Is Google Search Console Worth It?

Most Digital Marketers know that Google Analytics enables companies to understand the behaviors of their website visitors. However, there are several important variables that are not included in Google Analytics that can be found on Google Search Console. Even if you are not intending on using Search Console yourself, you should encourage your marketing department and agency to leverage this free and powerful tool.

Google Search Console Benefits

Formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console helps users understand and improve the way Google sees your site by monitoring, maintaining, and troubleshooting your website’s presence on Google’s Search Result Pages (SERP).

With Google Search Console your marketing team or digital agency can monitor the health, safety, and operational excellence of your website and answer these critical questions:

• Can Google find and crawl your site? If you do not know for sure, there is an easy way to find out. This is essential to verify because it is key to the collection of all diagnostics on your website’s health and performance.
• Which individual landing pages, if any, have indexing issues? Google Search Console helps troubleshoot indexing errors with its Index Coverage Report. There are multiple ways it helps to fix common errors and potential problems. The Index Coverage Report investigates blocked URLs, crawl issues, error 404, redirect error, unauthorized request, and more.
• Could a manual request to re-index content be sent to Google? Even if Google will get around to indexing your website at some point, a proactive request should be sent to Google each time new or updated content is posted on your website.  This approach accelerates the time your website modifications are made visible on active search results. The five minutes spent taking this step could be the difference between a potential client seeing you online and winning new business, or not.
• Which search queries show your site? Organic search terms (queries typed directly into Google’s search box) are no longer found in Google Analytics but can be seen in Google Search Console. These organic search terms can be used as an indicator of which copy should be updated and expanded to attract more traffic to your website.
• Where on average are your website pages positioned on Google Search Engine Result Pages? Google Search Console tells you which pages rank highest on Google indicating which pages need immediate attention, and which can use continuous improvement.
• Which pages have the highest number of impressions? Which of the search queries are clicked on most often? Which of the search queries are clicked least often? The answer to this combination of questions will provide helpful ratios to score pages by “actual” versus “potential” conversion rates. Google Search Console’s performance report actively records page impressions whenever your website’s link URL appears in the users’ search results.

Applying Findings From Google Search Console

Regularly evaluating your website with Google Search Console could lead to impactful changes in your website’s performance. To save time, your most telling KPI (Key Performance Indicators) could be collected and displayed on one dashboard. It could even be exported onto a single report using Data Studio –another free tool from Google. Data Studio can be used to combine data from both Google Search Console and Google Analytics so that analysts are no longer required to flip from one tool to another. If your team or agency is still too busy to make continuous assessments, even with these time-savers, Google Search Console could be set up to send alerts whenever it encounters indexing, spam, mobility, site speed, or other search-related issues to maximize your company’s digital presence. It could even send a notification if it detects a “substantial drop” in clicks to your website compared to the previous week’s data.

With all the benefits Google Search Console offers at no cost, it is definitely worth your company’s and agency’s time and effort to improve your website’s online performance, reach, and rankings.