Getting started with Google Search Console

Google Analytics will tell you a story about what’s going on with your website’s traffic. But it won’t tell you the entire story.

If you’re interested in your website’s SEO performance, you’re going to want to see your search stats. And that’s where Google Search Console comes in.

Search Console is essentially the Google Analytics for search statistics, showing what search terms your website is appearing, clicks from searches, page rank and more. In short, it’s a main tool to figure out if your SEO efforts are working or not.

So let’s dive in a bit on what Google Search Console is, why you need to be utilizing it and how to get it running on your website.

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is how you can see all of your website’s search statistics to help you track your website’s SEO performance. Essentially, it’s the Google Analytics of search.

You can see what searches your website is appearing in, how many times it’s appearing, how many clicks from those displays and, maybe more importantly, your site’s average rank for those searches.

Plus, you can also flip the view around to see all of that information on a page-by-page basis, which can be very helpful to see what pages are ranking higher and bringing in more . Plus, you can filter it by country and other different categories.

But it doesn’t stop there. Search Console also makes you aware of any indexing problems with your website, such as an odd “noindex” error or a page being too wide for the browser/device and anything else that might hurt your website’s rank.

Also, you can submit XML sitemaps for Google to index and submit individual links for indexing, which is helpful when you’ve just published a new post or page.

It’s everything you could ever want to make sure your website’s search standing is as high as it can be.

Why does it matter?

If you’re working on your website’s SEO, setting up Search Console is an absolute must. It is really the one place you can go to see everything regarding your website’s search statistics.

You can see if you’re website is actually coming up in the searches that you want to be associated with. You can figure out what posts are performing well with search. Then you can use that data to figure out what you should be writing about more to continue on that success. And you can really get a good feel for where your website ranks on Google, both overall and in more refined searches.

Plus, it’s extremely helpful to know if there’s an error for one or many of your web pages that could hurt your SEO. Not knowing there’s a problem for a long time can sink your website’s rank while you’re all the none more wiser.

Finally, do not overlook that ability to upload a sitemap for indexing. That will help get your website into the index much quicker and likely much more accurately. Plus, requesting indexing for your posts and pages right after publishing them gets them into Google much quicker.

There is no reason why you shouldn’t be set up on Google Search Console right this minute.

How to set up Search Console?

Getting started with Google Search Console is fairly similar to starting Google Analytics. You will need to sign up for a Google account or log in with the same credentials as your Google Analytics account.

Then you’ll need to “Add a Property” and then enter in your website’s URL. Finally, you’ll have to verify that the website is yours. Search Console will offer you four ways to verify your website, the easiest of which might be using your Google Analytics tracking ID, if you have that.

Once you’ve got that all set up, you’re good to go. You’ll want to wait at least a week for the results to populate and really get a good sense of where you stand before jumping to any conclusions.

But really take some time to get started with Google Search Console. Like a lot of things, it won’t show you anything groundbreaking right away, but over time it will give you the insights you need to check and improve your website’s rank and SEO.