Tom Welbourne
Helping Small and Medium Businesses Achieve Their Full Marketing Potential | Digital Marketing Expert
How To Setup Google Search Console
WHAT IS GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE?
- June 20, 2019
- , 8:52 am
A free service offered by Google that allows you to monitor, maintain and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results.
As stated on Google, search console offers the following tools + reports:
Confirm that Google can find and crawl your site
Fix indexing problems and request re-indexing of new or updated content
View Google Search traffic data for your site: how often your site appears in Google Search, which search queries show your site, how often searchers click through for those queries, and more
Receive alerts when Google encounters indexing, spam, or other issues on your site
Show you which sites link to your website
Troubleshoot issues for AMP, mobile usability, and other Search features
HOW TO SET UP GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE
Go to the Google Search Console website
Log in or sign up
Click the “Add a Property” button at the top of the page
Enter URL of your website
Verify your website is owned by you
FYI – if your site supports both http:// and https://, add both as separate sites. Also, you must add each domain (for example, thegoodmarketer.co.uk and www.thegoodmarketer.co.uk)
VERIFYING YOUR WEBSITE
GSC gives you access to confidential information about a site or app’s performance and therefore you need to verify that the site is yours. One verified owner per GSC property is required to do this.
5 WAYS TO VERIFY YOUR WEBSITE:
HTML file upload
Sign in to your domain registrar (e.g. godaddy) and verify your site directly from GSC or add a DNS, TXT or CNAME record
HTML tag – Add a meta tag to the head section of a specific page’s HTML code
Use Google analytics tracking code – copy the GA tracking code
Google Tag Manager – copy the GTM container snippet code associated with your site
THE TWO GSC ROLES
Owner – has total control of the GSC properties and can add or remove roles for example
User – can see all the data and make some decisions but can’t add new users
BENEFITS OF GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE
Notifies you straight away about site errors, broken pages and issues concerning indexing (submit a sitemap and robot txt. to get your site indexed)
Notifies you if you’re site has been hacked or penalised
If you’re making major changes to your site then you can easily submit just the page you are changing rather than the whole lot
Gives you an insight into how the world perceives your customers. For example, finding out how people search for your brand on the internet using phrases and keywords
HOW TO USE GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE
Submit a sitemap – click “sitemaps”, enter URL and click submit
Learn the keywords people are using to find you – click “performance” and then “queries”
Identify your most popular pages – click “performance” and then “pages”
See where your visitors are coming from – click “performance” and then “countries”
Learn which devices people use – click “performance” then “devices”
Find out your mobile usability – click “overview” and then scroll down to “enhancements”
Check your backlinks – click “links”
CONCLUSION
The data you can derive from Google Search Console is something that many businesses / people would pay for just to get a hold of.
You get all this information for absolutely FREE and you should, therefore, be making the most of it!
Speak to one of our team today if you would like to know more about using Digital Marketing to drive more revenue to your business by clicking HERE for a no-obligation 30-minute chat 🙂
