How to Use Google Search Console

When you have a website, there are many tools to identify website performance, one of which is Google Search Console. This tool is a tool provided for free by Google to help website owners identify website performance in the organic realm.

Are you one of the owners? In this article, we will learn about what Google Search Console is, its benefits, and how to use it.

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a free platform that website owners can use to monitor how their website is performing in Google’s organic realm.

This tool allows you to find out which domains provide links to your website ( referring domains ), website performance on a mobile devices, and to the analysis of website pages with the highest traffic.

Benefits of Google Search Console

When using this tool, there are several benefits that you will get.

A. Knowing Where Visitors Come From

Google Search Console allows you to identify where your website visitors are coming from. These tools help you understand the demographics of your prospects so that you can reach a more precise target audience.

B. Identifying Devices Used by Visitors

In addition to getting visitor information, this tool also allows you to identify what devices your website visitors are using.

Google Search Console helps you find out how website visitors interact with your website, for example using a desktop, tablet, or smartphone device.

C. Knowing the Most Popular Pages

This tool helps you to identify which website pages are bringing in the most visitors because every website has pages that are more popular than other pages in search results.

You can sort website pages based on impressions or Click Through Rate (CTR).

D. Knowing Backlinks to Your Website

Backlinks are one of the important indicators in determining the ranking of a website in search results. This tool also helps you to identify websites that provide backlinks to your website.

Google Search Console also provides information on which pages get the most backlinks along with the most frequently used anchor text.

E. Check Broken Link

Broken links are a big problem for website owners, the existence of broken links can web a site’s reputation and lower the website’s ranking in search engines.

So it is important to check for broken links so that the performance of your website remains good. This tool will notify broken links on your website so that they can be repaired immediately.

F. Helping Find Popular Keywords for Your Business

Website visitors find your website through various kinds of keywords (keywords). Google Search Console helps you find keywords that are widely used to find your website.

This tool will provide information about the total appearance of your website in search results for certain keywords ( impressions ) and how many times your website has been clicked on from those search results ( Click Through Rate ).

That way you can find out which keywords are the most effective and less effective for your website’s SEO.

G. Identify Website Security Issues

Every website owner wants their website to be safe from attacks, data theft, or other security issues.

Google Search Console can help you identify security issues that occur on your website and provide warnings.

This allows you to fix security issues more quickly before things go wrong (compromising website security).

H. Check Compatibility on Mobile Devices

You can check whether your website has been accessed on a mobile device by opening your phone. But this method is considered less effective because you only use your sc ment.

You can take advantage of Google Search Console because this tool provides mobile usability features that help you check website compatibility on mobile devices.

In addition, this tool will also provide recommendations regarding the steps you need to take to improve website performance on mobile devices.

I. Submit Sitemap

The sitemap serves to help Google crawl your website so that Google can identify your website faster. You can add a sitemap easily via Google Search Console.

How to Add a Website to Google Search Console

Here are 7 steps to adding site to Google Search Console:

Google Account Sign in.
Open Webmaster Tools.
Click Add Properties.
Select “Websites”.
Select “Website” from the drop-down menu and enter your website URL. Make sure you write the aUR that appears in the browser.
Click ” Continue “.
Select Verification Method.
Google Search Console provides several ways for website verification, from uploading HTML files, domain name providers, HTML tags, or Google Analytics tracking codes. Choose the one you want.
Add Domain Separately.
If your website already supports http:// and https:// versions, add them separately.

How to Use Google Search Console

After successfully adding your website to GoogltoSearchtoonsoletonow you can use this tool, the following is the guide in the explanation below.

1. Recognize the Terms in Google Search Console

Before using Google Search Console, it would be better if you understand some of the terms contained in this tool.

Impression Each URL link that appears in search results is called an impression. The impressionl appearance of a URL link in search results, even though the URL link is not clicked or even seen by searchers.
Click When a user clicks on a link and exits the Google search results, it is considered a single click. And if the user clicks a click and then presses the “Back” button and clicks on the same link, it is still referred to as a single click.
Click Through Rate (CTR) CTR is clicks divided by impressions then multiplied by 100. If your link appears 20 times in search results and gets 10 clicks, the CTR is 50 percent.

2. Determine the Target Country

If your website targets an audience in a specific country, you can instruct Google to target the country of your choosing.

Choosing a target country does not mean your website will not appear in search results of other countries. If your website is still relevant in other countries, of course, Google will still display it.

Setting one target country will help Google to understand your target audience. That way, Google will give your website more priority in the target country you set.

The trick is to open the old version of Google Search Console and select the ” Search Traffic ” menu and click the ” International Targeting ” sub-menu “ Country ” tab and then specify which countries you want to target.

3. Add XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is used to provide search engines with information about all the pages on a website. An XML sitemap also serves to tell search engines which links on your website are more important than other links.

Adding an XML sitemap to your website helps search engines crawl your website. While it doesn’t directly increase your ranking in search results, adding an XML sitemap helps search engines to index the content on your website efficiently.

You can use the Yoast SEO or Google XML plugins (use either one). And after creating the XML sitemap, you will get a link like this:

https://www.ngulikenak.net/sitemap.xml

Then register the XML sitemap to Google Search Console. Open the Google Search Console dashboard then click the Sitemap menu and paste the last part of the link above, which is sitemap_index.xml. Then click the submit button to save the changes.

5. Fix Search Indexing Problem

One of the most useful features of Google Search Console is finding and fixing indexing errors. Indexing errors can affect the ranking in search results caused by the cessation of crawling and indexing activities from search engines.

You can find the error through the Coverage → Index menu. The menu will display pages on your website that have been indexed by Google and which have experienced errors or received warnings (notifications).

Google Search Console will also provide detailed information to learn about errors that occurred and what actions need to be taken to fix them.

Here are some of the most common errors found:

404 Error This error indicates that the crawler from the search engine has followed the URL link, but what appears is a 404 error.
Soft 404 Error An error that occurs when a search engine crawler gets a 404 error page, but the page’s status code sends a 200 message which means it was successfully sent to the browser.
Server Error This indicates that your server has timed out (not responding). This error usually occurs when the website gets a lot of traffic, is under maintenance, or for other reasons.
Not Followed This error occurs when Google cannot understand the type of content on the website. The content in question can be flash, iframe, javascript, or something else.

6. Knowing Potential Keywords

Google Search Console also helps you find out which keywords are often used by website visitors.

You can see potential and popular keywords for your website through the “ Performance ” tab. You can also find new keywords related to the main keywords of your content.

7. Finding Link Building Resources

Through Google Search Console, you can also check the performance of external links and internal links which are used as an indicator to determine the position of a website on search engines.

To see it, you click the “ Links ” menu , then you will see the link performance for external links and internal links. You can see which websites have provided backlinks to your website through the ” Top Linking Sites ” menu. Google Search Console will display a list of websites that provide links to your website.

Click the domain name to see more details on the target page of the website link. You will see several pages on the website that provide links to your website. In addition, you can also get information about what pages on your website are targeted by the website.

8. Content Evaluation

You can also use Google Search Console to evaluate the content that you have published on the website. You can see performance per page in search results, appearing on any keyword.

To check the performance per website page, you can follow these steps:

Go to the “ Performance ” tab.
Click ” Pages “.
Select the web page that you want to see its performance.
Then click the ” Questions ” tab.
After that, keywords will appear that generate impressions for that page.

You can complete the information in the article based on the keywords that generate impressions for the page so that the possibility of the website page appearing in various keywords is greater.

Your articles will be richer in the information that matches what people are looking for in search engines.

9. Removing URLs from Search Results

After updating some blog content, there may be some content that you want to delete. But removing content that has been indexed by Google is a bit tricky, you have to remove the URL from Google’s index via Google Search Console.

Open Google Search Console then click the Google Index menu → Remove URLs. Then click the “ Temporarily Hide ” button and enter the URL you want to delete.

This feature will only hide web pages from search results for 90 days. And to delete it permanently, you have to delete the content from the website until a 404 error warning appears.

To delete it permanently, you must remove the content from the website until a 404 error warning appears.

10. Adding User

If you manage Google Search Console with a team, you can easily add multiple users, the method is as follows.

Open Google Search Console.
Click the Settings menu -> Users and Permissions → Add User.
Enter the email address of the user you want to add.
Select the permissions you will give.
There are two types of permissions, namely Full Permission and Restricted Permission. Full permissions allow users to access all Google Search Console features, including adding new users. Meanwhile, restricted permission only allows users to view data, but cannot add new users.
New users will get a notification email and can log in via that email.

Ready to Use Google Search Console?

Thus an explanation of the benefits to how to use Google Search Console. These tools have many benefits for the development of your website, from keywords, and security, to website performance in search results. Good luck.