If you’ve built your website yourself on a shoestring budget, you may not even have heard of Google Search Console. Or perhaps your web developer mentioned it but you’ve been frightened off by the sound of too much tech?
Google Search Console is a completely free tool by Google and, let me reassure you, its main features can be used and understood by anyone, not just SEO professionals.
For websites of any size, however small, GSC is your direct line to Google, showing you exactly how it sees your site. It provides insights into your website’s health and data that comes directly from Google itself on the performance of specific pages.
What can Google Search Console do for my Business?
There are two areas in GSC that are a good place to start for small business owners:
1) The Performance Report: understanding your website visitors & the exact phrases people search before finding you
The Performance report tracks organic impressions (how many a page on your site has been shown in the search results for a query), clicks and average ranking position. More impressions mean more potential customers are seeing you. More clicks mean those impressions are leading to people clicking through to your site.
A recently new feature allows you to add an annotation directly onto the graph, so if you make a change on your website and you want to remember when you did it so you can see if it had an impact, you can make that note here.
Below the graph, you’ll see the specific keywords that your website is showing up for, so you can check how well your content is working. You can also then drill down into which are your best performing pages for impressions and clicks, and which keywords are working well on those pages.
What’s important to note here is that these keywords are literally the phrases being typed by people into Google. So, if you’re a florist in Daventry and you see that you have very few impressions for “Daventry Florist”, it’s clear your website is not working for you. In this way, it helps you identify the weaker pages on your site and where you need to apply your focus.
2) The Pages report: gain an overview of your site’s technical health:
The Pages report is one of the most important sections of GSC that every website owner should be aware of. Particularly if you have a new site, you’ll want to know how many pages have been indexed by Google – that means, the search engine has discovered the page and it’s ready to show up in search results – great news! If however, someone has accidentally left the “noindex” tag on an important page that hides it from Search Engines, it will show up here. If your site is a few years old, you may also have broken pages (404s) or broken links that are causing a poor user experience. Google Search Console will tell you where they are so you can go and fix them.
How to set up Google Search Console
- You’ll need to be logged in to a Google profile that you use for your business. Important – if you already have Google Analytics set up and Google Tag Manager ensure you use the same account.
- Begin by going to https://search.google.com/search-console
- If you see a Start button, go ahead and click that. You’ll then be at a welcome page and a prompt to “select a property type”. The Domain type option on the left provides you with a full picture of how your website is performing. Enter your domain without the https and any trailing slashes and click continue to get instructions. The technical part here is you need to log into your hosting provider to enter a TXT file. I recommend contacting your provider’s customer support as they will probably have a step by step guide on how to do this on their platform, or their team will be able to help you.
The other method, URL prefix, allows you to focus the reporting on sections of your site, so just your blog for example. If you’re using this method for the site as a whole, be careful to enter the correct version – www. or non-www. / http or https. Press ‘Continue’ again and you’ll see your options for verification. A lot of people find this method easier because you can verify using your Google Analytics account or by pasting code directly into the <head> section of your site.
For more details on verification, see Google’s guide: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9008080
