Google Search Console: Critical Data and Reports to Look Out For

Google Search Console, formerly called Google Webmaster Tools, is a free tool providing fascinating information about your website and those using it.

They can be used to find out how many people are using a website and whether they are accessing it by mobile or computer. It is also extremely useful when it comes to fixing any site errors.

The host of tools helps those using professional SEO services to maximize a website and increase traffic volume.

Here’s a breakdown of some of the most popular tools:

Searched keywords by impressions/clicks

Since Google blocked the option to view the actual search queries people were looking for- related to your site’s impressions/clicks, via Google Analytics, the search console has become the place to retrieve this type of data. All search queries that resulted in impressions or clicks to the site- are tracked and can be filtered by countries, type of search (web/media) and entry pages.

You can also receive data concerning how often people have clicked on your website as part of Google search results. This not only tells you about the performance of your website, it can also help you better optimize pages and metadata.

Impressions demonstrate how your website is in general and how often your keywords show up in search results.

Sitemaps
Providing a map of the website to Google gives search engines important information about how your site is organized and the content available. These can include metadata and information about video content. It also allows Google to do its job and give you a snapshot of the number of pages indexed.

Sitemaps that are hosted on the server can (and should) be submitted to Google’s index. In case there are multiple sitemaps- you can refer Google to the exact url of each- thus making sure Google scans the sitemaps and crawls the site according your guidelines.

Index Status
This offers a website owner an opportunity to see how many pages Google has, in fact, indexed. It can be helpful in identifying trends and whether there has been a drop in the pages indexed from your site by Google.

Manual Actions
This tool simply tells a website manager whether Google has issued a manual penalty. In doing so, you can quickly find out why and what to do.

Crawl Errors 
 When a Googlebot crawls your website, it will flag errors that show it has been unsuccessful. These can be interpreted as web users not having a good internet experience on the website. The solution is simply to hover over each error and manually correct them.

Security 
If you have suffered a hack, then this section of the Google Search Console will flag up any issues.

Backlinks
You can get a glimpse of which pages on your site are the most linked to- and which keywords are used to link back.

This is important to detect patterns, either positive or negative- such as excessive linking, excessive usage of specific keyword/s. When you can analyze this information- you can effectively plan your backlink strategy thus influencing which pages / keywords require additional backlinks and which should be diluted.