A COMPLETE GUIDE TO SEO: GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE
Google’s Search Console or Google Webmaster Tools is an online tool that provides search engine optimization (SEO) professionals with all the information they need to improve their rankings and maximize their traffic.
This article will provide you with a complete guide to SEO using the Google search console, helping you understand how it works, what you can do with it, and help you understand any mistakes.
WHAT IS GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE?
Google’s Search Console or Google Webmaster Tools is an online tool that provides search engine optimization (SEO) professionals all the information they need to improve their rankings and maximize their traffic. This includes the ability to submit your website, check your indexed pages, track your site’s performance, diagnose problems in real-time and check search queries that led visitors to your website.
The tool also provides you with the option to view the crawl errors of your website, work with Google’s indexing team in case of any problems and provide feedback on how they can improve their results.
Having access to all this data might seem like overkill, but it’s everything you need to make sure your website is performing as expected. If you’re new to SEO and don’t know where to begin, the Google search console will provide you with:
A map of your site that shows how often it’s crawled, indexed and even the number of pages that fall under the same sitemap.
SEO issues and their level of severity to help you improve your site’s performance.
You can also monitor where your traffic is coming from, monitor keyword trends, track how many clicks each result gets, view the top keywords used to reach your website and so much more. The possibilities are pretty much endless!
HOW TO ACCESS GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE?
To start using the Google search console you’ll need to create an account on Google’s Webmaster Tools platform. If you haven’t done so yet, make sure you follow our step-by-step guide on how to sign up for their services.
Accessing the Google search console is pretty straightforward and it only takes a few minutes to create an account and start using the tool’s modules. Once you have your own Webmaster Tools account, simply go to their website and click on the sign-in button:
To access the Google search console dashboard, all you need is a valid Google account.
From there, just type in your email address and password to log in to your Webmaster Tools account. After that, you will receive a confirmation page that asks if you want to see your data or not. If everything is good, click on the ‘go to my site’ button:
If you’re wondering which email address should you use to create a Google search console account, then I suggest that you use the same one that you have for your Gmail. Just keep in mind that if it’s a personal email this will make things easier because Google has separate logins for every single account and they don’t share them with each other.
HOW TO USE GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE TO GET RANKED?
The Google search console is a powerful tool, and when used correctly it can help you rank higher in the SERPs by revealing your site’s most important issues and showing where improvements can be made. As mentioned earlier, this includes:
Crawl errors: These are any errors that appear in the Google search console after crawling your website.
Low page quality: Google uses the number of low-quality pages indexed on your site as one of its ranking factors. This means that if you have a large amount of thin content or duplicate pages, it might negatively affect your rankings.
Sitemaps: This is where Google crawls your site and indexes its pages. If you submit a sitemap, this will make it easier for them to crawl your website’s content.
Duplicate content: Duplicate content is another thing that can harm your rankings if not corrected properly.
HOW TO SUBMIT AND CHECK YOUR SITEMAP?
If you already have a site map on your website, then this part is pretty much self-explanatory. All you need to do is find it within your WordPress installation or CMS software, copy its content and paste it in the Google search console section for sitemap files.
Something I recommend you do is create at least 3 different sitemaps.
For example, you can use one for your regular website content and another one for blog posts (if you have a blog). This way Google will crawl your pages faster and without any problems. To do this, just create two different sitemap files and paste their URLs within the Google search console for this option.
Which URLs to include in your sitemap?
To make the most out of your sitemap, I recommend that you submit every URL on your website. When doing this, you’re actually telling Google about all of the pages on your site and any errors they may be having while crawling it. These sitemaps will also be used by your website to check if the content is still live so you don’t lose rankings due to 404 errors.
If you want to submit your sitemap without having to copy and paste every single URL manually, then Google offers an easier way of doing this. Simply click on the ‘add/test sitemap’ button and you will be presented with a form:
Here, all you need to do is provide the URL of your sitemaps and choose whether they should last forever or not. Then, click on ‘save changes’:
Google will now crawl your site sitemaps to check for any errors and let you know if they found any.
HOW TO FIND AND FIX ERRORS?
Now that Google has crawled your sitemaps and all of your website’s pages, it’s time to see what they’ve found during their visit:
To do this, go to the ‘crawl’ section and click on the ‘diagnostics’ tab. Here, you will be presented with a list of errors found by Google when crawling your site.
The first thing you want to do here is to check if there’s anything unusual happening due to your settings or website structure. If not, then the problem can either be on your hosting side (which means that you should probably contact whoever hosts your WordPress site) or with one if your plugins.
However, in most cases, the errors you see in Google’s search console are not major issues that will decrease your website rankings by any significant amount of time or affect them at all. This is because they are only crawling your URL and looking for problems rather than actually indexing it (and these are 2 totally different things).
If you do need to fix something, then the next step is to find it on your WordPress website. This can be done by using Google’s cache or by looking at error logs. However, when doing this, make sure that you are looking for issues that are affecting your URL in question rather than anything else.
WHO SHOULD USE THE GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE?
Even though Google’s search console is mostly used by site owners to check for errors on their websites, it can be useful for webmasters as well.
As mentioned before, you can use the ‘diagnostics’ tab to find what’s causing issues with your website and fix them. Using this you can also see if there are more problems on different pages of your website, which will help you fix them faster.
Also, you can use the ‘Crawl’ section to check how Google views your website and what does it think about its structure. This is especially useful for webmasters who don’t have much experience and feel overwhelmed by Google’s search console and the options provided.
Conclusion
I hope this article helped you understand what the Google search console is and how to use it in detail. If you have any questions, then feel free to ask them below in the comments section.