Google Search Console (GSC)- How to use GSC
In this article, I will be walking you through how to use the google search console to index the content of your website to the google search engine for your posts and page to appear at the top of the google search engine result page (SERPs)
Here, we say that Google search console is a web service provided by Google which allows webmasters to check the indexing status of their website and also to optimize the visibility of the content of their website.
How To Connect Google search Console using your WordPress Dashboard
- Login to the Dashboard of your WordPress website
- Ensure you have installed Yoast SEO Plugin to your WordPress website
- Hover your mouse on the SEO panel as shown in the image below:
- Click on General
- Click on Webmaster Tools
- Clcik on the Google Search Console link as shown in the image below:
- Click on Html Tag to verify website ownership as shown in the image below:
- copy out the meta tag link displayed
- Go back to your webmaster tools and past the code in the google bar provided
- Click on save
- Return back to the Google webmaster central tools and click on VERIFY
- you should get a congratulatory message for successfully verifying your property or website
- The message at the Google webmaster central page will say “Good job, https://www.yourdomain.com is now verified, that you can now use Google service for your property such as SEARCH CONSOLE”
- Click on the SEARCH CONSOLE to go to Google search console to start making use of the service.
How to Connect to to Google search console manually without a plugin.
- Go to the URL section of your website and type in https://www.google.com/webmaster/tools or click HERE
hint: to perform this operation, make sure that you are logged into the email account that is associated to your website.
- you will be prompted to select the email account that you will want to use the google search console with
- once you select the email account, you will be required to enter the domain name of your website. just like the first step, you will then be taken to the webmaster central to copy and paste the HTML tag into the head section of your website
- copy the HTML tag and past it to the header section of your website and save
- Return to the Google webmaster central and click on verify….
- you will be given the success message as shown in the previous step to start using google search console.
Google search Console Overview
the overview shows the perfromance graph, such as the total clicks from web search, search console insight. you also have an option to view full report of your website
if you scroll down, you will see the coverage, with pages with errors and pages without erros. then the enhancement shows the progress status of your website
The next important feature of the Google Search Console is the performance as shown below”
in the image above, you can see
- The total clicks
- Total impressions
- average CTR (click through rate)
- Average Position
The graph shows the statistics of your perfromance on Google search engine result page.
At the top of the performance, you will see three editable sections
- search by:web
- Date:last three months
- New
you can all edit or adjust to suit what you want.
When you scroll down further, you will see:
- queries: this displays the top search queries your website has on Google search engine result page
- pages: This will display the pages that are mostly searched for, number of clicks, and impressions
- countries: This section will display the countries from which your website visitors hails from
- devices: The device of your website visitors, e.g. mobile, tablet, desktop, etc.
- search appearance: The rate at which the content of your website appears at Google search engine result page
- Date: This displays the date at which visitors visits a particular page or post on your website.
The next feature on the left hand side is the URL inspection tools
The URL inspection tool is used to hasten the rate at which the content of your website can be indexed on the Google search engine result page. (Google Search Console (GSC)- How to use GSC)
How To use the URL inspection tool
- Go to your website and copy the link of your page or post that you want to index instatly
- Come back to the URL inspection tool and past the URL at the url section of the url inspection tool
- After pasting the URL, hit on the enter key on your keyboard
- Wait for Google to retrieve your data from Google index
- Google will show you if that url has been indexed or not. if it hasn;t been indexed and you want to index it, click on request indexing
Do this to all the URL that you want to index
The next feature of the Google search console is the Coverage
The coverage shows
- pages/posts with errors
- pages/posts that are valid with warning
- pages/posts that are valid: this will display pages/posts that are submitted and indexed and pages that are indexed not indexed in sitemap
- Excluded pages/posts: if you click on this and scroll down, you will see pages and posts that are crawled-currently not indexed, Discovered-currently not indexed, Alternate page with proper canonical tage, Not found pages and posts, and pages/posts with redirect
In Google search console, we have another feature called the sitemap
Sitemap is the differnet compartments of your website
e.g. posts, pages, categories, members, authors, general sitemap, etc.
the required sitemap url to a website includes: https://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml or https://www.yourdomain.com/post-sitemap.xml, https://www.yourdomain.com/page-sitemap.xml, https://www.yourdomain.com/category.com/categrory-sitemap.xml
you can do this for the members, authors, etc.
Note: submit the right website URL: if your website is HTTP do not type in HTTPS, etc.
To see how to get your sitemap out from your website, consider reading my post called Yoast settings and configuration.
Or Read how to add Robot.txt to your website
Training video below:
Google Search Console (GSC)- How to use GSC
Related: Google Analytics Step by Step Guide
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