Whether you have your own website or you are responsible for maintaining your company’s website, it is important for you to measure the performance of the site. There are plethoras of tools offered by Google, which help you accumulate and analyze your website data. Google analytics and Google Search Console are to name a few. Almost everyone can use these tools free for maintaining their sites while having a fair insight into the website’s performance.
So, let us first get started with the definition of the Google Search Console.
Google Search Console is a combination of tools as well as resources usually meant for helping website owners, web marketers, webmasters, and SEO professionals to monitor the performance of websites in the Google search index.
Why is it required for website owners to use the Google Search Console?
The tool was built solely to keep a track on the website performance. With this, you can have an insight into your Google Search Console account, meaning that you can have a fair idea of what part of the website requires an extra layer of effort.
This could be anything, for instance, crawl errors that are increasing in number and required to be fixed immediately. This could be about putting more attention on certain keyword as the keyword ranking is getting decreased.
You will also be informed by emails whenever there is an occurrence of new errors that are detected by the Google Search Console. This makes it easier as you can fix those issues quickly after receiving notifications.
What are the main features of the Google Search Console?
Performance
In this tab, you can observe that your website ranks for what keywords and pages. Checking the performance tab on a regular basis will help you identify the keywords and pages needing more optimization.
Index coverage
Being a technically valuable tab, index coverage can show you the number of pages that have been there in the Google search index since the previous update. It also shows you the errors that caused difficulty in indexing the pages in the right way.
AMP
Let’s say you have already set up AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages for your website, you can easily check out the errors. This tab will show you valid AMP with all the errors and warnings. If you hit click on any issues, it will show you the affected URL.
Job Postings
In this tab, you can start listing the job openings at the same time tracking their performance. You will immediately know if any errors occurred. Like other features of GSC, this might not be the most important one; however, this can be useful for some websites.
Events
‘Events’ section gives you helpful feedback on structured markup. Events are at times complex in terms of tagging them up in the right way. In that case, this could be useful when you want to find out the areas on which you require to make some little changes.
Links
In this section, you will get to see other site links that are pointed to your site. In addition, you will be able to see the website links and their numbers that are included in your website. This section is proven to be the most important part of SEO.
Mobile usability
This tab helps you see the issues regarding the usability of a mobile website. As a matter of fact, mobile traffic is on the rise everywhere, make sure you check them on a regular basis. If mobile websites are not user-friendly, chances are high that many visitors will be gone.
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