There’s no harm in purchasing premium accounts for well-known SEO tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Deepcrawl. But are you just getting started with search engine optimization? If so, start with Google Search Console before you spend any money. Do you already have premium accounts but aren’t using Google Search Console yet? Then you’re missing out. Mark my words: after reading this article, you’ll make Google Search Console your top priority for the coming month.
Fortunately, it’s easy to get started with Google Search Console. Create a Google Search Console account at https://search.google.com/search-console/welcome.
First, you’ll need to sign in with your Google account. Next, select “Add Property.” Under the “Domain” option, enter your website. You’ll likely see the screen below:
Copy this code and send it to your web developer, or add it yourself to your DNS records through the provider where you registered your domain. This is because the so-called TXT record needs to be added to your DNS. Once you or your web developer has done this, it takes about an hour on average for your Google Search Console account to go live.
Another option is to verify using a URL prefix. Here, you enter the full URL, including https://. For example, https://smartranking.nl/. You then have five ways to verify your ownership:
Your crawl budget is very important. You don’t want to waste it on irrelevant pages. Therefore, make sure to submit an up-to-date XML sitemap to Google Search Console. The submitted XML sitemap should only contain indexable pages. So, do not add pages with a noindex tag to XML sitemaps.
Under the “Coverage” menu item, you can check how many pages of your website Google has indexed. Under “Sitemaps,” check the current number of pages in the sitemap and compare it to the statistics below. If there’s a significant discrepancy, there may be an issue with indexing, and you might have crawl errors or, for example, duplicate content issues.
It’s also possible that Google has discovered pages that are indexable but aren’t included in your XML sitemap. In that case, it’s important to determine whether you need to add the pages to your XML sitemap or whether they’re accidentally indexable. Take action based on this finding.
Coverage issues caused by crawl errors can undermine your SEO efforts. First, you’re wasting your precious crawl budget, and in many cases, other pages still contain internal links to your pages that have crawl errors. In addition, every page builds up a bit of authority, and a crawl error causes you to lose that page’s authority.
Under the “Coverage” menu item, select the “Error” checkbox at the top (highlighted in red). You’ll then immediately see a list of errors. In the example below, you can see what kinds of errors these might be. They range from server errors and 404 errors to pages that have been assigned a noindex tag, whether intentionally or not.
Resolve these errors as much as possible by using redirects, removing redirect loops (multiple consecutive redirects), or taking other actions.
Google Search Console also has a quirk. Many errors aren’t necessarily listed under “Errors” by Google. Therefore, always check the “Excluded” tab as well. Many errors listed under “Crawl Anomalies,” “Soft 404,” and “Not Found (404)” are also broken pages.
In addition, pages listed under “Duplicate page without a user-selected canonical version” and “Duplicate page, submitted URL not selected as canonical” are pages with duplicate content. It is important to implement optimizations for these as well.
There is sometimes a difference in your performance on mobile devices versus desktop. Google already uses “mobile-first indexing” for virtually all websites. However, there are still times when your performance differs. For example, this might be because a meta title or meta description is truncated on mobile devices, or because the mobile SERP looks completely different from the desktop SERP.
That’s why it’s helpful to check Google Search Console. For all your search results and views, you can apply the “Mobile” or “Desktop” filter. Use this filter and focus primarily on the traffic that converts well for you.
Waiting for a new page you’ve written to be indexed is frustrating. Unfortunately, waiting is something we have to do a lot of the time. Fortunately, Google Search Console has a handy feature that lets you have Google crawl a URL immediately.
Google often indexes the page on the same day. This ensures that a new page is included in the SERP more quickly or that SEO optimizations are processed faster.
At the top of Google Search Console, you’ll see a gray bar with a search field. Paste the URL you want Google to index into this field and press Enter. Google will immediately retrieve the data from its database for that URL. Then, use the “REQUEST INDEXING” button to request that Google reindex the page.
In Google Search Console, you can see at a glance what your overall link profile looks like via the “Links” menu item. You’ll immediately see which pages receive the most internal and external backlinks. You’ll also see which domains (and how many) are linking to your website, as well as the most commonly used anchor texts. That’s a huge amount of data!
Find out how many external and internal links your most important pages are getting, and develop an action plan to acquire backlinks through link building. Just always remember: start with on-page SEO. So if your on-page SEO isn’t in order yet, that’s the first thing you should focus on.
Using the “Export External Links” feature, you can export the backlinks indexed by Google. This lets you immediately see which pages contain a link to your site. This is an important feature for identifying spam links and taking action against them by submitting a backlink disavow request.
With structured data—a Schema.org code embedded in your website’s HTML—Google gains more information about your website and its pages. Google uses this information to enhance your search results with rich snippets. The most common types of structured data include breadcrumbs, reviews, FAQs (see example below), author, address, price, and duration (e.g., for a recipe).
In Google Search Console, you can easily see which pages you’ve applied structured data to and whether that code is error-free. You can also see how often the various categories appear in search results and how often they’re clicked on. To do this, go to the “Search Results” submenu and click “Search Formatting.” Here, you’ll see the results broken down by category. You can click on each result to view more details.
To check the status of your structured data snippets, review the various structured data types under the “Optimizations” menu item. You can then fix any errors in the structured data code on your website.
Google Search Console contains a wealth of information. It would be going too far to delve deeper into this topic in this article. The real data junkies will love all the possibilities Search Console has to offer. You can perform a relatively simple data analysis by, for example, looking at which search terms have a high CTR for specific pages. For example, if you have a 5% CTR and a low ranking for a search term with 1,000 impressions, and a 1% CTR and a high ranking for a search term with 4,000 impressions, it’s worth focusing your content more on the first keyword. Despite the low ranking, you’re already getting a significant amount of traffic from that search term. So don’t just focus on the number of impressions—look a step further!
We hope these tips will help you further improve your search engine visibility. By applying the tips and information above, you’ll be taking solid and important steps toward greater SEO success!