Google Search Console: the complete SEO guide

In SEO, the urgency is to spot site problems quickly. Those issues hit your performance and your visibility in search engines directly.

How does Google crawl your site to push it to the top of the results pages? That is exactly what Google Search Console lets you watch.

Google Search Console: the essential tool for monitoring your SEO

Google Search Console is the latest version of Google Webmaster Tools, a free product that lets site owners review or act on how Google indexes their site.

The console makes organic search easier to improve thanks to the data it collects and analyzes, and to the official services it provides.

Today, in SEO, you cannot skip this tool. Web professionals know how useful it is for analyzing a site’s visibility on Google. They also use it to send Google requests about how they want the engine to treat their site.

Search Console recently got a visual refresh and now offers a simpler, more graphic interface.

First login to Google Search Console: how to get started

Like Google Analytics, Search Console collects a site’s data continuously once it is set up. You can look back at the data it has recorded, as far as the date the property (the site being analyzed) was created.

You can study and compare data over shorter or longer periods (1 week, 1 month, 1 year, and so on), depending on how much history you have.

Set up Google Search Console

To start Search Console analysis for your site, sign in to Google Search Console first.

Click Add a property (a red button in the old interface, and a link in the dropdown menu in the new one).
Enter the URL of the site you want to add to your analyses on the platform.
So far that is simple, and anyone could do it. To keep strangers out of your site statistics and confirm that you are the administrator, Google Search Console requires verification. You prove to Google that you can access confidential site data (the host, the server, Analytics, which itself requires a code on the site, and so on).

Verify your administrator status before accessing the data

Search Console offers several verification methods. The method Google recommends is to upload an HTML file to the site. That action requires you to edit the site’s code, which is enough to show Google that you own it.

If you find that method time-consuming or too complex, you can pick another verification option from this list:

Adding an HTML meta tag on your homepage. The tag must stay permanently. Do not remove the code once verification succeeds. If Google cannot find the tag, it sends error details in Search Console.
Contacting your domain name provider: your host then attests that you own the site, plus any associated subdomains and directories. Pick your provider from a list and follow the steps to create a DNS TXT or CNAME record.
If you have already connected your site to Google Analytics, the process is simpler, because you already inserted a code that Search Console can detect too. Your Google Analytics and Search Console interfaces must be linked on the same Google account. In the same way, never remove the Analytics code, or data collection will stop.
Likewise, if you use Google Tag Manager, verification is easier. Make sure the “View, Edit, and Manage” setting is enabled in your GTM account.

Connect Google Analytics to Google Search Console

What is the difference between Google Analytics and Google Search Console?

Google Analytics and Search Console were designed as complementary tools.

Google Analytics gives you precise information on:

Visits;
Visitor profiles;
Geographic location;
The device used;
Behavior, and more.

Google Search Console focuses more on:

Security settings;
Site compliance;
Performance in search results, and more.

How do you connect the two tools?

Both tools are user-centered, but they do not look at the same information from the same angle. Switching back and forth can slow you down, and Google knows it. That is why it lets you connect the two tools and link the two properties.

From the Google Analytics Admin interface, open Property Settings and click “Set up Search Console” in the list of options. The tool then shows a list of properties linked to your account, and you only have to pick the one for the matching site.

How does Google Search Console work?

Keyword analysis

For an SEO agency, the most important Search Console feature may be the one that provides organic queries. That is the list of keywords that put the site in the top 100 of the SERP and generated clicks, and therefore visits.

With that list of keywords that rank the site, an SEO can feed an SEO audit (on-site or semantic) and identify the most strategic keywords. Those are the ones already in the top 30 that only need a small push to reach page one.

That importance still needs a caveat: the data is not exhaustive. It is only a small sample of site-user searches: people who are not signed in to their Google account.

Anyone browsing while signed in to a Google account gets personal-data protection. The result: Search Console does not give you their visit behavior.

Most of the organic keywords typed into the Google search bar that led to the site therefore stay unknown.

Semji tip: the Content Ideas module

Alongside Google Search Console, Semji can help you run an SEO audit for your site.

From a generic keyword, Content Ideas analyzes user behavior and your competitors’ content in one click. It combines that with your site metrics and returns relevant suggestions to improve your site’s ranking potential.

Semji lets you analyze:

The keywords used by the best-ranking sites;
Search volumes;
Performance, so you can pick the strategic keywords to include in the site’s content.

Request a demo!

The crawl-bot visit report

Another useful feature is the report of visits from Google’s indexing bot on the site, in the “Crawl” section or the newer “Index coverage” tab.

That data shows how many pages of the site Google indexes, and which pages it excludes from results (server errors, 404 not-found pages, duplicate pages, canonical-tag errors, and so on).

The overview of indexed pages versus pages in error gives you a sense of how Google sees the site as a whole.

Then, with the page-level detail, an SEO can take targeted action on the site: set up 301 redirects, add internal links, customize canonical URLs, and more.

Site analysis and improvement suggestions

Google Search Console is also a site-analysis interface from the user’s point of view: it offers HTML-code improvement reports, error reports on AMP pages and mobile usability, and an analysis of structured data (which can display rich snippets in Google SERPs).

The tool can alert the webmaster or SEO about how visitors perceive the site, and it flags elements that can hurt it, from the Google results page through to navigation inside the site.

Finally, Search Console is the communication interface Google uses to send alerts or messages to site managers. In the event of a penalty, Google can send an official notification inside Search Console. The goal is to push the webmaster to follow its guidelines and offer a site that matches user needs.

How to use Google Search Console to act on your site’s indexing

Submit a sitemap

The XML sitemap gives Google information about your site structure so it can crawl it more easily:

The list of URLs you want indexed (pages and media);
Optional notes on metadata;
How often content is updated.

For Google, the sitemap is an alternative to classic crawl, which means following every link from a site’s homepage. Having a URL in the sitemap does not guarantee indexing, but it does improve visibility and crawl for the engine.

Search Console offers a sitemap add-and-test feature for your site. In the old console, that function lives under “Crawl > Sitemaps”. In the new version, a “Sitemaps” tab is already easy to find in the menu.

To test or add a sitemap for your site (a way to declare it to Google), you first need to create an XML sitemap file and place it at the root of your site, on the server. Then you only have to enter its URL in the console. With this tool, Google also lets you send it messages and information in return.

Act on Google’s crawl

Search Console lets you request the removal of a URL from the Google index.

If one of your pages is indexed and appears in the SERP, or is at risk of appearing, and you do not want that (confidential data, no SEO value, and so on), you can request removal in the “Google Index > Remove URLs” section.

That option is still temporary: Google recommends several methods to block content from its bot permanently.

The “noindex” mention in the page’s robots meta tag;
Password-protecting files on the server;
Placing the URL in the robots.txt file.

The console also offers another tool to test your robots.txt file and check that the instructions in that file are consistent.

Paste the file’s code directly into the console, in the “Crawl > robots.txt Tester” section, and it tells you whether the file contains errors.

Search Console also lets you lower the site’s crawl rate for the algorithm. That can help when the bot’s many requests slow down the site’s server.

Click the Settings icon at the top right and check “Limit crawl rate” in the “Crawl rate” section.

Note: this change only lasts 90 days. Use that window to optimize your server so you can switch back to the crawl rate Google recommends.

Before you decide to index or de-index content, it can also help to see how Google crawls it. Search Console offers a feature that lets you crawl a page the way Google’s bot would.

Go to “Crawl > Fetch as Google” and configure the bot you want.

For example, if the property (your site version) registered in the console is a mobile site, choose the mobile crawl bot. Then select “Fetch and Render” to display the page’s HTTP response and present it by calling and executing all of its resources (images, scripts, and so on).

You can then see the difference between a visitor’s view and Googlebot’s view, and notice which resources it can and cannot access.

Disavow backlinks with Google Search Console

Search Console also shows you your site’s inbound links: your backlinks. They can change how Google sees your site, and therefore how your pages rank, through PageRank, which is part of Google’s ranking algorithm.

That means a site can be the target of demotion attempts by bad-faith competitors. The idea is to send it a large number of low-quality links, or simply make it the target of many toxic links.

If your attempts to remove those negative backlinks have failed, Search Console offers a last resort, to be used with care.

The process:

Download the list of links pointing to your site from the “Search Traffic > Links to Your Site” section.
Under the first table, “Who links to you most,” click “More.”
Click the “Download more sample links” button.
In that file, identify the URLs you want to disavow.
Then create a text file (the extension must be .txt) encoded in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII, and list only the URLs to disavow (one link per line). You can add comments, which are ignored, if the line starts with #. You can also disavow every link from a given domain in one command by writing “domain.com”.
Finally, go to Search Console’s link disavow tool.
Select your website again from the list.
Click “Disavow links” and upload your file.

The value of Google Search Console no longer needs proving for webmasters and SEOs. The features are numerous and complex, though, so you need to use it with real rigor and some analytical skill.

Semji tip: the Position Tracking module

When competition for online visibility is this fierce, you need to spend time and resources analyzing your site’s performance.

Semji offers a more advanced Position Tracking view of your pages, so you can steer your SEO strategy.

Our product gives you an overview of how your pages rank. With Semji, you can:

Watch how your ranking evolves for each keyword, and compare your positions with the competition.
React faster to algorithm changes and adjust your strategy.
Spot your SEO strengths and weaknesses immediately.
Track your positions over time and react quickly if you lose rankings.
Improve content creation by watching your gains across all keywords.