What is it?
Going somewhat hand-in-hand with the previous post in this series, we're still in ecosphere of Google's free offerings for website owners, with Search Console.
Search Console is their tool to allow you to monitor how they see your site, and how it's performing in search results.
Have I got it?
Unlike Google Analytics, there's no easy way to figure out if your site is associated with a Search Console account. It works by verifying your ownership of the site within Search Console, so there's no way of seeing if there's already data being fed through to an account anywhere.
If it doesn't show up when you log in to Search Console then the first step is to add your site as a new property from the dropdown in the top left hand corner. That will take you through the process to add your website (or your entire domain, which is easier) and verifying it by either adding a record to your domain's DNS records, or a small file on your website.
What does it show me?
Once you've got it in place, it opens up a huge range of information about how your site is faring in Google's search results.
The landing page gives you a run down of how many clicks your site received in search results in the last thirty days (a full report can be found in the Performance section), how many pages from your site are indexed (and, just as importantly, how many aren't), your speed metrics from Core Web Vitals if there's enough data to display them, and details on any enhancements that you've got in place.
Let's dive deeper into each of those in turn, and look at why they matter.
Performance
This is the most accurate record of how your site is doing in Google's rankings - as we've seen in the previous article in this series, Google Analytics cannot be 100% accurate because of blocking by users and / or browsers.
The performance section shows you how many clicks were made from search results through to your website during the relevant period, compared how many times your site was shown in the search results ("impressions") which, combined, gives your CTR ("click-through ratio"), as well as your average ranking.
It will also show you your ranking for specific search terms, as well as how that ranking has changed over a given time period. So if you are working to rank higher in a specific area, this is where you come to find out the results of that.
Indexing
This section has three subsections. The first, Pages, has information about which pages on your site are, and are not, in Google's search index. The second, Sitemaps, shows you what sitemap(s) Google has detected for your site. And the third, Removals, is where you can request that pages be removed from the index, and see information on removal requests.
Starting with the second section first, the Sitemaps should show any sitemaps that either Google has automatically detected for your site, or that you've told it about. An earlier post in this series covered sitemaps in more detail, so you should be seeing your sitemap here already, but if not you can use the Add a new sitemap to submit the location of your sitemap - you only have to do this once.
Once added, your submitted sitemap will show the number of pages that are listed in it ("discovered pages") - this is a key number to keep in mind when you visit the first section, Pages.
The ideal, of course, is that the number of pages in your sitemap will equal the number of pages showing as indexed in the Pages section, but it does often lag behind somewhat as you may publish a blog post, for example, but it will not show up in Google index immediately.
What is just as important, though, is the list of pages which are not indexed - why these pages are not being indexed will be shown in the various reasons below, which will give you a chance to fix them and request that they be reindexed (on which see the Making Changes section below.
Finally in the Removals section, you can request removals of pages from the index. Often this is for stuff that shouldn't be in there (testing versions of pages / the website, for example), and it's only a temporary fix for three months - if you want permanent removal you must ensure that the page isn't accessible to Google's spiders.
Enhancements
In this series we've already covered Rich Results and why they're useful to your site, and the Enhancements section is where you see whether those are being picked up by Google.
For each type of enhancement (breadcrumbs, FAQs, profile pages, reviews. etc) you should see an entry in the menu on the left hand side, and within each of those you should see how many items have been detected. Hopefully all those will be valid.
Bear in mind that just because you implement something doesn't mean that it gets picked up immediately - ideally you will be looking for a steady increase in green - detected - items, and no red - invalid - items, but it is not an overnight affair.
Making changes
If one of the sections of the Search Console tells you that there are invalid items, then once you've fixed the issue you can tell Google to re-check it - this seems to be a somewhat slow process, but if your site implements, for example, profile markup for profiles of individual profiles, then it will be using the same template for all people, and a fix to one will result in a fix to all.
If you've asked for a fix to be checked, then it will show as "started", and hopefully then move to "passed" in due course. Don't expect that to be overnight, though. As we say - it can be a slow process.
Use it to its best advantage
A visit to the search console should be on your calendar at least once a month, even if it's just a quick scan through to see if any issues are popping up. It's also useful to keep an eye on the performance side of things to see if changes you're making are working.
Next, we look at Local SEO in Day 8 of our 10 Days to a Healthier Website series.