What is Google Search Console?
Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool provided by Google to measure your website performance, traffic, keyword performance, analyze issues on your website. It also provides an insight on how your website doing in organic search as well as ways to make an adjustment to the site in the Google Index.
For SEO, Google Search Console is a must tool for adjusting strategy based on data. The data that you can get from Search Console can help businesses discover new ranking opportunities, boost existing performance, and learn how exactly people are coming to their website by their search intent.
What are the GSC used for?
Google Search Console provides you a performance report metrics about organic traffic coming to business websites as well as each individual URL. It gives details about clicks, impressions, click-through rate, and average keyword rankings.
- Impressions: This is defined as how many links to your site a user saw on Google search results . A simpler way of describing it is that impressions are how many times your site appears in search results, even if they don’t get clicks. Your results aren’t counted as impressions if they appear on the next page of search results that the searcher did not click on.
- Click Through Rate: This metric is a measure of how many clicks the site has received, divided by the number of impressions received.
- Clicks: This metric reflects the number of clicks from Google search that results in users visiting your site’s property. Unlike Google Analytics these clicks don’t necessarily represent user’s sessions (a total period where a user browses the site) or even page views (the number of times a page is viewed in total). Clicks are, just that… clicks. This is a big part of why the number of clicks you see in Search Console doesn’t always match with sessions you see in the landing-page report of Analytics; because Google measures these metrics with slightly different definitions.
- Position: This means the average position of the topmost result from your site for a given keyword. Average is given here because the position fluctuates often, give or take a few spots.
Google Search Console also provides to check your technical site’s health, what are the component of site health you should aware of?
- The Index Coverage Report
- The Sitemaps Report
- URL Inspection Tool
- Manual Actions Report
- Removals Tool
- Core Web Vitals Report
- Mobile Usability Report
All these reports are just a few of the main resources available in Search Console. Depending on what sort of business you own and how your website is set up you might have other reports available to you. Read More Here