Google Search Console: The complete guide on how to use it in practice in 2023

Just as Google Analytics is a powerful tool for analyzing user behavior on your site, Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) is also a key piece of information on how users get there.

Google Search Console is the tool that allows you to understand how Google sees your site and make the necessary optimizations. But do you really know what to analyze and how to do it?

With the "democratization" of information, even the old name Webmaster Tools has been changed, since the public that uses it is not only limited to technicians.

Thinking about this, here we gather the key information so that you can extract the important data, even if you are not a webmaster.

The functionalities of the Google Search Console

Search Appearance: How Google reads each part of the page – titles, descriptions, images, etc.;
Search Traffic: What people are looking for on Google, what leads them to click (or not) on your site;
Google Index (Google Index): How Google is performing when indexing the pages of your site and identifying the keywords that appear the most;
Crawl: What are the difficulties that Google robots find when inspecting the pages of your site in search of relevant content;
Security issues: Notifications of security issues detected on your site;
Other additional resources.

We are going to address each of these points, trying to explain all this information in practical actions to know what to do with them:

1. Search Appearance

In this option, you will be able to analyze the optimizations that you can do to improve the appearance of your site when it appears in Google search results:

Structured Data

It is a report that serves to identify the data that is structured on your site, and that Google can identify on your page to understand and add rich snippets (search results with information optimized to make them attractive).

We understand structured data, as a set of information with a standard structure, for example, a sequence of articles that contain the author, date, and title; or, then, a list of restaurants with address information, user ratings, prices, etc.

This report is important for analyzing the data and markup errors found on the page.

There are two types of structured data errors:

Missing field: For example the author or title of the article was not indicated;
Missing best or worst rating: For example a product is rated on a 5-point scale, but the minimum and maximum value parameters have not been marked – best rating (5) or worst rating (1).

If you click on the elements found, you will have all the details of the markings found.

Use the data marker to correct it, as explained below.

structured data marker

For errors found in structured data, this is the tool to tell Google what each element of your site is if you have a set of structured information, such as Events, Articles, Products, etc.

You must choose the type of information you want to highlight. For example, if you choose Article, you will have to indicate Title, author, publication date, image, category, and average evaluation. It will depend on the option you choose.

HTML improvements

As the name implies, this report allows you to identify HTML improvements on issues found on your site during Google's crawl. This is because, in search, Google always wants to show unique and exclusive search content to users.

See below what each indication means:

Meta description: These are the problems found in the description of the site that will be displayed in searches, such as duplicate meta description, too long or short. Ideally, a meta description should be between 50 and 140 characters.
Titles: Here you can identify the configuration of the Title of the pages (Title): Absent, long, short, non-informative, or duplicate. If you click on the problem found, you will have access to a report of the pages where the error has been identified. In the case of duplicate titles, for example, you should change the <title> to the pages that appear.
Content that was not indexed: Pages that were not crawled and indexed by Google.

links to the site

Rich snippets can feature sitelinks.

If you do not want a site link to appear in the Google search result (currently it is an automated algorithm), you have the option to lower it so that it does not appear anymore.

Accelerated pages for mobile devices

This functionality provides a parsing error report for pages that have been accelerated to mobile devices. For this, they must been created according to the specifications of AMPs HTML .

The goal is to make it easier to spot issues with the implementation of AMPs (accelerated mobile pages) throughout the site, as described in the Google blog for webmasters.

If you want to start your AMPs, you can follow this instruction, from the AMPs project itself. And for more information about this report, you can check the Search console instructions on Google Search Guidelines for AMP and AMP report s

2. Search Traffic

This report has important features to identify detailed traffic information to your site:

Search Analytics

In this report, you can identify the organic traffic for your site and provide ideas for possible optimizations. The report presents:

The keywords your site appeared for in search results: If you're having trouble with (not provided) analyzing the keywords that brought users to your site in Analytics, here's the solution. Keep an eye on the words that attract the most traffic and invest in them;
The pages of your site that have been referenced: Analyze if the pages that you consider important are really getting results;
The countries that accessed: If so, optimize the pages for the other languages that also have traffic to your domain;
Whether it was mobile or desktop: If you have a lot of mobile access, make sure your pages are responsive;
If the search was on the web or specifically for images: This is a way to check if the images are being indexed. If you want to know how to optimize search for your images, see this article with Google optimization guidelines.
Analysis by date: Extract analysis and comparison of data from a specific date.

And in all the information you can know how many clicks and impressions you have (user display in search results), what is the CTR (how many views you got and which ones got clicks), and what is the average position obtained.

Clicks: Number of clicks that brought users to your site.
Impressions: How many visits the link to your site had in Google search results, even if it was not displayed by scrolling.
CTR (click-through rate): Click count divided by impression count. A high CTR means that the appearance of your site in the search results is assertive, that is, who saw it, was interested, and clicked. If there are no impressions, the CTR will be displayed as a hyphen (—), since it is divided by zero.
Position: The average position of your site's main result in search results. If there are no impressions, the position will be displayed as a dash, since it does not exist.

For more information about the report, check out the Google Search Console Support article

links to your site

One of the important criteria for Google to better classify your page is the number of links that refer to you.

Here you can see the sites that reference this (also called backlinks). This analysis allows you to identify those who are drawing attention to your content and draw conclusions about possible allies.

internal links

In the same way, the number of internal links also helps in this classification. Therefore, this report is essential to analyze the structure of internal links used within your own site and verify if the important pages are being referenced. Otherwise, you should better review your internal links to them.

If no data is displayed, check the "Crawl Errors" topic to identify if there were any issues found in crawling and indexing your site. More information is here .

Manual actions

Although Google uses algorithms to improve search quality, it also uses manual mechanisms, in specific cases. That is, if there is any inappropriate configuration in your domain, it will be manually corrected by Google as a penalty. The reasons can be:

Site invaded by third parties;
User-generated spam;
Free hosts with spam;
Structured dialing with spam;
Artificial links to your site;
Superficial content with little or no added value;
Cloaking techniques and/or unauthorized redirections;
Spam puro;
Hidden text and/or excess keywords.

So, if your site isn't showing up in search results, or is performing less than it already did, check to see if there were any manual actions. In the Google support center, you can find out how to correct each of the reasons.

International Segmentation

If your site also has international reach (which can be seen in the Search Analytics > Countries report), then you need to optimize your content to reach the right target audience. You grant this functionality if you have correctly optimized it for the language in question. For more information go to Google Support .

Ease of use on mobile devices

Unlike the "Accelerated Mobile Pages" report we talked about earlier, here you don't need to have set up AMPs, as the goal is to present the usability of your pages for mobile devices and possible errors. The main errors that Google will indicate are:

Use of Flash;
The viewport is not configured;
Fixed-width viewport;
Content not adjusted for the viewport;
small font size;
Very close touch elements;
Use of interstitials.

For more details and information, go here on Google Support.

3. Google Index (Google Index)

Index Status

It shows the pages indexed by Google, those that were blocked by robots, and those that were removed.

Ok, but what should you analyze? This is what you should pay attention to:

The constant increase in indexed pages: This means that Google is managing to crawl and index them;
Unexpected crashes: Keep an eye out because it may mean that the server is overloaded or down and that Google is having difficulty accessing your content;
Very high index volume: It can indicate duplicate content, lack of canonical addresses, automatically generated pages, and even that the site may have been invaded;
Sudden changes: Indicating security or site configuration issues.

content keywords

In this topic, you can identify the most used keywords on your site, their variations, importance (frequency in which they are found in your content), and the main pages that refer to your domain. Ideally, analyze it together with the Search Analytics menu to understand how Google is interpreting the keywords on your site.

If nonsense keywords appear with your content, it may be an indication that your site has been invaded. And if some important keyword does not appear, a problem may be occurring with index said page. To confirm this, see the "Crawl Errors" topic.

blocked resources

To index pages properly, Googlebot needs to perform a full scan of your domain, including JavaScript, CSS, and image files. These must be accessible so that Google can execute the process properly.

If you encounter problems, this report will identify the resources that are blocked from being read by robots.

If any error is found, you must correct it by clicking on the host to see the related problems and there will be an instruction on how to unlock each of the locked resources.

remove URLs

You can temporarily block pages on your domain that you don't want to appear in search results by submitting a request to remove this URL.

If you want to remove the URL permanently or you don't know the proper use of this tool, see the instructions in the Remove URLs Tool article

4. Raster (Crawl)

In this section, it is possible to analyze exactly how Google crawls your site to index it and what problems it finds:

crawl errors

If Google has any problems crawling or indexing any content on your domain, it will be presented in this report:

Site Errors: Issues from the last 90 days that prevent access to your entire website
URL errors: Specific errors when trying to crawl exclusive pages for computers, Smartphones, or Android applications

Crawl Statistics

The graphs presented are divided into Pages crawled per day, Kilobytes received, and page download time. The important thing here is to analyze sharp rises and falls.

In the article Crawl statistics report (websites) you can find the complete explanation for each situation.

Search as Google

This tool simulates how Google indexes your page to make sure the Flash or JavaScript elements are appropriate. Here the important thing to analyze is whether the investigation was:

Done: Google managed to crawl your entire site.
Partial: Some error has been found, the complete list of the error report and how to proceed is here
Redirected: The server responded to an address.

Try Robots.txt

Through the robots.txt file, you can indicate and check what you do not want to index and the URLs that will be blocked from appearing in the search results. The goal is not to overload the server, crawling irrelevant pages – for example, some images you don't want to appear in Google searches. To better understand how it works, see this article on robots.txt files in Google Search Console support.

Sitemaps

Sitemaps are important so that Google can understand how your site is structured and index it better. In this tool, you can send the generated sitemap file and see the errors that were found in this process.

URL Parameters

Here, you can tell Google the parameters you use on your website and what your purpose is, to avoid it being understood as duplicate content.

If your site features multiple products for purchase – which may be separated by beverage categories, for example – these filters lead to different sessions but may feature the same content. Get a better understanding of this topic in this Google Search Console Help Center article .

5. Security Issues

In this section, you will know if your site has been invaded or has been infected with malware. You can follow Google's instructions to prevent a malware infection here.

If you find a problem, the best thing to do is to analyze if the code does not contain or offer a malware download and request a review of the problem.

After you fix the problem, you can also request a reconsideration request to have Google take another look at your site.

6. Other resources (Other Resources)

In this section, all the other additional features of Google are gathered to further improve the optimization of your site. These are:

Structured data testing tool

Here you can enter a URL or source code and check that Google robots can read it correctly.

Structured Data Markup Helper

It's a slightly more advanced tool for marking up structured data, just like the Data Marker in the Search Appearance menu.

Markup Tester for Email

It is a tool to validate the HTML structured data of an email, whose objective is to improve participation in emails, adding information that allows the recipient to configure their inbox.

Google My Business

This is where you can tell Google the physical address and phone number of your store or office, when they are searched on Google.

Google Merchant Center

Here, you can configure information about your products and make them more easily found by users.

Ideas PageSpeed

Do you want to know how to optimize the speed of the pages of your site? Here you receive various prompts from Google. See the following example:

custom search

It is a functionality for you to insert search fields in your own site and you can manage them. It is an important application for extracting resources from what users are looking for within your site and analyzing these statistics to create or optimize the layout of the content on your page.

Google domains

If you want to buy a Google domain to create your website.

webmaster academy

It is the area where all the information and content is gathered to create a website and optimize it to be found on Google. Here you will have access to courses that show tips, videos, and examples and explain how Google search and Search Console work.

Conclusion

Using the Google Search Console is essential to optimizing your site for Google searches, although it can be challenging to use at times.

If you can understand it and manage to dedicate yourself to applying the corrections with the resources that the tool has, it will be an important ally to know the necessary optimizations for better positioning in the search results, without the need for a specialized technician.

This post was initially written by Cristine Basso in Portuguese and contains adaptations made by the author for the Latin American and Spanish markets.