In Google analytics you can also access Google search console data under acquisition to see which pages are gaining traffic through search. However, sometimes you may want a bit of a deep dive into what search terms are useful for you and how successful certain pages are in the long-term. That’s where the Google Search Console website comes in handy, as it has more data for you to look at and analyse.
How To Start?
Sign up to Google Search Console by inputting your URL, and then you will need to verify that it’s your site. There’s a few different ways to verify your site is yours, but I personally use the Yoast plugin which I’ve talked about before which has an area to place your Google verification code in for Search. This is under ‘General’ settings in your Yoast plugin and is under ‘Webmaster Tools’. The code you need to use is what comes after content= in your HTML tag.
<meta name="google-site-verification" content="USE THIS PART" />
Alternatively, use the HTML tag and apply it to your website so that it applies on all pages on your site. You can do this my using your HTML editor and paste into the <head> section, it doesn’t matter where in this section as long as it’s within its brackets. If your site doesn’t have this section then you can create one, just make sure you close the code with </head>. You can use plugins like ‘Insert Headers and Footers’ if you’re not particularly HTML savvy – and there’s many other plugins that can be used. Make sure you don’t delete the code if you want to stay verified. Plus, if you use a plugin, remember that if you deactivate or delete it, your site will no longer be verified as well.
Also if you’ve already verified through Google Analytics, you can use that to verify as well. Make sure that the analytics tracking code is in the <head> section of your homepages code first, and then you’ll know if you’re ready for this option. Similar to the HTML tag, remember not to delete the code from your site after verification as this will de-verify your site.
Sitemap
First thing after set up is making sure you submit your sitemap. A sitemap organises all of your important information and how your site is organised into a file that search engines and web crawlers can read. It details what kind of content is available, metadata, images, video content and even how often your site is updated. Whilst you could appear in search results without this step – this is a way to ensure Google has the data that it needs to be more efficient when ranking search results.
To submit your sitemap, go to Index and sitemap and you’ll need to input the URL. Now I guess you’re asking where to find your sitemap? Well first you’ll need to make sure you have one. My xml sitemap is created through the Yoast plugin and there’s multiple other plugins that you could use as well.
Often the sitemap can be found at URL/sitemap.xml
Alternatively you can manually create a sitemap by using a sitemap generator. You will then need to upload the file to your website – which you can often do through your host or a FTP client. It can be uploaded into your public_html folder. This should then allow you to visit your sitemap at the above address if the file name is named sitemap.xml.
Now go back to Search Console and input your URL that should look like URL/sitemap.xml.
Performance
See your blogs performance on Google Search with clicks, impressions, CTR, position and top queries. You can choose which metrics are important to you by just clicking on the headers. You can also change the timeframe or the search type at the top. Search types means you can see whether you videos, images or web content is more or less popular on search engines. For example, when I compare images to web, my images get way more impressions, however they’re gaining a similar number of clicks so it’s not a huge issue for me as images generally have a lower CTR anyway.
If you’re aiming for better SEO, look at which queries are already leading impressions to your site and you can click on each of these queries to see which of your pages are being clicked on. If you’re in the beginning stages of SEO, this also gives you a quick overview to track your impressions and position to understand whether your posts are being seen through Google Search. Preferably you will want them on the first page as ‘the best place to hide a dead body is the second page of google’. Although don’t kick yourself if you’re not as there’s multiple factors that affect your rankings and you can’t always anticipate this.
URL Inspection
If you want to know if a certain page on your site has been indexed you can use URL Inspection. This will let you know if it’s on Google and whether it is mobile friendly and AMP available.
Coverage
See which pages Google has indexed or whether there’s any errors with your pages. You can check excluded posts, and make sure that what you want to be excluded is, but also if there’s any pages that are excluded that shouldn’t be. If there’s any errors, it will tell you here as well and you can try to find a solution.
Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag
Pages that include a ‘noindex’ tag are usually tagged this way for a reason. These pages are often archive pages like URL/2018 or a tag like URL/tag/fantasy. These are pages on your website that hold a lot of duplicate content – your snippet of a blog post may appear on 10+ pages because it’s in multiple tags, and categories and a date. So these will negatively affect SEO if they are indexed.
Alternate page with proper canonical tag
This is a page that is a duplicate of a page that Google recognises as canonical or ‘original’. For example AMP pages are important to have for better mobile usability, but each of those AMP pages will be excluded as they’re duplicate content and will negatively affect SEO if they are indexed.
Crawled – currently not indexed
The page was crawled by Google, but is not currently indexed. It may or may not be indexed in the future and there’s no need to resubmit this URL for crawling.
Mobile Usability and AMP
The increase in phones as a main tool to view the web has meant all websites need to be reactive to fit mobile screen. This means that your blog also needs to be fit for mobile. The mobile usability report shows you which pages may have errors when viewed on a mobile device, you can then work to fix these where possible. The same occurs in the AMP status report where you can view possible errors and work to fix them.
Links
If you’re currently trying to boost SEO by improving linking then this is the page for you. Both internal and external links are good for SEO and this gives a good overview of which pages have more links. You can see which pages other sites are linking to more than others, for example if one post is getting a lot more links it may be beneficial to write more content similar to that. It also shows you which websites are linking to you – this is important as the higher that sites SEO, the better it is for you. You can use the MOZ SEO Toolbar to check a site’s DA which is a ranking for SEO – the higher the ranking the better the SEO.
So what do you think of Google Search Console? And do you have any questions?
View Comments (7)
this looks a little outside the scope of what I can do right now (as a brand-new blogger using free Wordpress), but bookmarking for future reference!
Let me know if you have any questions when you come back! 😄
This is so helpful, thank you so much for sharing! I always get confused with these types of things! Imogen x http://www.imogenchloe.co.uk
Although it looks a bit gibberish right now ahah, it seems like something quite interesting to try someday ! Though since we're talking on "plug-in" here, can it even be done with a free wordpress ?
I'll nonetheless save it to look upon later aswell !
Bookmarking it for the future, I think I need to start by installing the Yoast plugin and see where to go from there!
Ooooooo I tried playing with this years ago but i got SUPER confused after the first few steps. I never went beyond that unfortunately, but maybe I’ll try again in the future.
Feel free to message me if you need any help with it in the future Sophia! x