Google Search Console provides invaluable insights into what Google believes your site pages are about, based on how well your site pages rank for specific queries and the number of clicks and impressions your pages receive for those queries. If you want your site to rank higher for specific search terms and bring organic traffic, Google Search Console keyword search is your best bet. In addition to keyword tracking, the platform provides other powerful SEO features that will improve your site’s visibility and ensure that Google scans and indexes it as efficiently as possible.
In this blog on Google Search Console keyword, you will be introduced to Google Search Console along with its features and set up. In addition to this, you will also learn about Use Google Search Console to Measure Your Google Search Console keyword Results.
What is Google Search Console?
The Google Search Console is a free platform that enables you to monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot search engine results for your website. Google Search Console, formerly known as Google Webmasters, helps you understand, enhances the overall visibility, and improves how Google views your website.
The Benefits of Using Google Search Console
Aside from acquiring data directly from Google, Google Search Console offers several other advantages:
- Having your website connected to GSC will make it easier for Google to understand and crawl your site. Enhanced crawling helps pages to be ranked or re-ranked by becoming more thorough and frequent.
- New pages can be submitted to Search Console to improve their indexation speed.
- It can be used to investigate issues that could lead to poor user behavior, SEO de-ranking, or a decline in ranking.
- Security issues can be monitored for your site’s safety.
- Domain Authority can be increased by analyzing backlinks and internal links.
- Identifying indexing issues can be done by inspecting specific pages.
- Pages that have low click-through rates (CTR) can be retargeted or have their metadata improved.
- A low impression page can be identified and reworked, retargeted, rewritten, or re-indexed.
- Low-ranking pages can be identified for reworking, retargeting, or rewriting.
- Over time, site content can be monitored and analyzed to make data-driven, impactful SEO decisions.
Getting set up on Google Search Console is a must for anyone who owns a website or does SEO on a website. The benefits far outweigh the effort involved in setting it up.
Google Search Console Features
Search Console provides web admins with a wealth of features to enhance their site’s usability and understand the search engine performance of their website.
- Overview of the SEO performance of your website with Google Search Console Keyword search and other features
- Make sure your domain URLs are indexable, crawlable, and mobile-friendly
- Click-through-rate (CTR), impressions, and average position of SEO metrics can be accessed
- Analyze your landing pages’ rankings for the search queries you choose
- Google Discover performance metrics
- Sitemaps in XML
- File disavows
- Monitoring Core Web Vitals for desktop and mobile versions of your site
- Google will notify you if your website has security issues
- Take a look at all of the backlinks, internal links, and top anchor texts for your website
Setting Up Google Search Console
The GSC platform is easy to set up, so getting started is simple if you’re new to website tracking. Below, you will find a guide to help you link your GSC account with your domain to improve the Google Search Console keyword.
1. Go to the main Google Search Console page and click the Start Now button to get started with the Google Search Console keyword research.
2. If it’s your first time, you will be presented with a page to select your property type. If not, click Search Property in the upper left-hand corner, then click Add Property.
3. In this section, you can choose between two types of properties and learn the various methods of verifying your property. There will be multiple options for verifying the property types.
The most popular options for verification are HTML file uploads, domain name providers, and Google Analytics tracking codes.
If you can verify your domain through DNS (through your host), you should use the Domain Verification service, including all subdomains and all HTTP variations of your domain.
Alternatively, you can enter your main URL (the URL that shows up when you access your website) using a URL prefix.
If you have multiple subdomains, using the Domain Verification method will allow you to aggregate all of your Search Console data into a single property, rather than having it split into multiple properties via the URL Prefix method.
By adding the HTML tag to your SEO plugin’s advanced settings, you will be able to verify your site via the URL prefix method. Alternatively, you can directly embed the code in the <head> section.
*Note: If you choose Domain Verification, you will not use the legacy tools.
There you have it! You’re done!
How to Use Google Search Console to Measure Your Google Search Console keyword Results
You can start tracking the performance of your website in the SERPs after adding your domain property, users and linking your Google accounts.
Knowing what SEO metrics represent is vital for beginners. This is an overview of the primary Google metrics that are tracked, organized by how they are structured in the Google Search Console.
The Overview Section
There are three main categories of metrics that Google Search Console tracks in the overview section: Performance, Coverage, and Enhancements.
- Performance: Metrics associated with how your URLs perform in search results
- Coverage: Crawling & indexing metrics related to your URLs
- Enhancement: Metrics related to your website’s performance and coverage that could be improved
Inspection of URLs
Using the URL inspection tool, you can examine the indexed version of any web page on your domain. In your Google Search Console account, you have two options for accessing and using the tool.
- From the toolbar on the left, choose “URL Inspection.”
- At the top of the page, there is a search bar for Inspect URLs
Upon inspecting a URL, GSC provides you with an overview of all the information from the last time they crawled it, such as whether it has been indexed in search results, whether it appears in search results, where it was found, and more.
Performance
You can view all of the metrics related to your URL search appearances in the Performance section of your Google Search Console account. There are four critical metrics provided in the primary data graph detailing the general performance of all web pages on your site.
- Total clicks: The total number of clicks your web pages have received across all search queries for the selected period.
- Total Impressions: The amount of time your web pages appear in search results and are viewed by users for the selected time.
- Average Click-Through-Rate (%): Describes the average click-through rate across all search queries for a given date range.
- Average position: Your pages’ average position for the specified period across all search queries.
From the table below the primary graph, you can set your parameters for filtering these search performance metrics for specific keywords, landing pages, days, or other factors in Google Search Console keyword research.
Source: Self
You can select one or more filters to populate the table. If you’d like to filter clicks, impressions, average position, or average CTR, you can do so using the following parameters.
- Queries: Find out where your URLs rank for any keywords or search phrases currently associated with them in the SERPs
- Pages: View the search performance of individual pages on your site
- Countries: See how you fare by country
- Devices: See how well your searches perform on different devices
- Search Appearances: See your search results by rich results, non-rich AMP results, and job listings
- Dates: Access the search performance metrics of any day in your domain history
To use this data from Google Search Console keyword research effectively , you will have to decide what keywords to target, your SEO strategy, and your SEO objectives. This data is meant to provide you with both a large-scale summary of your search performance as well as detailed information about your strengths and weaknesses.
Index Section: Coverage, Sitemaps, and Removals
Google must crawl and index your pages before it can rank your URLs for keywords. You can find all of the information and tools that you need to improve how Google understands your web pages under the Index section of your Google account.
Coverage
In Google Search Console, you can see whether your landing pages have been indexed and any problems encountered when Google bots crawled them. Google indexes mobile-first whenever possible since 2018. There should be no errors on your coverage report, but if there are, Google will identify which pages had errors and the type of error so you can attempt to fix them.
Source: Self
Sitemap
Essentially, a sitemap is a roadmap for all the web pages on your domain. Despite not having internal links pointing to all of your pages, it tells Google’s crawlers which of your pages are the most important.
By providing a sitemap, you enable Google to crawl your site more efficiently and intelligently, which will eventually help improve your keyword rankings. Use a sitemap generator (try Yoast plugin) for an XML sitemap. Before generating your sitemap, you should consult an SEO strategist to determine which pages to include in it.
It may not be necessary to add a sitemap to your GSC account for smaller sites with only a few landing pages. In contrast, larger websites (like eCommerce sites with many product pages) may benefit from a sitemap.
To submit your XML sitemap to Google Search Console. Please select the “Sitemaps” tab.
A page will appear asking you to upload your XML file. Insert the link and click submit.
If your website has any crawling or indexing errors, you’ll be notified in Google Search Console. Keeping an eye on your sitemap is important because Google may not crawl every page of your website the same way.
You should also update your sitemap as your website grows or your site architecture changes, so Google continues to understand the most important pages.
Removals
The removal tool is one of Google’s newest features, letting site owners remove content from the SERPs and see which content has been removed based on a third-party request.
The website owner can opt for any one of three options offered by the removal tool:
- Hide URLs temporarily from appearing in search results
- Find out which URLs do not appear in Google because they are “outdated content.”
- Check if URLs have been blocked by the “Safe Search” or adult filter for Google.
Most likely, the tool will be used by site owners to access the first feature only. In some cases, it may be necessary to remove a URL from Google temporarily. You can request this via the removal tool. Google will remove any URLs containing the same prefix, or a specific URL, for six months upon receiving this request.
Page deletion from Google’s index cannot be permanently achieved with this tool. For this to happen, site owners need to either use the no-index robot tag or delete all of their content.
Conclusion
- From this blog on Google Search Console keyword, you have learned about Google Search Console along with its features and set up. In addition to this, you have also learned about Use Google Search Console to Measure Your Google Search Console keyword Results.
- The first step to improving your site’s search engine optimization is having full access to the data that will help you measure your results. The Google Search Console website has all the basics and is most straightforward for small and large sites to track SEO and settings.
- The tool has an incredible potential for enhancing the SEO of your website and gaining traction on Google. You should install GSC on each site, monitor the data, and update the website as necessary.
Share your understanding of Google Search Console keyword research in the comments section below!
Samuel is a versatile writer specializing in the data industry. With over seven years of experience, he excels in data science, data integration, and data analysis, crafting engaging content on these topics. He is also adept at WordPress development. Samuel holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Lagos State University.
