What and Importance of Google Search Console for WebMaster

How to optimize and find out the performance of a website? The solution to this problem is Google Search Console. This article will discuss in detail what the google search console is, its functions and a complete guide on how to use it. Let's see information about GSC,

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a webmaster tool provided by Google for free to help website owners identify the performance and optimize their website in the organic realm.

GSC can be said as a website monitoring tool that serves to determine the performance of a website. GSC allows you to know website performance, find out the most popular keywords, website traffic, referring domains, website performance on mobile devices, external and internal links and many others.

Google Search Console Functions

Google search console has many functions. As mentioned above, GSC has several benefits to help webmasters improve website performance. So, here are the benefits of using GSC:

1. Identify Website Performance

Search Console is a special tool for webmasters to find out the performance of managed websites. GSC has a very useful menu to identify the performance of a website.

With GSC website owners can find out the amount of traffic, the most popular keywords, broken links and various matrices such as page rank, impressions, CTR, etc.

2. URL Inspection

If you have a new post on the website but it's old in the search engine index, then you can use Search Console. With the Google search console you can inspect new urls to get indexed quickly.

Although there is already a sitemap that is useful for automatic url inspections, sometimes the sitemap has an error so that it cannot perform url inspections. Therefore you can inspect new urls with the search console so that your posts can be indexed quickly.

3. Knowing Internal and External Links

With the Search console you can find out external and internal links, you can also find out backlinks from your website. This really helps you in managing and monitoring the links on your website.

This feature can also make you disavow spam backlinks that enter your website. Spam backlinks can have a bad impact on websites, With GSC you can monitor backlinks that point to your website.

4. Submit Website Sitemap

Sitemap serves to find out the urls listed on a website, Sitemaps can function for Google to find out the latest urls on a website. But to find out the latest url you have to submit a sitemap first to Google Search Console.

After submitting your website's Sitemap, the latest url will automatically be inspected and indexed by itself.

5. Delete Google Index

You just deleted one of your posts? But in the search results it still appears, causing the page not found. You can solve this by removing the google index with Search Console.

Complete Guide to Using Google Search Console

1. Go to Google Search Console Page

Open the Google Search console page first, the page provides information about what the google search console is. You can read on to find out more about GSC.

If you already know about GSC, you can immediately start registering your website by clicking the “Start Now” button.

2. Registering a Website on Google Search Console

If you have found the admin page as shown above, the next step you have to do is enter your domain name into the column so you can analyze the website & go to the next process.

There are two options for registering a website on the google search console, the options are Domain and URL Prefix. You can choose Domain if you have multiple subdomains. However, if there is only 1 website in 1 domain, then you should choose the URL prefix.

For starters, you can enter your domain in the URL Prefix Menu.

Then select continue, In the next step we are asked to verify our domain.

3. Domain Verification

To verify the domain, there are several verification options. For now, we will use the verification method via HTML files and HTML tags, because these two options are the easiest to do.

Note: For verification with the "Domain" option, the method is different, you must verify DNS first.

1. Domain Verification Via HTML File

For domain verification via html the method is very easy, just upload the html file that you have downloaded on your hosting server.

After successfully uploading, you just have to go back to the google search console page. Then click the verify button to verify the domain.

2. Domain Verification Via HTML Tags

Similar to verification via HTML file, Verification via HTML tag is very easy. Simply put the html tag code provided by the search console between the <head> and </head> codeshead

If you are using WordPress, just go to the WordPress Menu -> Appearance -> Theme Editor -> Then find the header.php file and copy-paste the html tag and save it.

Once saved you can return to the search console page and click the verify button. If successful, a popup will appear indicating the domain has been verified.

The image above shows if the domain verification has been successful and completed. You can go to go to property to see the results of your search console dashboard. The dashboard serves to view and analyze the performance of your website. So you can know which ones to optimize on your website.

Because it has just been verified, the report results from the website's performance still cannot be displayed. Wait for a while to see your website's performance report

4. Adding an XML Sitemap

Select the Sitemap menu on Google Search Console, after that just enter the sitemap on the form in it. To get a sitemap you can use an SEO Plugin to create a sitemap automatically.

Make sure the sitemap that you submit is successful. If there is an error, you must find out what caused the error on your sitemap.

5. Analyze Website Performance

To analyze the performance of your website, you can go to the performance menu, you can see various matrices. By clicking on the performance tab you can find out the number of clicks and impressions, page rank, CTR, country, keywords, most popular pages, devices used and many more metrics that you can see.

With this you can analyze the performance of the website, you can also optimize the website by looking at some metrics, errors on the website such as broken links and the like. GSC will also notify you when the website has an error so that you can immediately resolve the error.

That's information about the google search console, you can use GSC to see performance and help you optimize your website.