Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools)

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a free service that allows bloggers and SEOs to manage and monitor their site’s performance in Google Search. It was formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools.

Google Search Console provides SEOs and bloggers with insights into how Google crawls, indexes, and displays their website in search results. It also notifies you of potential issues and errors that may prevent Google from crawling and indexing your content.

Google Search Console provides you with several details about your site and content, including:

• The index status of your content
• The position of your content in search results
• The search queries your site appeared for
• The impressions and clicks your website received from Google Search
• The sites that link to your site

Besides providing these details on its dashboard, Google Search Console also sends you email notifications when Google encounters spam, indexing, and other issues that may prevent it from indexing your content.

Getting Started with Google Search Console

To get started, you will need to set up a Google Search Console account. If you already have one, you may also want to add other users. We will show you how to do both below.

1 How to Set Up Google Search Console

Head to the Google Search Console login page and click Start now. 

Once done, log in to your Google account. Google Search Console will present you with multiple verification methods. You can refer to this guide on verifying your site on Google Search Console. 

2 How to Add a User to Google Search Console

At one point or another, you may need to add other users to your Google Search Console account. To do that, head to your Google Search Console dashboard and click Settings. 

Next, click Users and permissions. 

Now, click Add User. 

Once done, enter the Gmail account of the new user. You will also select their permission type from the available options:

• Owner: The user has total control over the Google Search Console account, just like you. They can add and remove users, adjust settings, and view all data and reports.
• Full: The user has nearly the same level of control as the owner. They can perform almost all actions within the Google Search Console, except for a few, like adding new users.
• Restricted: Users with restricted permission have limited access to certain features and data in Google Search Console. They can view selected reports and data, but cannot change their settings or manage other users.

Once done, click Add.

Options Available in Google Search Console

Google Search Console provides analytics data and options that allow you to view, inspect, and modify your site’s performance on Google. Let us address the available options one after another. 

Note: The tabs, reports, and options displayed in Google Search Console will often differ depending on the content you publish, the issues Google detects, and the metrics Google gathers from your site. 

1 Overview

The Overview page summarizes the reports and key metrics informing you of your site’s performance. It contains the links or summary of several reports, including: 

• Search Console Insights
• Performance 
• Indexing
• Experience
• Enhancements

Search Console Insights

The Search Console Insights provides a comprehensive report of your content’s performance. It combines data from Google Search Console and Google Analytics and shows you actionable information, including:

• Your content’s performance over the last 28 days
• Which of your content is receiving more traffic
• Your most popular content over the previous 28 days
• How your visitors found your site

The Search Console Insights does not display any report in the Search Console. Instead, you will click the Explore your Insights. Once done, it will redirect you to the Search Console Insights tool. 

Performance

The Performance section shows the number of visitors that clicked on your site from Google results pages over the last three months. This section is a summary of the Performance report.

You can open the Performance report by clicking Full report, as shown below. 

Indexing

The Indexing section shows you the number of indexed and unindexed pages on your site. It also shows you the number of pages indexed on a specific day. This section is a summary of the page indexing report.

You can click Full report to open the Page indexing report. 

Experience

The Experience section provides insights into how visitors interact with and perceive your site. It includes detailed reports on your Core Web Vitals and HTTP and HTTPS protocol usage.

Enhancements

The Enhancements section provides insights and suggestions to improve your site’s performance and appearance in search results. 

2 Insights

The Insights tab provides an overview of your content’s performance on search results pages. It focuses on how users discover and engage with your content.

The Insights tab focuses explicitly on content-based metrics and does not include technical SEO issues. So, it displays multiple performance and engagement-based metrics, including:

• Clicks
• Impressions
• Your content 
• Queries leading to your site
• Top countries 
• Additional traffic sources

The tab also includes a timeline dropdown that allows you to select a timeline between the last 7 days, 28 days, and 3 months. With that said, let us briefly explain the data that is displayed.

Clicks

The clicks represent the number of times users clicked your site on Google Search results pages.

Impressions

The impressions show the number of times your site appeared on Google Search results pages. 

Your Content

This section contains a summary of your site’s top-performing pages. It displays its insights in three categories, including top, trending up, and trending down.

• Top: Shows the pages that received the highest number of clicks
• Trending up: Shows the pages that recently earned more clicks compared to a previous period
• Trending down: Shows the pages that recently lost clicks compared to an earlier period

Queries Leading to Your Site

The queries leading to your site section display the search terms that brought users to your website. The report is structured into three categories: top, trending up, and trending down. 

• Top: This shows the queries that generated the most clicks
• Trending up: This shows the queries that are now bringing in more clicks than before
• Trending down: This shows the queries that are bringing in fewer clicks than before

Top Countries

The top countries section displays the countries from which your clicks originate. 

Additional Traffic Sources 

The additional traffic sources section shows the other ways people reach your site, other than the Google Search results page. Some common sources you may find here include Google Discover, image search, video search, and news search. 

3 Performance

The Performance report provides insights into the clicks and impressions your site received on Google search results pages. It reports on several metrics, including:

• Total clicks: The number of times your pages were clicked on in search results pages
• Total impressions: The number of times your pages appeared on search results pages
• Average CTR (Click-through Rate): The percentage of impressions that resulted in a click
• Average position: The average ranking position of your pages on search results pages

The report also contains several options to filter the specific analytics displayed. For example, you can filter reports according to where they appeared on the search results page (Web, Image, Video, and News). 

The report also includes a search appearance filter, which enables you to view specific traffic data. Available options include:

• Translated results: Shows clicks and impressions you receive when Google translates your page’s title and snippet into the user’s language
• Android app: Tracks traffic from content linked to your Android app through App Indexing
• Videos: Measures the performance of your content when it appears in video search results features, such as video carousels or rich snippets
• Discussion forums: Reports clicks and impressions for content that Google identified as forum posts or discussions
• AMP non-rich results: Shows traffic for AMP pages that appear in search without rich result enhancements

You can also filter the performance report by date to view data within timelines ranging from the past 24 hours to up to the last 16 months. You can also create a custom timeline or filter the report using multiple parameters, including the visitor’s device, query, page viewed, and country. 

4 URL Inspection

The URL Inspection tool allows you to examine and analyze individual URLs on your site. Clicking the URL Inspection option will redirect you to the URL Inspection tool at the top of the Search Console. 

The URL Inspection tool provides you with insights into how your pages are indexed, how they appear in search results, and whether there are any issues or errors that may impact their visibility or performance. 

Here, you can enter any URL on your site into the tool, which will return a report on the page’s status. This provides you with a series of information split across multiple sections, including:

• The indexing status of the page
• A summary of the page indexing report
• Enhancements and experiences detected on the page

Indexing Status

The indexing status informs you whether a URL has been indexed or not. If the URL is indexed and on Google, you will see a “URL is on Google message,” as shown below.

The field also contains multiple options, including:

• Test Live URL: This allows you to view the page as Google sees it
• Request Indexing: This allows you to request Google to index the page

Page Indexing

The Page indexing section summarizes the page indexing report. At the top is the URL’s crawling and indexing situation. This informs you whether the page has been crawled, crawled but not indexed, or crawled and indexed.

You can click the page indexing report for more insights into the page’s index status. 

Some data you should look out for include:

• Last crawl: Lists the last date and time the URL was crawled
• Crawled allowed: Specifies whether Googlebot is allowed to crawl the page
• Page fetch: Specifies whether Google can fetch the page
• Indexing: Specifies whether Google is allowed to index the page
• User-declared canonical: Lists the canonical URL that you specified to Google
• Google-selected canonical: Lists the URL that Google declared as canonical

Enhancements & Experience

The Enhancements & Experience section displays crucial information about the page, including its HTTPs status and the structured data present on it. You can click on any report for further insights. 

5 Indexing

The Indexing dropdown contains multiple reports and options, including Pages, Sitemaps, and Removals. Depending on the content on your site, it may also contain additional reports, such as Videos. To view it, click the Indexing dropdown.

We will now explain the available entries below.

6 Pages

The Pages report provides insights into the indexing situation of your pages. Here, you can view the pages Google has indexed, the pages Google did not index, and why some of your pages are unindexed. It is among the reports provided in the Indexing dropdown.

Click View data about indexed pages to view some of the indexed pages on your site. However, note that the report is limited to 1000 pages. This means the data will not display all your indexed pages if you have more than 1000 pages. 

7 Sitemaps

The Sitemaps option allows you to submit a sitemap to Google. It also provides you with insights into the sitemaps you already submitted to Google. It is one of the options provided in the Indexing dropdown. 

The status of the sitemap will vary depending on its crawl condition.

• Success: Google was able to crawl the sitemap without issues
• Couldn’t fetch: Google could not crawl the sitemap due to some issues
• Sitemap has x errors: Google partially crawled the sitemap, but could not complete the crawl because it encountered some issues

You can click on a sitemap to gather more insights into it. 

Once clicked, the sitemap report will display multiple reports about the sitemap, including the number of times Google read it and the number of URLs Google discovered using it. 

8 Removals

The Removal and SafeSearch reports tool allows you to manage the SafeSearch filters and remove pages from Google search results pages. It also provides the status of the pages you requested Google remove from its results pages. 

The Removal and SafeSearch reports tool is among the reports displayed in the Indexing dropdown.

The Removals section contains three fields: 

• Temporary removals
• Outdated content
• SafeSearch filtering

Temporary Removals

The Temporary Removals option allows you to request Google to remove pages from your site. You can click New Request to ask Google to remove your content or description snippet from search results. 

It is crucial to note that Google will remove the page for a period of six months. In the case of the description snippet, it will be removed until Google recrawls the page. 

Outdated Content

The Outdated Content field shows you the removal status of old and irrelevant content you requested Google to remove from your site. The data is displayed for URLs whose removals were requested using the Refresh Outdated Content from Google Search tool. 

SafeSearch Filtering

The SafeSearch Filtering field lists the pages that contain adult or inappropriate content. The URLs listed here are from reports submitted to Google using the Report inappropriate content tool. Google reviews content reported using the tool and lists the ones it decides are not family-friendly on this page. 

9 Experience

The Experience dropdown in Google Search Console shows how users perceive the overall usability of your site. The dropdown includes multiple reports, including Core Web Vitals and HTTPS. We will now explain the available reports below.

10 Core Web Vitals

The Core Web Vitals report provides you with insights into the performance of your site. It is among the reports provided in the Experience dropdown and is gathered from real-life users. This report is split into smartphone and desktop reports. 

The Core Web Vitals report is based on three metrics: 

• Largest Contentful Paint: Measures how quickly the page loads
• Cumulative Layout Shift: Measures how much the content on the page shifts as page resources like text and images load
• Interaction to Next Paint: Measures how long it takes the resources on the page to provide feedback indicating a user interaction was successful

The report will contain a status indicating whether the URL’s Core Web Vitals need to be improved. A page can have one of three URL statuses:

• Poor
• Need improvement
• Good

You should know that all three metrics must be “good” for the entire URL to be considered good. If two metrics report good while the third is poor, the URL will be listed as poor. 

11 HTTPS

The HTTPS report shows you the number of HTTP and HTTPS pages on your site. It is among the reports provided in the Experience dropdown, and only reports pages that Google has indexed. 

For reference, Google recommends serving your pages over HTTPs and will often serve the HTTPs version of a page when both versions are available. 

12 Enhancements

The Enhancements dropdown highlights the additional features that Google detects on your site. These features enhance your site’s usability and appearance on search engine results pages.

The Enhancements dropdown is only visible when Google has detected at least one enhancement on your site. Breadcrumbs are one common enhancement you will find here. We will discuss it below.

13 Breadcrumbs

The breadcrumbs report helps you to identify the valid and invalid breadcrumbs that Google has detected on your site. It is among the reports included in the Enhancements dropdown.

14 Security & Manual Actions

The Security & Manual Actions dropdown displays the security issues Google has detected on your site, along with the manual action penalties imposed against your site.

This dropdown contains two reports: Manual actions and Security issues. We will explain them below.

15 Manual Actions

The Manual actions report lists the manual actions that have been applied to your site. Google only issues a manual action after a human reviewer concludes that a site has engaged in activities that violate its guidelines. 

16 Security Issues

The Security issues report lists the security issues that Google has identified on your site. 

17 Links

The Links report contains the details of the backlinks pointing to your site. The reports are split into External links and Internal links. 

External Links

The external links report provides insights into the backlinks you receive from other sites. The insights provided include:

• Top linked pages: Lists the webpages that receive the most backlinks
• Top linking sites: Lists the sites that link back to you the most
• Top linking text: Displays the most common anchor text used by sites linking to you
• Top linking sites for a linking page: Shows the top sites that link to a specific page on your site. This only displays for pages included in the “top linked pages” report
• Backlinks from a given site to a given page: This shows the backlinks a specific page on your site receives from a specific site

Internal Links

The internal links report reports on the internal links on your site. The insights provided include:

• Top linked pages from within your own site: This shows the pages that receive the most links from other pages on your site
• Which pages link to a given page: This shows the pages that link to another page on your site

18 Achievements

The Achievements tab in Google Search Console displays milestone badges and goals your site has earned or is progressing toward earning. This helps you to track your growth in a visual and motivating way.

The tab displays the milestones in two sections: In progress and Achieved.

• In progress: This shows milestones your site is working toward, but yet to reach
• Achieved: This shows the milestones your site has already reached

19 Settings

The settings option provides you with insights into your existing settings and allows you to modify the settings of your Google Search Console account. It also contains your robots.txt and crawl stats reports. 

3 Ways to Improve SEO Using the Google Search Console

The Google Search Console enables you to upload crucial data to Google and identify existing or possible issues affecting your SEO. Here are a few ways to use the Search Console to improve your SEO.

1 Upload a Sitemap to Google

From your Google Search Console dashboard, head to Sitemaps. 

Once done, paste your sitemap file path into the available field and click Submit. 

Google will show a success message indicating it received your sitemap. 

2 Request Google to Index Your Content

If you publish a new post or update an existing one, you will want Google to index it as soon as possible. To do that, click the URL inspection tool and enter the URL of the page you want to index. 

Google will return with a page showing its index status. A new page may be unindexed, while an existing page should likely be indexed. 

In either case, click Request Indexing.

Google will check if the page can be indexed. If it is indexable, it will display a success message, as shown below. 

3 Identify and Fix Indexing Issues

To identify the unindexed pages on your site, head to Pages from your Google Search Console dashboard. 

You will be presented with the indexed and unindexed pages on your site. Scroll down to the Why pages aren’t indexed field. Here, you will see a list of the unindexed pages on your site and why the pages are unindexed.

You should click on any reason for more insights into why the pages were unindexed. However, you should know that you can only fix issues if the source is listed as Website. Sources listed as Google systems are from Google and cannot be resolved by you. 

This is an overview of what a details page looks like. 

You can then proceed to fix these pages on your site. Once you have fixed all pages affected by an issue, return to the details page for that issue and click Validate Fix to inform Google that you have fixed the issue. 

Thereafter, you can monitor the validation status from the Validation row. For example, this changed from Not Started to Started after we fixed the issue and validated the fix.