To improve the user experience and facilitate access to various data, Google has implemented a new design for its Google Search Console service.
Discover in this article the advantages of this new design, and the importance of Google Search Console to optimize the performance of your website.
What is Google Search Console?
Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google that allows you to monitor, maintain and adjust your site in Google search results. You don’t need to sign up for Search Console to appear in Google’s search results, but Search Console helps you understand, and improve the way Google sees your site.
Why is Google Search Console changing its design?
Google said the design change is part of their ongoing efforts to improve accessibility and user experience. “We’re starting a journey to refresh the look and feel of Search Console,” Google wrote on Twitter. “Over the next few months, you’ll see small changes to the product in an effort to improve accessibility and the overall user experience. We hope you enjoy it!”
Many SEO experts use Search Console daily. The new-look seems to be fresh and clean which will make it easier for them to use the tool. Apart from its design, the functionality of Google Search Console has not been changed so far.
We’re starting a journey to refresh the look and feel of Search Console. Over the next few months you’ll see small changes in the product with a goal to improve accessibility and user experience in general. We hope you like it! pic.twitter.com/Seq0CUGxpP
— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) November 22, 2021
How to integrate your website into Google Search Console?
In order to connect your website to Google Search Console, follow these steps:
- Sign in to your Google Account. Make sure you are using your business account if it is a business website.
- Go to Google Webmaster Tools.
- Click on “Add a property”.
- Choose “Website” from the drop-down menu and enter your website URL. Be sure to use the exact URL that appears in the browser bar.
- Click on “Continue”.
- Choose a way to verify that you own your website (HTML file upload, domain name provider, HTML tag, GA tracking code or GTM container snippet).
- If your site supports both http:// and https://, add them as separate sites. You must also add each domain (for example, https://eminence.ch, and https://eminence.ch).
→ What is Search Console insights?
What is the purpose of Google Search Console?
The Search Console offers the following tools and reports:
The performance report:
You can choose the type of search among web, image, or video, and compare them. It is possible to change the date tab, which is customizable, the analysis period can cover up to the last 16 months.
You then have 4 types of filters:
- The total number of clicks in the search results.
- Total number of impressions: impressions communicate the number of times users were able to see your ad in the Google results pages.
- Average click-through rate (CTR): This is the percentage of clicks your links generated when they appeared in Google’s results.
- The average position of your pages: the lower this number is, the better you are positioned on the keywords you are interested in.
The coverage report
This report helps you identify problems and bugs that your site may encounter. It contains 4 sections:
- The error section includes the list of URLs that Google could not index because they contain errors. You can view the details for each error to understand its origin.
- The section Valid with warnings: where you can find the URLs indexed but blocked by the robots.txt file
- The Valid in green section: this section contains the URLs that are indexed and valid, that is to say, they do not have any anomaly according to Google.
- The Excluded section: unlike the Errors section, the Excluded section contains the URLs that are not indexed voluntarily (i.e., you have taken an action so that they are not indexed).
The URL inspection tool:
This tool allows you to have information about the page studied, such as its mobile ergonomics and AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) errors, its indexing status, or data related to structured data.
You can also ask Google to crawl an inspected URL by clicking on “Request an indexation”.
Netlinking:
To manage your netlinking in Search Console, you have four types of reports available:
- A report that looks at the top landing pages. All the pages on your site that have external links pointing to them.
- A second report that focuses on the main originating sites. In this report, you will find the source of the sites that share your links the most.
- The third report is for the top anchor texts. This report shows you the anchors used to link to you.
- As for the fourth report, it is for the internal links of the main landing pages: the Google Search Console shows you the number of internal pages that point to each page of your site.
The Core Web Vitals
These scores are based on the Core Web Vitals criteria, and Google Search Console gives information about each score:
- LCP (Largest Content Painful), which is the loading speed.
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift), which represents the visual stability of the page.
- FID (First Input Delay), which is the delay of interactivity.
It is essential today to meet both the recommendations of search engines and expectations in terms of user experience. This mix is not easy to satisfy. That’s why Search Console is essential since it allows you to improve the quality of your site’s SEO . Complementary to the Google Analytics tool, all its features will allow you to boost your SEO, and optimize the performance of your site on the web.
If you need assistance in setting up your GSC account or in its use, do not hesitate to contact our experts.
Do you need assistance in setting up your Google Search Console account or in its use