Google Search Console

Connect Your Site to Google Search Console

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Google Search Console gives you an incredible amount of information about how your site is doing in search. It is a free tool that shows how your site is doing in the eyes of Google. You can also see how searchers see your site in the search results.

Every website owner should use Google Search Console to:

  • Get information on keywords and queries that bring traffic
  • Find out which rich results your content has earned
  • Discover how your mobile site is doing

How to Connect Your Site to Google Search Console

Adding your website to Google Search Console is generally quick and easy. Google outlines the 5 steps.

You must own the site or have permission granted by the owner in order to add a site to your Search Console account. You can have up to 1,000 properties in your Search Console account.

Using Google Search Console

After you’ve signed up for Search Console, you’ll receive emails if any unusual events occur with your website. These emails alert you if your website has been hacked and if there are problems indexing your site. Google will also email if your site violates any search quality guidelines. All of these emails have links that guide you on the issues as well as recommended corrective actions.

You can access your Search Console dashboard any time to:

  • Check for any technical issues or errors impacting your search visibility
  • Track your appearance in search results and clicks
  • Learn your searched keywords and ranks

Tools and Reports

Many reports and tools are available in Google Search Console. All of these give website owners good insight into how Google sees their sites, and therefore why their site may rank well, or poorly. While we still can’t know the ranking algorithm, search console gives pretty good insight.

These are some of the more useful reports and tools.

Performance Reports

Explore how many people saw and clicked on your site in Google Search, what queries showed your site in Search, and your average search position. Data includes clicks, impressions, click through rate (CTR), and position for your site, as well as query strings that users were searching for. Data can be grouped by page URL, country of query, or device type.

URL Inspection Tool

Use this report to troubleshoot any crawling errors that Google encountered on your site. You can reach this tool by clicking into a specific URL in the Coverage report. You can also use this report to fix and retest a page before resubmitting the page for indexing.

Page Indexing Report

Shows index status for all the pages in your site. Pages are grouped according to whether they are or can be indexed, and a description of why they could or could not be indexed.

Sitemaps Report

Check to see if Google could process your sitemaps, or use for debugging, if Google can’t seem to find new pages on your site.

Removals Tool

Allows you to temporarily block URLs on your site from appearing in Google Search, or to clear the search snippet until the next document crawl. Also shows a history of your block requests, as well as a history of user requests to mark pages on your site as adult-only.

Page Experience

See what percentage of URLs on your site Google considers to be a good page experience for your users. This is a combination of fast page availability, good mobile experience, and support for HTTPS.

Core Web Vitals Report

Check how well your pages perform for your users. This let’s you know what pages need to be fixed.