Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free service to help webmasters improve their SEO performance. Everyone that wants to improve their rankings should know their way around the service.

Key-insights for webmasters:

• Search Performance: provides insight into what queries your website is ranking for, what pages are performing best, what countries visitors come from and what device they are using.
• Index Coverage report: reports on how Google fared while crawling and indexing your site. Don’t forget to also check the FAQs around this report as they go into more detail.
• Structured Data issues: reports whether your Schema implementations are valid or not.
• Crawl stats: shows how frequently Google is crawling your site.
• Penalties and security issues: reports whether your site has any manual penalties, or is suffering from security issues.
• Links explorer: report who’s linking to your site, what anchor text they used and what internal links you have within your site.

But it’s not just one-way communication, webmasters can also use it to communicate to Google by using:

• URL Inspector: use it to request URLs to be indexed.
• Sitemaps: submit your XML sitemaps so Google can efficiently crawl and index your content.
• International Targeting and URL Parameters: communicate your preferences directly to Google without making changes to your site.
• URL Removal: request URLs to be temporarily hidden from Google Search.

You can also integrate Google Search Console with ContentKing. After doing so, ContentKing will display your Search Performance data — allowing you to better understand how your changes affected your SEO performance, to set up segments and alerts.