Why and How to Use Google Search Console in Your Marketing

Search Engine Optimization…the ever-changing beast you’ve spent hours pouring over and working to reign in. While you may be using the right keywords, H2 tags, Alt tags, etc., to rank higher on Google search results, what if we told you there’s one simple tool you may not be using, and it’s holding you back from being crawled by Google? Enter Google Search Console.

This incredibly powerful free service that gives you a great deal of information about your website and the people who visit it. We’ve enjoyed using this incredible engine to help our own business and in this post, we will show you what Google Search Console is, why it’s important, and how to use it to benefit your business.

Google Search Console is a collection of tools and reports that allow webmasters and non-webmasters alike to monitor, manage, and improve their websites. It is a web service provided by Google free of charge, that gives you information about your site and the people who visit it. Using Google Search Console can truly make optimizing a lot easier.

Google’s Search Console offers to help you monitor and maintain your site’s organic search presence and is often your best friend when it comes to maintaining good standing with Google. Search Console makes sure that Google has access to your content, helps you monitor spam issues to keep your site clean, can help you submit new content to crawl, and allows you to remove old content.

This tool acts as an official communication channel in which Google communicates with individual site owners. By having a registered account, Google can send webmasters information about site issues, errors, or even penalties.

It also acts as a control center to reveal how Google sees particular pages and URLs on your site and then allows you to submit and monitor XML sitemaps all while evaluating errors you may have previously missed.

It lastly acts as a performance dashboard, telling you more about how your website is showing and performing in search results through mobile usability reports and click-through tracking.

Taking this step tells Google that you are the website owner, webmaster, or another authorized user and gives you access to all of that good info we listed above. You must have a Google account to log into the Search Console. We recommend using the same log-in you use to sign into your Google Analytics account, as it will be beneficial later in the process. Once you’re logged in, paste your URL in the box next to the red “Add Property” button.

After adding your website, you must verify it in order to access the reports. Start at the Search Console dashboard, choose “Manage Site” then “Verify this Site.” From here, choose “Alternate Methods,” then you have one of four options to complete the verification:

1. If you have experience working with HTML, you can upload an html file.
2. If you are the owner of your site’s domain, you can verify using your domain name provider.
3. If you use Google Tag Manager, you can verify via Google Tags.
4. If you have already have Google Analytics setup, the easiest method is to use Google Analytics Tracking ID. Simply click the “Verify” button, and you’re ready to go!

Sitemaps give search engines and web crawlers important information about what type of content you have available and how your website is organized. Adding a sitemap to Google Search Console will ensure that Google has all of the information it needs to properly find content on your site and index it more quickly.

If you don’t already have a sitemap set-up, you need to create one. If you’re using WordPress, install the Yoast SEO plugin, which will generate an automatic sitemap for you. If you aren’t using WordPress, there are plenty of other online tools that will automatically create a sitemap for you.

Once created, go to your Search Console dashboard, select “Index”, then “Sitemaps.” From here, paste in your URL and click “Submit.” It takes a few days for Google to pull in the data, so check back in every day until the reports start getting pulled.

Once Google Search Console begins generating information about your site, there are a few key data points we recommend analyzing right away:

A technical but valuable tab is the Index coverage tab. This section shows how many pages are and are not in the index of Google since the last update and what errors and warnings caused problems for indexing.

Check this tab regularly to see what errors and warnings appear on your website. However, you also get notifications when Google has found new errors. When you get such a notification you can check the error in more detail here.

By clicking on the link, you can analyze the error more in depth to see what specific URLs are affected. When you’ve fixed the error you can mark it as fixed to make sure Google will test the URL again.

You most likely have authorized pages within your website that you don’t want indexed by search engines. In order to signal to Google which pages these are, you can create a robots.txt file, which provides boundaries for search engine crawlers and tells them what they can and can’t crawl.

With Google Search Console you can check on your robots.txt file to see exactly what these boundaries are. To do so, log into Search Console and pull up your dashboard, then choose “Crawl” followed by “robots.txt Tester.” From here, you can see your robots.txt file, find errors and make changes.

If you’ve made changes to your website, you may notice that they don’t show up in Google search results. Search Console allows you to notify Google of the changes and get your updates indexed correctly. Simply go to your Search Console dashboard, select the page you need to submit, click on “Crawl” then “Fetch as Google.” From here, enter the full URL of the page you want indexed, the click “Fetch and Render.”

This process may take a few minutes, and once completed, click “Submit to Index.” If you’re only submitting one specific page, then choose “Crawl Only This URL” but if you want to index the entire site, choose “Crawl This URL and its Direct Links.” Your updates should catalog your new content within just a couple of days.

Although Google Analytics and Search Console seem very similar at first, they have distinct qualities, and it’s crucial that you allow them to work together. Google Analytics allows you to see who is visiting your site (how many visitors you’re getting, how they’re finding your site, how much time they spend on your site, and where they’re coming from); while Google Search Console gives you more internal information (who is linking to you, if there are problems on your site, and which keywords your site is appearing for in search results).

When the two accounts are linked together, you can pull very insightful reports that will help you enhance your website. How do you link them? In the upper right hand corner of your Search Console dashboard, click on the gear icon, then click “Google Analytics Property.” Choose the Google Analytics account you want to be linked to your Search Console and click “Save” and you’re done!

Once you have Google Console properly set up for your website, you and your team will have a whole new wealth of data to dig into. This is a great foundation for ensuring that Google is successfully crawling your site. Explore the reports, analyze how people are interacting with your site, and fix errors you never would have known existed.