Google Search Console, formerly Google Webmaster Tools, is a free service offered by Google that helps website owners better understand and troubleshoot their site’s presence in Google Search results.
Why use Search Console?
Why should you care about this thing? Well, you don’t have to. But, it does give website owners unparalleled access into how Google sees your site and let’s you monitor how your site is doing. After all, the way Google and other search engines see your site is how the world sees it.
A few examples:
- Make sure that Google can access your content
- Submit new content (and XML sitemaps) for crawling
- Remove content you don’t want shown in search results
- Create and monitor content that delivers visually engaging search results
- Monitor and resolve malware or spam issues so your site stays clean
- Which queries caused your site to appear in search results?
- Did some queries result in more traffic to your site than others?
- Are your product prices, company contact info, or events highlighted in rich search results?
- Is your mobile site performing well for visitors searching on mobile?
Get Setup
The setup process sounds more complicated than it really is. Here, we’ll just give you the steps and link each to a more robust help article about how to actually perform that step.
- If you don’t have a Google Account, get one.
- Add a website property
- Connect that property with your Analytics account
- Submit your XML sitemap
- Go have a beer
What’s up with that last step? Well, it’s going to take some time for the analytics data to roll-in, Google to process your sitemap for errors and then index the parts without errors. There’s really very little you can do at this point, so why not treat yourself to a beer?