Google Search Console: an asset for your SEO?
Google Search Console, is a free tool that allows you to analyze, monitor the performance of your site and highlight certain technical problems that it may have, in order to be able to make optimizations.
- Free tool from Google
- Convenient to quickly see errors on your site
- Complicated to use extensively
- The exclusion of certain data
Why use Google Search Console as an SEO tool?
As you will discover, the Google Search Console is a tool for indexing and optimizing visibility of a site. Let's go for a short explanation and a focus on these different functionalities.
What is Google Search Console?
Google Search Console (or GSC) is a tool offered by Google intended for anyone who has a website. Its main function is to allow users to monitor and optimize the visibility of their site in Google search results.
The GSC offers a wide range of tools and reports that allow you to understand and analyze how Google interprets and indexes your website. Among the information provided, you can find data on organic traffic, technical issues that may affect your positioning, or the keywords on which your pages are displayed in search results.
To summarize, the Google Search Console is an interesting tool for anyone looking to analyze and improve the performance of their site on Google.
The Google Search Console has many features for the SEO optimization of a site. Among them:
Les fonctionnalités de cet outil
The “performance in search results” section allows you to have detailed information on the traffic of your site: via which requests Internet users arrived on your site, what are the most visited pages, the number of clicks, impressions or even the average position.
It allows you to analyze a specific page on your site to check if it is well indexed by Google. This is an asset for detecting indexing errors.
You can submit your sitemap directly to Google! Practical to facilitate the indexing of your site. It also lets you know if Google hasn't visited your site recently.
Another feature of the Google Search Console is that you can test your robots.txt file. This ensures that Google can properly crawl and index your site.
It gives you an overview of the indexing status of your site by Google. It tells you what the indexing problems are and where they are located. Examples: 404 pages, excluded pages, etc.
This feature allows you to check if Google can correctly interpret the structured data on your site. It also gives you any concerns that there may be.
Link analysis
This feature analyzes your site to detect potential mobile usability problems and offers you solutions to solve them.
Discover our 3 favorite use cases of the Search Console, which we use to optimize the referencing of our sites!
Performance report
The performance report from the GSC provides information on the visibility and performance of your site in Google search results.
This tool offers several pieces of information:
- Number of pages indexed in the search results
- Average positions of your pages in the search results
- Click-through rate (CTR) on your pages
- Total number of impressions of your pages
These data are elements that allow you to evaluate and optimize your SEO strategy. They allow you to understand which search queries bring users to your site and which pages are the most performance/relevant for them. Another significant point that we appreciate is that the performance report can also indicate opportunities for improvement or optimization.
Did you know that? There are four types of performance reports, each focusing on a specific type of content:
- Web
- Images
- Videos
- News
These sub-reports allow you to measure your SEO visibility on each type of content, thus offering a more complete picture of your overall performance.
URL inspection
URL inspection is a key feature of the Google Search Console that allows you to thoroughly analyze a specific URL on your site. When you enter the URL to be inspected in the inspection search bar, the tool will provide you with valuable information about:
- Indexing the page: The tool will tell you if the URL is well indexed by Google or if it has indexing problems.
- Structured data: You can check if Google is able to correctly interpret the structured data on your page.
- Details specific to the page: such as videos or AMP pages linked to the URL.
At Sales Odyssey, we use this functionality to diagnose page issues and resolve potential indexing problems. To do this, simply click on the inspection icon that appears next to the URL, to get detailed information on the exploration, indexing, and delivery of our pages, directly from the Google index.
It is therefore crucial to use the URL inspection tool regularly to ensure that your pages are properly indexed and optimized for SEO.
Indexing, experience, and improvements
For us, these 3 features go together when you're on Search Console. Indeed, they allow you at a simple glance, and in the same place to see if there are technical corrections to be made to your site.
These are features that we use on a daily basis, whether for ourselves or for our customers. They allow us to optimize the sites. Here is a more concrete example: following the SEO audit of one of our customers, the Google Search Console allowed us to highlight important points to correct, such as:
- The missing structured data
- Visibility concerns
- The fact that there was much more mobile traffic, and therefore that the site had to be optimized on mobile to promote conversion
- The lack of performance of the site
- Errors in the sitemap
Following these analyze, we were able to provide complete and detailed feedback to our client so that he could implement the recommended optimizations, which had a positive impact on the performance of his site.
2 points that we like less
The exclusion of certain data
Google Search Console has a tendency to exclude low-volume search data from its results. This can be quite annoying when you want to work on these pages or optimize certain keywords.
The use of the GSC
We're not going to lie to each other, it's not a very complicated tool to use, but it's not easy either. What do we mean by that? Quite simply, there is no complete user manual for Search Console, so most people don't know all the possible features, which is a shame.
For example: Did you know that Google Search Console can allow you to see a mobile display bug? And yes! To do this, simply take a URL, test it, display the tested page to see the code and also a screenshot that shows us how Google sees our site.
Our opinion on Search Console as an SEO tool
Although presenting some areas for improvement to be implemented, the GSC is one of the tools SEO essentials. As we saw above, it offers a variety of features for the analysis and optimization of a site.
However, it should be noted that making optimal use of Search Console involves a certain learning curve. Indeed, the absence of a comprehensive user manual can make it difficult to discover all the available features.
However, once mastered, the Search Console provides interesting data to improve the visibility of your site. It is a tool that allows you to quickly identify and solve technical problems, optimize page indexing, and monitor site performance. Note that the Search Console transmits real data to the root of the site, unlike other platforms such as Google Analytics.
In conclusion, even if it has some areas for improvement, the Google Search Console remains a essential tool for SEO.
Google Search Console cost and installation
It is with great pleasure that we announce that the Google Search Console is a tool completely Free. In addition, its installation does not require special technical skills. To get started, simply go to the Search Console site, then 2 options are available to you:
- Domain option: Allows you to follow your site as a whole (http, https, with/without www, with any sub-domains). It is the most complete solution for managing a site.
- Other methods: Add an HTML tag to your home page, create a new DNS entry for your domain name, use your Google Analytics account, use your Google Tag Manager account.
So you can choose the method that best suits you based on your preferences and skills.
