Google Search Console - Must have FREE tool

I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge , hints and tips that I've built up over the years . Today , I'm going to talk about Google Search Console .

Google Search Console is a free web-based tool provided by Google that allows website owners to get access to a whole plethora of data about your site from the perspective of Google's index and rankings , and some tools to help you optimise your organic performance . It's an absolutely must-have tool for any site owner or SEO .

It's free , it's very simple to set up and use , and it gives you an enormous amount of available data about your site's organic Google performance . To get started with Search Console , all you need to do is go to searchgooglecom . I'll put the link in the show notes to that .

Once you get there , what you need to do is click the Start Now button and away you go . Google will only share the information in Search Console with people who can prove their association with the website . It'll start by having you log into your Google account or asking you to create one if you don't have one already .

Then you'll verify your ownership of the website by one of the methods they offer . These are a HTML file upload or putting a TXT record in the DNS of the domain , adding a HTML tag or a Google tracking code or a Google Tag Manager container snippet . Whichever is the easiest for you to do you can do it after all of them , just the easiest one for you .

I usually use the DNS method because I find that's the quickest and the easiest . Once this verification is done , google will then give you access to the Search Console for that domain . There's a whole bunch of things that you can see and learn from in Search Console . I'm not going to go through them all today because I've not got time .

I'll go to the main ones , the ones that I find most interesting . When you first log in , you will see an overview for your domain that will give you some key performance indicators . The first one is performance , and that will be a graph that you'll see and it will show you how many total web search clicks your website has had over a period of time .

That's a click from the organic SERPs on Google to your website . You'll also see an indexing overview and that will show you how many pages on your site Google knows about , how many it's indexed and how many it's not indexed . Let me give you the two figures , and obviously you want to see more indexed and not indexed .

Then it will give you some experience , information , things about core revitals , that's , how your website performs within browsers and how well it is or isn't doing so . Then some information on HTTPS , whether your site is properly secure . If we go and look into some of these in a bit more detail , let's look at performance . On these .

You can click the full report for these . When we go into performance , it will give you more fine grain detail about the web performance .

On search results for your website , it will give you things like the total number of clicks , the total number of impressions , which is how many times people have seen your website in search results without necessarily clicking on it the click-through rate that you're getting and the average position in the search engine result pages .

These are graphed so you can see over time whether you're declining , plateauing or increasing in the number of clicks and impressions that you're getting . It will also give you information on queries the actual web queries that people are using when your site appears in the search engine results from actual , real results .

You can actually see , for example , the actual keywords people are using , how many times those keywords were seen , the impressions and how many times they were actually clicked . This starts to be able to see how well you're performing lots of keywords .

You can then benchmark that over time and look for keywords which you might be getting lots of impressions for , not very clicks , which means you're starting to be ranked for those keywords but you're not necessarily high enough to generate many clicks yet .

It might give you an example of a page that you need to work on and the keyword you need to work on on that page to try and raise it in the ranking . So there's really brilliant information on those things . You can change these results . You can change the period of time for it .

It defaults , I think , the last three months , but you can set it to the most recent day or seven days , 28 days , months or custom date ranges that you want . So it's incredibly useful information there . Information in Search Console is that around page indexing .

So this is where Google will show you all the pages that it knows about on your website and whether they're indexed or not indexed and , if they're not indexed , the reasons why they're not indexed . Now , this is great because A it gives you a good overview of A is your site being discovered properly ? Is it being crawled properly ?

Are those pages on your site being discovered in the first instance ? And then it also highlights any issues . You've got around pages that are being discovered , but then Google is choosing not to index them . And the reasons why ? Now , it may be because it just doesn't think you're worth indexing , and so sometimes that is just one of the reasons .

Found , you know found , but not you're indexed . But a lot of the time you might find where there's pages with redirects that aren't in the right place , or you've got issues with canonical tags or duplicate content without user selected canonicals .

So it's things like that that may be Greek to you , but within there you can find what all these issues are , and then you've got the definition of the issue that you can then go and research to find out why you might have issues . So , yeah , it might be great . It just shows you there's all your pages and I've got all the more indexed .

It's very rare , though , I ever see a site with all the pages Google knows about being indexed , but this is a really good starting point where you've got the definitive answer from Google on what your indexing position is on all your URLs . Within this , there is also a really good tool . You can actually give Google your site map links to your site map XMLs .

If you've got site map XMLs for your site , I strongly suggest you get them . If you haven't , but this is great for brand new sites to be able to give Google the site map XML location , and it's a good prompt for Google to then go and start looking at indexing your site , and that's brilliant for brand new sites .

I really recommend it if you're brand new , but I say if you're not brand new , it's still really important to get this indexing information to make sure that you get as many of your pages index as possible , because if it's not indexed , then it's not going to be in search and people are not going to get see it in search and you're not going to get clicks

to it . The next feature that I like is the link section , and this shows you a good sample of the external links and internal links that Google knows about your site .

It isn't necessarily going to show you every link that Google knows about and they're not necessarily in any kind of particular order , but it's really good to keep an eye on on this because you can find where people are actually linking to you and it's always useful to know who's linking to you and why .

So you can find details on these links and it's the pages that are being linked to and the sites that are linking to them . So it's really good to be able to sort of see your progress with how you're attracting links or , if you're building links , whether those links are starting to be picked up .

So , yeah , it's really fascinating to go through that information . If you've ever done anything in terms of service and you're worried that you may have been affected by them from a manual action , then there is actually a manual actions tab in there that you can click and you can see whether Google has taken any money elections against your site .

Now these will be ones where someone's money reviewed your site and done an actual money election to penalize your site . They will show up in here . Now these are very rare . I don't think I've ever actually seen one from my own experience of an actual money election .

I've seen people post screenshots of them , but you tend to have to do something pretty bad here . But at least it's nice you can come and check to be double sure that you've not had a money election put against your site , and so that's a good little feature to know about .

So here is search console insights , and this is available if you go to the overview link at the top menu on the left hand side . Click overview and you'll see the first little thing that's highlighted is see the sites top queries on Google search and a link to search console insights . Now this is fantastic .

It gives you an overview of performance on Google , the type of content that you've got that's growing at the moment , with examples what your most popular content is and how people are finding you and kind of what your search results like at the moment .

This information , google will actually email you every month some insights into how your site's performing over the previous month . But this is a good way of going through and being able to drill down into some of that data , and it's really interesting to see how your site's doing , how it's growing or hopefully growing or declining .

It'll give you some detail about how that declines happening . So really , really powerful information if you're trying to diagnose problems with your site or see , look for areas of improvement .

So I hope that's given you a flavour of some of the information that you can find from Google search console and hopefully given you enough motivation to go and , if you're not using it , to get on with it and get registered and get in there for your sites and it's information that it's free . It really helps you diagnose problems , be able to see you know .

Is this a problem with Google ? Is it a problem in my site ? You know you've just got to really do it . There's no excuse for not , for not getting access to information . So get registered , get verified , get stuck into information and see what Google really thinks about your site . Thanks for listening . I really appreciate it . Please subscribe and share .

It really helps . Seo is not that hard is bought to you by keywordspeopleusecom . These solutions to finding the questions people ask online see why thousands of people use us every day . Try it today for free at keywordspeopleusecom . If you want to get in touch , have any questions , I'd love to hear from you .

I'm at channel five on Twitter , but you can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleusecom . Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard .