What is Google Search Console? Definition, features & benefits

Search engines play a crucial role in connecting users around the world with relevant information. As the most popular search engine globally, Google holds a dominant position in this area.

For that reason, understanding how a website performs in Google’s search results is essential for businesses and digital marketers. This is where Google Search Console comes in.

In this article, we’ll explore Google Search Console (GSC), including its features and why it is such a valuable tool for anyone operating online.

Introduction to Google Search Console

Google Search Console, formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, is a free web service provided by Google.

It offers a range of tools and reports to help website owners and managers to optimise their website’s performance in the Google search results (SERPs).

The primary purpose of GSC is to assist website owners as they attempt to improve their organic search visibility and performance, specifically within the Google index.

Alongside Google Analytics, GSC is one of several tools offered by the search giant to provide support and analytics data to website owners.

Google Search Console: Key features

Google Search Console offers a range of tools and features to help market your website. In the sections below we’ll provide a little more information on each of them.

Search performance insights
Indexing and crawling
Mobile usability and page experience
URL inspection tool
Security and manual actions
Link analysis

Click an option from the list above to skip ahead, or read on for our full breakdown.

Search performance insights

Google Search Console provides valuable data on how your website is performing in Google’s search results.

You can view a range of metrics, including Clicks, Impressions, Rank and Click-through rate (CTR). Combined, this data can help you to understand which keywords and pages are driving traffic to your site.

Insights from GSC are an ideal starting point if you’re working on improving website performance. Any single metric, or combination of metrics, can provide guidance on what work you need to do.

For example, if your Rank is low, you can focus on improving the content of your pages to better match the keywords users are searching. Or, if your CTR is low, you might instead focus on improving the meta title or meta descriptions of your content to better appeal to the terms your page ranks for.

Indexing and crawling

Search Console allows you to submit your website’s sitemap – essentially, a list of all of your pages – directly to Google, enabling the search engine to discover and index those pages more efficiently.

You can also request that Google re-crawls specific pages or URLs if you’ve made significant updates or want to expedite the indexing process.

Once you have submitted your sitemap to Google, the search engine will begin periodically crawling your site without prompt. The number of times your site is crawled will depend on a range of factors; as a simple rule though, the more prominent your site, the more often it will be crawled.

Mobile usability and page experience

Having a mobile-friendly website is crucial. GSC provides a Mobile Usability report in GSG that highlights any issues or errors that may affect a visitor’s user experience on a mobile device.

GSC also provides Page Experience and Core Web Vitals reports. Both of these reports, alongside the Mobile Usability report, are designed to ensure that marketers can optimise their sites to provide a quality experience for their users.

Increasingly, Google and other search engines prioritise user experience as a top ranking factor, meaning that a website offering a poor-quality experience is liable to rank below competitors that prioritise a high-quality experience.

URL inspection tool

The URL inspection tool in GSC allows you to inspect specific URLs on your website to find out how Google views and indexes the pages.

You can confirm whether a specific page has been indexed, identify any issues with crawlability or indexing, and also review important details such as canonical tags and structured data.

This sort of work may stray slightly into the realm of technical SEO but, as a rule, if you can’t see errors in this dashboard then you’re on the right track.

Security and manual actions

Search Console will notify you of any security issues detected on your website, such as malware or hacking attempts.

It also alerts you if your site has received a manual action penalty from Google. A manual action means that your website has violated Google’s quality guidelines in some way; this might be because you’ve been found to have ripped off content from another source, for example.

By addressing security issues and manual actions, you can maintain a secure and compliant website that can continue to perform online.

Link analysis

Backlinks – meaning links from other sites to yours – an are important part of search engine optimisation (SEO) and can contribute to improved performance in search results.

GSC provides insights into the number of external websites linking to your website and the pages being linked to.

The Links dashboard also provides an overview of the internal links on your site, meaning the links from one page you own to another. Internal linking is an important process for improving user experience, but also for demonstrating to Google where content sits closely together in theme or context.

By monitoring and analysing your link data, you can begin to understand your website’s link profile and start building high-quality backlinks from external sources to improve performance.

Google Search Console: Getting started

To begin using Google Search Console, you first need to verify ownership of your website. Once done, you can begin to access the various reports and tools.

You should monitor these reports regularly to ensure that your site performance is as expected. Likewise, you should tackle any issues that you spot as and when they come up to avoid running into long-term issues.

Along with Google Analytics, GSC provides a solid base to begin marketing from. It’s worth mentioning though, that most marketers or website managers will invest in third-party tools over time to get more specific marketing insight.

For example, for keyword research, tools like SEMRush are popular. For backlink analysis, you might use Ahrefs. When you’re just starting out, Google’s own products provide enough information to begin with, but it is advised that you branch out to get more information as your site develops.

What is Google Search Console? Final thoughts

Google Search Console is a vital tool for website owners and digital marketers, whether you’re running a personal blog, business website or an online shop.

With the help of the range of tools offered by GSC, you can improve your site’s performance and visibility in Google’s search results.

If you haven’t already got it set up, then it’s well worth taking the time to start pulling together all of the data you can get your hands on.

Bryn Glover

Bryn is the founder and editor of WebsiteJumpStart. He has worked in the digital field for over a decade and was editor for Startups.co.uk - the UK's leading small business website - and for NerdWallet UK before launching WebsiteJumpStart to help people and businesses get online with ease.

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