Google Search Console (opens in a new tab) is a free service by Google that site owners and SEO specialists use to improve their site's SEO performance. We've written the following in-depth guides on how to use key-features:
Furthermore, Google Search Console also packs the following features:
- 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 check out the FAQs around this report, as they go into more detail.
- URL Inspector: use it to gain detailed insights about the crawlability and indexability status of URLs.
- Structured Data issues: reports whether your Schema implementation is valid or not.
- Crawl stats: shows how frequently Google is crawling your site, how much kilobytes they downloaded and how long it took to download.
- 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:
- 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.
