Google Search Console – what is it used for and what reports can we find in it?

Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool offered by Google with which both professionals and site owners can monitor data on traffic, positions and possible errors. 

What specific information and reports can we get with GSC? How can we use this knowledge in the process of positioning a website?”

How to create and verify an account in Google Search Console?

Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) is a platform from which we can find out how a site’s search engine effectiveness is. The owner of a site for which an account has been defined in GSC can grant access to an agency or specialist to monitor the status of the site. 

How to create an account in GSC?

If you own a site and have a Google account, you can easily access the GSC panel. In the first step, you need to add your site service to your account. You can do this both for the whole domain and for a branch of it.  

Before you get full access to the tools and reports offered, however, you need to go through a verification process and confirm that you own the site. There are several options available for confirming ownership, and you can choose the one that will be quickest and easiest for you to complete:

• Google Analytics tracking code – if your site has a Google Analytics account that you have access to and editing privileges, you can use the GA tracking code
• HTML tag – if you have access to edit the source code of your site you can place the corresponding tag in the head section
• HTML file – the simplest and most popular method, which requires downloading an HTML file from GSC and uploading it to the appropriate place on the site’s server
• Google Tag Manager – if you have an active Google Tag Manager account and have admin or publishing privileges, you can get a code to verify ownership
• domain name provider – verification can be done by adding the DNS record to the domain provider’s record list. To do this, however, you must have access to the domain name provider’s administration page.

Further details and conditions regarding verification of site ownership are available at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9008080

What information can you find in Google Search Console?

There is a lot of valuable information in GSC that we can use in the process of analyzing the state of a website. Until now, each tab had a breakdown of the website’s subpages, taking into account the current status of each page. URLs were grouped into correct, with warnings and incorrect. 

After the update, the reports look slightly different. Now addresses are divided into only two categories – correct and incorrect. 

Effectiveness

The effectiveness tab tells us what the performance of the site is in Google search results. 

We can find the following data in it:

• reports on traffic and its variation over time,
• queries and keywords for which the site is visible,
• information on the pages with the highest number of views,
• country and device from which users visit the site,
• CTR which is an indicator that tells the ratio of clicks to page views,
• the average position of a page in search results for a given period,

Index

The recently updated report Pages (formerly ‘Status’) is now divided into ‘Indexed’ and ‘Not Indexed’. The data is presented both in a graph and in the form of a list of occurring messages. 

From this report we can find out the cause of poor indexation of the site and which pages are correctly visible in the search engine and which are not.

The most common messages that appear in the Pages tab include:

• Not Found – this is, of course, the familiar 404 error. Google’s search engine may have detected the page, but at the moment the page no longer exists. To get rid of this error, you need to perform appropriate redirects.
• Page detected – currently not indexed – this situation occurs when an attempt to index a page has caused it to load. Google usually plans to re-index such pages at a later date.
• Page scanned but not yet indexed – this is a message indicating that the page has been noticed by Google’s robots and is waiting to be indexed. 
• The submitted URL contains the tag “noindex” – the page has not been indexed because the robots encountered the “noindex” directive. If you want to index the page, you need to remove the tag or the directive.
• Redirect error – message occurring when a page is in a loop or chain of redirects or the redirects contain an invalid or too long URL.

Problems in indexing can be related to various aspects of the site. All the possible messages we can encounter in the Sites tab are located at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7440203

In GSC we can also display a list of correctly indexed URLs and the date they were last indexed by Google’s robots.

In the Index tab there is also information about the site maps. In order for the map to be read correctly by Google’s robots, you need to add it to Google Search Console. We wrote about how to create a site map in XML format and its impact on site indexation in the article on sitemap

Additionally, in GSC we can also report URLs we want to remove from search results:

• temporary removals – in the event that some content has been indexed accidentally or the data it contains is of a sensitive nature, we can quickly remove it from the search results. This is a temporary solution and requires other measures (such as the use of the “noindex” directive) if we want the content in question to disappear permanently from the search engine
• outdated content – a place where we can submit outdated pages, no longer found on the site, for removal from search results
• SafeSearch filtering – here is a list of addresses that have been reported by search engine users as adult-only content and are hidden to users who use the SafeSearch filter

Experiments and personalization

The web metrics report shows information about the performance of pages on the site. A breakdown for mobile devices and a version for computers allows a thorough analysis of the parameters that speak to the quality of the pages. 

LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) – an indicator of how long it takes to render the largest element on a page (graphics, text or video)

FID (First Input Delay) – the time it takes until the user first interacts with the page (such as clicking a button)

CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) – the sum of layout shifts during page loading.

We wrote more about metrics and how to optimize them properly in an article about Core Web Vitals

Depending on how a website’s subpages perform in terms of the analyzed indicators, GSC divides them into URLs of poor or good quality and URLs that need improvement. 

Additionally, in the tab Service on mobile devices we can verify whether a particular subpage is adapted to users using smartphones or tablets. This is extremely important given the increase in popularity of mobile devices among users over the past few years.

Improvements

For proper implementation of structured data, through which robots read information about the site and its content, you should follow the generally accepted rules defined by Google.

The report found in GSC shows the type and correctness of the data implemented for the site.

As a site owner, you can use it to periodically check the correctness of deployments and eliminate errors that occur. 

Security and manual actions

This is where you’ll find reports on any manual actions and security issues that Google’s robots have detected within your site. It’s worth taking a look here when you get an alert about unsafe or modified content on your site without your knowledge, which could be the result of a hacking attack.

If you manage to eliminate the detected errors, you can easily request a recheck of the URLs from within the report. 

Links

This is a report on internal and external links for your site.

You will learn from it which external portals have links pointing back to your site, which anchors are the most popular, and which pages of your site are most frequently linked – both externally and internally. 

You can also export external link data of interest from within the report. Monitoring this tab allows you to verify that links leading to your domain are not the result of spam or other unwanted activities. 

What relationship does Google Search Console have with positioning?

Google Search Console is a tool that supports proper analysis of traffic and website situation. GSC, thanks to the data and reports it offers, is very often used by professionals responsible for website positioning 

Continuous monitoring of indexing problems, technical optimization, adaptation of the site to mobile devices or linking reports are essential aspects to consider in the process of creating a site and adapting it to the requirements of search engines.