A Beginner’s Guide • Yoast

Do you have a website or do you maintain the website of the company you work for? Of course, to do this right, you need to keep a close eye on your website’s performance. Google offers various tools for collecting and analyzing data from your website. You’ve probably heard of Google Analytics and Google Search Console. These tools are free for anyone managing a website and can give you valuable insights into your website. Here we will explain how to use Google Search Console for SEO!

Why use Google Search Console?

Google Search Console helps you easily track your website performance. You can gain valuable insights from your Google Search Console account so you can see what part of your website still needs work. This could be a technical part of your website, such as an increasing number of crawling errors that need to be fixed. This can also result in a particular keyword receiving more attention due to a decrease in rankings or impressions. Or find the reasons why some pages are not indexed.

Not only will you see this type of data, but you’ll also receive email notifications when Google Search Console detects new errors. Thanks to these notifications, you will quickly become aware of problems that you need to fix. That’s why everyone who has a website should learn to use it!

The Search Console is divided into different sections

Search Console has several sections that are continually expanding as Google adds more:

• URL inspection
  • The URL Inspection Tool gives you insights into specific URLs and how Google sees and indexes them. You can also see whether the page is suitable for rich results.
• Performance
  • The Performance section tells you how your site performs in regular search results, Discover, and Google News if it’s eligible.
• indexing
  • The Indexing section has all the insights you need to see how Google recognizes and indexes your pages. You can also learn if and how Google indexes the video content on your website. There is also a section where you can review your XML sitemaps and any page removals you may have requested.
• Experience
  • The Experience section will give you an idea of ​​how Google evaluates your site’s performance on mobile and desktop, and whether your pages are served over HTTPS connections, with a little help from Core Web Vitals.
• Shopping
  • The Shopping tab provides more information about how Google sees your products – if you have an e-commerce site or sell something else online. You can see which products provide rich results, as well as insights into your merchant listings and how they appear in Google Shopping.
• Improvements
  • The Improvements section lists all the structured data that Google found on your site and whether or not it is suitable for rich results. This includes events, reviews, job postings and more.
• Security and manual actions
  • The Security and Manual Actions goal should not be accessed often as it lists security issues found by Google or when it takes a manual action against your site.
• Left
  • The Links section provides an overview of your website’s internal and external links.

Set up an account

You must create an account to use Google Search Console. In Google Search Console, you can click “Add New Property” in the top bar:

You can insert the website you want to add by clicking the Add Property button. If you choose the new domain option, you only need to add the domain name without www or subdomains. This option tracks everything connected to this domain. For the “old” URL prefix option, you need to add the correct URL, so with “HTTPS” if you have an HTTPS website, and with or without “www”. To capture the correct data, it is important to add the correct version:

You must confirm that you are the owner once you have added a site. There are several ways to confirm your ownership. The domain option only works with DNS verification, while the URL prefix supports various methods. For more information on the differences, see Google’s documentation: Adding a new property And Verifying your website ownership. You can also use Google’s Site Kit WordPress plugin to connect Analytics and Search Console while displaying statistics in your site dashboard.

Add to Yoast SEO

For WordPress users using Yoast SEO, you will receive the verification code via the HTML Tag method from the Property Settings in Search Console. Copy the long, random string.

You can easily copy and paste the code into the Google field in the Site Connections section of your Yoast SEO plugin settings:

After saving this, you can return to Google Search Console and click the Confirm button to confirm. If everything is OK, you will receive a success message and GSC will start collecting data for your website.

Features in Google Search Console

What’s the next step after you’ve set up your account? Well, it’s time to look at some of your data! In the remainder of this article, we will examine some of the reports and information available.

Performance tab.

The Performance tab allows you to see the pages and keywords your website is ranking for on Google. If you’re eligible, you’ll also find reports on how your content is performing in Google Discover and Google News. You will receive 16 months of performance data for your reports.

By regularly checking the Performance tab, you can quickly identify which keywords or pages need more attention and optimization. So where should I start? On the Performance tab, you will see a list of “Queries,” “Pages,” “Countries,” or “Devices.” Search Appearance lets you check how your rich results perform in search. You can sort each section by the number of “clicks,” “impressions,” “average CTR,” or “average position.” Below we explain each one of them:

1. Clicks

Click Count tells you how many times people clicked on your website in Google search results. This number can tell you something about the performance of your page titles and meta descriptions: if only a few people click on your result, your result may not stand out in search results. It can be helpful to check what other results are showing around you to see how you can optimize your snippet.

The position of the search result also influences the number of clicks. If your page is in the top three of Google’s first page of results, it will automatically receive more clicks than a page that ranks on the second page of search results.

2. Impressions

Impressions tell you how often your website or a specific page appears in search results. The number of impressions for this keyword shows how often our website appears in Google search results for this keyword. You don’t know what page rank this keyword has yet.

To see which pages might rank for each keyword, you can click on the keyword’s row. If you do this for a keyword, the keyword will be added as a filter:

You can then navigate to the Pages tab to see which pages are ranking for that keyword. Are these pages the ones you want to rank for this keyword? If not, you may need to optimize the page you want to rank. Think about writing better content that includes the keyword on that page, adding internal links from relevant pages or posts to the page, making the page load faster, etc.

3. Average CTR

CTR – click-through rate – tells you what percentage of people who saw your website in search results also clicked on your website. You probably understand that higher rankings usually lead to higher click-through rates.

But you can also do something yourself to increase CTR. For example, you could rewrite your meta description and page title to make them more engaging – Yoast SEO has AI features to help you with this. If your website title and description stand out from the other results, more people are likely to click on your result and your click-through rate will increase. Keep in mind that if you don’t rank on the first page yet, this won’t have a significant impact on you. You may need to try other things first to improve your ranking.

4. Average position

The last item in this list is the “average position”. Here you can find out the average ranking of a specific keyword or page in the selected period. Of course, this position is not always reliable as more and more people receive different search results. Google seems to be getting better at understanding which results best suit which visitor. However, this indicator still shows whether the clicks, impressions and average CTR are explainable.

indexing

The Indexing section is a more technical but appreciated addition to Google Search Console. This section shows how many pages there are have been in the Google index since the last update, how many pages were not yet included and which errors and warnings caused Google to index your pages incorrectly. Google has divided this section into parts, Collect your regular pages and video pages while giving your XML sitemap and removal sections a home.

We recommend that you check this tab regularly to see what errors and warnings you are seeing on your website. However, you will also receive notifications when Google finds new errors. If you receive such a notification, please review the error in more detail.

You may notice that errors are caused when, for example, a redirect doesn’t seem to work properly or Google finds broken code or error pages in your theme. You will also find error messages such as “Crawled – not currently indexed”. Google has a long list of possible reasons why pages aren’t indexed and what you can do to fix the problem.

By clicking on any of the issues, you can analyze the error in more detail to see which specific URLs are affected. Once you’ve fixed the error, you can mark it as fixed to ensure Google retests the URL:

Things to pay attention to

There are a few things you should always pay attention to when looking at your indexing reports:

• As you write new content, your indexed pages should steadily increase. This tells you two things: Google can index your site, and you keep your site “alive” by adding content.
• Watch out for sudden falls! This could mean that Google is having problems accessing (the entire) website. Maybe something is blocking Google. Whether it’s robots.txt changes or server outages, you need to deal with it!
• Sudden (and unexpected) spikes in the graph may indicate a duplicate content issue (e.g. both www and non-www, incorrect canonicals, etc.). automatically generated pagesor even Hacks.

We recommend that you monitor these situations closely and fix errors quickly, as too many errors could be a signal of poor quality (poor maintenance) to Google.

URL inspection

The URL inspection tool helps you analyze specific URLs. You retrieve the page from Google’s index and compare it to the page as it now exists on your site to see if there are any differences. On this page you will also find further technical information, e.g. B. when and how Google crawled it and what it looked like at the time. Sometimes you will notice multiple errors. Maybe it’s because Google can’t crawl your site correctly. You will also receive information about the structured data located on this URL.

Experience

The experience report is an invaluable addition. It gives a good overview of how quickly your site loads on mobile and desktop, and how Google uses key web vitals to evaluate page experience. It shows which pages have issues that affect their performance. The data is based on the Chrome UX report, so it is accurate data from real users.

Site speed, page experience, and user experience are complex topics with many moving parts, so it’s good to learn how to think about page speed. The answer can be found here: How to check website speed.

Improvements: Rich search results

If you have structured data on your site – for example from Yoast SEO – it’s a good idea to look at the improvement reports in Search Console. The Improvements tab collects all insights and improvements that could lead to large-scale results. It lists all the structured data that Google found on your website. The list of rich results is constantly expanding and you will find, among other things:

• breadcrumbs
• Events
• FAQs
• Job advertisements
• Profile pages
• Review excerpts
• Sitelinks search boxes
• videos

All of these tabs show how many valid extensions you have or how many have errors or warnings. You will receive details about the types of errors and warnings and on which URLs they are found. There is also a trend line that shows whether the number of problems is increasing or decreasing. And that’s just the beginning.

Use the improvement reports to find and fix issues that are affecting the performance of your rich results. By reviewing the issues, reading support documentation, and validating fixes, you can increase your chances of getting rich search results. We have a more detailed guide to structured data improvement reports in Google Search Console.

Sitemaps

An XML sitemap is a roadmap to all the important pages and posts on your website. Any website would benefit from this. Are you running the Yoast SEO plugin on your website? Then you automatically have an XML sitemap. If not, we recommend creating one to ensure Google can easily find your most important pages and posts.

An XML sitemap option can be found in the Indexing tab of Google Search Console. Here’s where you can tell Google where your XML sitemap is on your website:

We encourage everyone to enter their XML sitemap URL into GSC to make it easier for Google to find. Additionally, you can quickly see if your sitemap contains errors or if some pages are not indexed. Regular checking ensures that Google can find and read your XML sitemap.

We recommend regularly checking the XML Sitemap section in our plugin to manage which post types or taxonomies you include in your sitemaps!

Shopping

Google Search Console also has a shopping section. Here you can check how Google sees your products and whether they are getting the right rich results. You can see if they are valid or if there are missing fields that highlight the product snippets. Click on a product to see which fields are missing for specific products and whether they are essential parts or nice-to-haves. Once you’ve added these to your products’ structured data, validate the fix in Search Console.

The Shopping section also contains your Google Merchant listings and an option to enable Shopping tab listings to display your products in the Shopping tab in Google Search. With these options, Google gives e-commerce website owners – and people who sell things – more ways to check the performance of their listings.

Left

In the Links to Your Site section, you can see how many links point to your site from other sites. You can also see which websites are linked, how many links those websites contain, and which anchor texts are used most often when linking to your website. This can be valuable information as links are still crucial for SEO.

The Internal Links section allows you to check which pages on your site are linked most often elsewhere on your site. It may be useful to analyze this list regularly, as you want your most important pages and posts to receive the most internal links. This will ensure that Google also understands your cornerstones.

Manual actions

You don’t want to see anything in the Manual Actions tab. If Google penalizes your site, you will receive further information. If your site is affected by a manual action, you will also receive an email message.

Several scenarios can result in such penalties, including:

• You have unnatural/purchased links
  Make sure there are links from and to Your website is valuable, and not just for SEO. Preferably, your links come from related content that is valuable to your readers.
• Your website has been hacked
  A message saying that your website has probably been hacked by a third party. Google could flag your site as compromised or lower your ranking.
• You’re hiding something from Google
  If you engage in “cloaking” (i.e. intentionally showing users different content to deceive them) or use “sneaky” redirects (e.g. hiding affiliate URLs), then you are breaking the rules Google’s guidelines (now known as Google Search Essentials).
• Simple spam
  Auto-generated content, scraped content, and aggressive cloaking can cause Google to blacklist your site.
• Spammy structured markup
  Using rich snippets on too many irrelevant elements on a page or highlighting content that is hidden from the visitor can be considered spam. Mark what is necessary and only the necessary things.

Security issues

In the Security Issues tab, you will receive a notification when there is a security issue on your site.

Google Search Console is essential

Reading this post should give you a good idea of ​​what Search Console is capable of and how to use it. So we want to ask you the following: Are you already using Google Search Console for your website? If not, create an account to collect data about your website. Do you think something is missing? Feel free to leave a comment!

Read more: How to make your website stand out in search results »