number of tasks you can perform with GSC. Here are the top ten:

1. Determine your most popular pages.
Google Search Console will tell you which of your pages bring the most visitors to your site.

2. Identify security issues on your website.
You read in the news reasonably consistently about different companies being hacked and having their data breached. Sometimes they are large companies; sometimes they are small ones. Make sure that your website is as secure as possible at all times.

3. Make sure that your schema markup is functioning correctly.
If you are using schema markup or other structured data on your site, Google Search Console ensures that it functions properly with the Search Engine Results Pages.

4. Enter a sitemap.
Once you submit a sitemap to Google, it will make it much easier for the bots to crawl and organize all of the pages on your website.

5. Find out which keywords searchers are using to find your website.
This helps with your SEO strategy if you do not see the expected results or want to transfer some of those successes to other pages.

6. Check where your visitors are finding you.
Businesses that require having users from different world areas will benefit from knowing whether their site is attracting users from the right countries.

7. Find out what kind of devices your visitors are using.
At this point, everyone should have a mobile site. Even if you are confident that your site looks great, it is good to know that mobile users will visit your website.

8. Verify that your site is mobile-friendly.
It’s more than just looking good. You should make sure that there are no errors on the mobile version of your site. There can be issues that arise on the mobile version of your site that are not immediately visible. GSC can identify them and alert you. 

9. Figure out which websites link back to you.
Even if you are new to SEO, you must know by now the importance of backlinking. This feature helps you determine where your backlinks come from.

10. Check to see if you have any broken links.
Broken links provide a poor user experience for any of your visitors. By finding and fixing any bad links, especially 404s, your users will have a much better experience.

Search console

Google Search Console is a powerful free tool with many great features. SEO Design Chicago has a great deal of experience working with it. We can help your business understand your user traffic better, and we can help you take advantage of all of these great free features made available.

Reach out today to SEO Design Chicago to see how we can help you with Google Search Console.

Linking Google Search Console With Other Google Products

Why Should You Link your Google Ads Account to GSC?

Google Ads and Google Search Console are two great tools. They become super valuable to a webmaster or marketer when you link them. Linking your Google Ads account to Google Search Console lets you see if customers are reaching your website by organic traffic or paid ads. Google explains Google Search Console and how it works, and they go into detail about paid and organic reports and how it works.

Link search console

Why Should You Link Your Client’s Google Ads Account to GSC?

Many marketers also ask what value is in linking the Google Ads account to Search Console. We always recommend doing this as more data is better for all clients. If your organic content is not at the top, the next best way is through ads at the top of the page.

Let’s jump into the specifics of how this works.

Link GSC to the Paid and Organic Report

When you link Google Search Console to Google Ads, you can enable the paid and organic report. The paid and organic report shows how often pages from your website are showing up in organic search results and which search terms triggered the results to display on the SERP.

Google Search Console Squarespace Integration

Are you having an issue regarding Squarespace integration with Google Search Console?  Our web development team is skilled at troubleshooting and correcting GSC and Squarespace issues.

How to Add Google Search Console to WordPress

Linking Google Search Console to a WordPress site used to be an automated feature that you could do through Yoast.  As of late 2019, that functionality has disappeared. Now you must link GSC to Google Analytics, which sometimes requires hosting access. Adding Google Search Console to WordPress is not a difficult task, but if you need advanced support, we are here to help. We are available for hourly consulting on Squarespace, Shopify, WordPress, and Joomla issues regarding GSC integration.

Where Do I Start?

Use the webmaster tools available in your Google Search Console to monitor the performance of your website every day. SEO Design Chicago will help you understand the usefulness of GSC and webmaster tools for the success of your website.

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