Tracking The Performance Of
Your Site In Google Search Console
Measuring your website’s performance can provide statistics on what’s
important to your audience, how they find your content, and whether
that content is actually showing up in search results. Google Search
Console is the best collection of free tools and reports that will
help website owners and SEO professionals do just that.
How Google Search Console can help you manage your website
It can help you identify the search terms people use to find
your website, as well as analyze key metrics like your average Google
search rank, clicks, and impressions.
You can also use GSC to solve technical problems and make sure
your pages are properly indexed and search engines accessible. GSC
will also send you email notifications when problems with the Website
are detected, and may notify Google as soon as those issues are
resolved.
Set up Google Search Console for your website
To get started, visit the GSC landing page and click “Get
started”. After that, you’ll need to sign in to the Google
Account you want to link your website’s Search Console account to.
A domain-level property gives you a complete picture of how
your website is performing, including all URLs for all subdomains of
both HTTP and HTTPS.
To check The GSC of a site may contain a lot of information
and settings that should not be accessed by unauthorized persons.
That’s why Google requires verification as part of the setup process.
Adding domain ownership requires that you change website ownership
by adding a DNS record with your domain name provider. This is the
only validation method for domain properties.
After adding your domain, check that your domain registrar is
listed in the drop-down menu, as shown above. If so, select it to
start the automatic authorization process. If the verification fails
initially, Google recommends trying again after a few hours as the
change may take some time to take effect.
If you have selected the URL Prefix property instead of the
Domain property, you can take ownership of the website by uploading
an HTML file, HTML tags, Google Analytics tracking code, Google Tag
Manager container snippet, the above method of the domain name
provider, etc.
Some Important Functions of Google Search Console
Once you have verified the ownership of the website, you are
ready to start using GSC for your website.
The main sections are performance, coverage, experience and
upgrades. If you want GSC data and functions to work in your
location, you will need to familiarize yourself with these
sections/reports.
The main query used to find your content.
Impressions (how often users see your website in Google search
results).
Clicks (the number of times your website was clicked in Google
search results).
Average CTR (percentage of impressions resulting from a
click).
Average position of your website in search results.
You can edit the report to show you the information that
interests you most by viewing the Filter bar (circled in yellow), the
Metric options (indicated by red arrows), and the Dimensions tab
(indicated by a blue box with a diamond).
You can use the filter bar to filter information by search
type (web, images, video or news), date range (up to last 16 months),
query, page, country, device, and search presentation (search result
type or function).
You can enable or disable Total Clicks, Overall Impressions,
Average CTR, and Average Position to toggle the graph (shown in
green) to show the data you want for a specific time period.
The table (outlined in orange) gives you an overview of clicks
and impressions based on the selected dimension (cases, pages,
countries, devices, search performance and data).
It’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with how to use the
filter bar.
GSC Performance Filter New
Additional filters in performance reports.
You can also use these filters to compare two values. Try a
new filter and change or remove the filter if you want to analyze
something differently. The updated user interface can be used to
determine the value of keywords and entire sections of your website,
the source of traffic by country, the types of tools used by search
engines, and the way Google serves your customers.
Index coverage report. This report shows the position of your
website’s URL in the Google index and is used to troubleshoot SEO
issues that may prevent your pages from appearing in searches.
Google will email you when it detects a new index coverage
issue on your website, but will not email you if an existing problem
has worsened. It is a good idea to review this report periodically
to make sure any problems are under control.
Index coverage report in Google Search Console.
As in the performance report, toggling between errors,
validate, and exclude options with warnings updates the chart to show
the data you want.
Error: The page is not indexed and does not appear in Google
search results. Clicking on a specific type of error (in the table
at the bottom of the diagram) will display the URLs to which the
error applies, which may guide you on how to fix it.
Valid with restrictions: These pages are indexed and may or
may not appear in Google search results. The GSC uses this term
because it believes there is a problem you should be aware of.
Valid: Indicates that a page is indexed and appearing in
Google search results; No further action is required (unless you
want the page to be indexed).
Deprecated: These pages have not been indexed or flagged with
an error as Google believes it is their intention to exclude these
pages. This can happen, for example, if one page has no index
directive or another page has a canonical tag.
Your indexed pages should increase as you continue to create
new content. If you merge or remove content that no longer serves a
purpose, you may see a downward trend. If the number of indexed
pages suddenly drops (this is not justified by an action you take
such as merging content) it could indicate that there is a problem
preventing Google from indexing your content. The Google Index
Coverage Report help page has a comprehensive list of errors that you
can use to troubleshoot issues that are preventing Google from
indexing your URLs.
Experience Report Page. This report was added to the GSC
before Google updated its page experience. The report combines the
main Web Vital report with other metrics that are part of the Page
Experience update. The basic data for web statistics comes from the
Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX), which collects anonymous
performance metrics from actual visitors to your website.
Improvement report. Similar to index coverage reports, these
reports show you error trends, valid pages with errors, and valid
pages. Pages with the error do not appear in Google search results.
Warning pages may appear in the results, but errors may prevent them
from appearing in places where they would have otherwise been, such
as in the Top Stories carousel in the case of AMP pages.
Structured data that cannot be parsed reports adds syntax
errors to the structured data. These are included in this report
rather than the report for the specific role (for example rich
results in events or job postings) because errors may prevent Google
from identifying the nature of the role.
Depending on the structured data markup you implement, other
reports may appear on the Extensions tab. These can include
breadcrumb search box markup, videos, logos and sitelinks to name a
few. When you zoom in on a specific type of error on a report,
you’ll also see a Validate Validation button; This can be used to
tell Google that you have fixed an issue that was preventing search
engines from properly accessing part of your website.
Respectfully
Vasile,