If you've heard of Google Webmaster Tools while talking about SEO, you should also have a good idea about Google Search Console. A phase of GWT's popularity among various professional marketers, SEO experts, designers and app developers, Google decided to change its name in 2015 to Google Search Console.
If you are not familiar with GWT or Google Search Console, then this important article from Hiddnetech will be able to give you a thorough knowledge about it. Let's go ahead, today we will see a short list of what to know about Google Search Console.
- Google Search Console?
- What is the function of Google Search Console?
- Why do we use it?
- How to use GSC?
What is Google Search Console?
Google Search Console is a free service from Google that gives you a lot of information about your website and its visitors. Google Search Console helps you with complete information about how many people are visiting your site and how they found it.
According to popular SEO service ahrefs, “Google Search Console (previously Google Webmaster Tools) is a free service from Google that helps you monitor and troubleshoot your website's appearance in their search results.”
Not only that, you can check whether more people are visiting your site on mobile devices or desktop computers and which pages of your site are most popular with this free tool from Google.
It helps you find website problems and fix them. Also can help submit website sitemaps and create and check a robots text file.
What is the function of Google Search Console?
Lots, lots and lots. If you have a website, you can never deny the need for Google Search Console. As we all know, SEO is very important to bring a website first in the search results. Search Console helps you understand whether your SEO is moving in the right direction or not.
Google Search Console allows you to track your website's progress and decline. In the above figure you can see the search engine position of a website in the last 3 months. It appears that in the last three months, about one and a half lakh visitors are entering the website from Google search. Total Impression appears right next to it. Which means, the website has been shown about 1.22 million times in Google search in the last three months.
At the same time, the number position of your website's keywords in Google is also seen in the picture. Google presents the progress and decline of your website very nicely and effectively in front of you through a graph. There are many more features beyond this image, which you can access by using Google Search Console. For example:
- URL Inspection: You can know whether the pages of your site are indexed in Google by URL Inspection.
- Sitemap: You can submit a Sitemap to Google to fully crawl your website.
- Removals: If you think that any page or post of the website does not need to be shown in Google search, then you can remove it.
- Mobile Usability: Get information about how visitors experience your website while visiting it on mobile.
- Backlinks: You can check the backlinks of your website.
Why use Google Search Console?
Unlike the numerous reasons to use GSC, there is not one reason not to use it. It is popular among SEO experts all over the world as a free and most effective SEO tool. Once you submit your website on this platform then Google will automatically present all the important information about the website in front of you.
You can know whether your website is progressing or lagging with this excellent tool. Besides, if there is any technical problem of the website, how to correct it, Google will give you that advice. And you get all this absolutely free.
How to use Google Search Console?
You can easily use it for your website. And for this, first go to the Google Search Console site and click on the Start Now button.
On the next page you will be brought to the Ad property page and asked to add the property i.e. your website domain. Clicking on the Ad property option will bring up a pop-up window. Your website link will be asked as shown in the image above.
Put the full link of your website in the second box ie URL prefix box; Just as shown in the image above. Then click on Continue button.
After clicking the Continue button, you will be brought to the Verify ownership option. You have to prove to Google that you own the website. And for this Google will give you an HTML file. Your job is to download the HTML file and upload it to your cPanel.
But in this case, it should be remembered that the domain of your website is in the directory of cPanel, the HTML file is also uploaded in the same directory. Once the file is uploaded there click on VERIFY button. Well, your website has been submitted to Google's Search Console.
After submitting your website to Search Console, Google will start crawling your website and indexing the website content. When Google will index your website content, they will notify you through an email. Once you get the email as shown in the above image, you will know that your website is ready to be displayed on search engines.
