A couple of days ago, when I learned the secretive way to find underserved keywords without any paid tool, I started paying less attention to my premium SEO tools.
To make a long story short, when I was not doing work on premium tools like Ahref, I realized the importance of Google Search Console.
If you have a Google Search Console account for your website, and you not taking all the benefits of using it, you are losing huge opportunities for free organic traffic.
Many times it gives you opportunities that none of the tools can give you. I have explained later.
The most appealing thing is that it’s free. You don’t pay even a single penny for using it.
Though I use Google Search Console for a long. I started using Google Search Console when I started blogging a decade ago. But my primary purpose was to index my blogs and see how many impressions my sites were getting from Google.
This is what most bloggers do.
But this is one of many advantages of Google Search Console. You can do much more if you use it properly. GSC can help in your SEO and give you huge opportunities to grow your business.
Literally, it does.
Before I share which benefits encouraged me to speak my mind, here is how to get started with it. If you are not using it, give this free tool a try.
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How to use Google Search Console
Even you are new and don’t have technical knowledge, you can get started with Google Search Console easily.
Here are easy steps to use Google Search Console for your website.
- Go to Google Search Console main page.
- Click on Start Now
- Login with your Google Account
- Enter the domain name in the Domain section if you want to verify your business with changing DNS records. Otherwise, enter the URL of your business website or blog in the URL Prefix section.
- Enter the exact URL. For instance, with HTTP or HTTPS, with www. or without www (the best information). The simple way is to open the homepage of your site or blog, copy the URL and paste it here.
- You have many options to verify it. I prefer using HTML code.
- Put the code in the head section before the /head tag
- If you are on WordPress. Open dashboard. Appearance > Theme file Editor > header.php and inser the code before /head tag
- Click Verify Property
You are done. Your business site or blog is now on Google Search Console and you can take all the advantages of Google Search Console for free.
Benefits of using Google Search Console
Once your business is on Google Search Console, it will start showing you how it’s appearing on Google search. What issues your site is facing and how to improve it.
There are many areas of business where this tool helps you improve your business.
Here are the top benefits of Google Search Console that can help your business grow faster than you think.
GSC notifies you for crawling issues
The biggest benefit of Google Search Console is that it notifies you if there are any crawling issues with your site.
Look if crawlers can’t crawl your site. You are wasting your energy on the website. So GSC gives you a free opportunity to see if Google Crawlers can crawl your site appropriately.
It solves Google indexing issues
Google is the leading search engine in the world. So it’s one of the biggest free opportunities to grow your business by getting free traffic to your website.
That’s why it’s essential to make your business appear on Google.
But over a period of time, Google indexing has become an issue with new websites and even with the older blogs. You can’t index your web pages on Google as easily as you could years ago.
Search Console helps you resolve the Google indexing issue for free.
As you verify your site, you add Sitemap of your website. Crawlers automatically crawl your sitemap over time and keep indexing the newer quality pages of your website.
The benefit of using URL Inspection tool
You can also manually index any of your webpage with the URL Inspection tool.
This is what I mostly use for all of my new articles.
You might already know duplicate content issues. Sometimes, you use some tools that automatically share your content on some content-sharing websites like Medium or any other similar sites.
If Google crawled that site earlier than yours, then it’s not your website content anymore.
Google will prefer that webpage it crawled first.
Even you delete the content from that website, still, Google doesn’t give that much value as unique fresh content. Some of my web pages are not ranking because of this issue. In this case, I am helpless other than deleting those articles and writing the new ones.
So you can’t take risks.
What do I do to avoid this issue now?
As I publish my new articles, I manually request Google to index my new page with URL Inspection Tool.
It not only helps me crawl quicker but secures my content as well.
Here is how to do it.
- Click on URL Inspection in the left menu
- Add the URL
- Click on Test Live URL (to let Google crawl it immediately and save content)
- Request Indexing
It will make your indexing quicker and save you from duplicate content issues.
See how your business is performing on Google
If your business site or blog is on Google and you are not monitoring it. It’s like being blind about something. How can you improve if you don’t know where you are?
You don’t know which pages of your website are getting more traffic, which keywords are getting more clicks and impressions. Average CTR, Rankings, and usability.
There are huge data given by Google for free.
Now it’s up to you how you take advantage of this free information.
To get details, click on the Search Results under Performance in the left menu. And get into the massive free information world.
Using filters, you can get the full idea of whatever you want to do.
Here is an example for your better understanding.
If you want to see how my webpage example.com/keywordA is performing for a keyword A.
- Click on Search Results
- Scroll down and click on the keyword.
- Click on pages, and see if it’s appearing for the right URL.
- Select your desired country from the country tab.
You will get the best information on how the keyword A performed over the period you selected in the “Date” section. If you didn’t change, it will get you the last 3 months’ results.
Remove any of your unwanted webpages
In the menu, there is an option to remove any of your outdated content.
If something went wrong with any of your web pages. For instance, you have a discount page, the offer is over, but it’s getting huge traffic and it’s ruining your reputation.
You can ask Google to temporarily remove the page for a period of time, or completely remove it.
Page Experience
In the menu, you will get a Page Experience section where you will understand how Google Crawlers find your website on Google Search.
If all of your web pages are giving their best, then you might see 100% of the good page experience. Otherwise, you will see any other percentage.
The percentage can be different for Mobile, and Desktop.
For instance, my mobile pages load faster than Desktop because of many factors. That’s why I see 100% for mobile but 75% for my desktop.
Keep an eye on Security and Manual Actions
In this section, you can see if you are facing any security or manual action issues.
When people use bad tactics in SEO, and Google wants to stop them from doing that practice, they see manual actions on their sites.
It’s essential to keep an eye on it. Because sometimes even you are not doing any bad practice, your competitor can do with your site.
Keep an eye on your backlinks and Anchors
As mentioned earlier, some websites get manual actions. And you know what are the biggest reasons for getting manual actions?
They get tons of spammy backlinks or use the same anchor to manipulate the Google algorithm. Never do that.
As I said, it’s not you who will do it, why would you take risk of getting penalized? It’s your competitors who do it for you.
So how to know if something messy is happening with your site?
People use premium tools like Ahref and Moz to keep an eye on the site. You can do it with your GSC account for free.
GSC is even better because not all backlinks are crawled by Ahref or Moz crawlers. They can’t show you what they can’t crawl. Google will provide you with all the information that even you can’t get on your Ahref.
In the left menu, scroll down, and there is a section named “Links”.
It gives you information on internal links, external backlinks, and anchors used.
If you believe that some of the backlinks are too much spammy, then you can disavow links to let Google know that you are not responsible for those backlinks. You will neither get benefits nor Google will harm you for those links.
I keep checking the newer backlinks through fresh links reports. If I find any cheap spammy backlinks, I disavow those links.
If you have any spammy backlinks reports, and your website is on Google Search Console, you can disavow links here.
Track your most recent rankings for free
SEOs use many paid tools to track their rankings. They don’t want to lose their rankings – not even for a single day.
What if you get the most recent information for free?
Using Google Search Console you can easily track your rankings on Google. It provides you with the most recent information provided by Google search.
It’s up to date and highly accurate.
Some people are confused and ask if the google search console is accurate?
Google has confirmed that Google Search Console information is highly accurate because it presents you with what actually happened. There are no predictions involved.
At last, here are the two benefits that I take from Google Search Console to grow my business faster.
It helps in keyword research
Google has confirmed that it gets up to 15% new searches every single day.
Google surely tries to match the best results for those queries. But sometimes no one has targetted those keywords. (Those are called underserved keywords.)
In that case, Google will try relevant pages for those keywords.
Your website will surely get impressions on such relevant queries.
If you keep an eye on all of your queries, which are available in the Performance > search results, you will find dozens of fresh keywords for your business. None of the tools have those keywords.
It’s up to you to select the best keywords for your business.
I believe that if your website has some authority, you will definitely get at least one new keyword for each of your web pages. This is what I noticed in my GSC account.
So the biggest benefit of using Google Search Console is in your keyword research. You can judge many things about those keywords if you pay attention to them.
Here is what I notice.
I notice where my site appeared for the query? On the first page? This means I can rank on the first page. Secondly, how many impressions am I getting? Many? That means the search volume must be high.
Improve your rankings and grow traffic
Last but not least. Google Search Console can improve your rankings, and grow your traffic.
It’s true.
Once your website gets older, you will see that all of your web pages are appearing for many relevant search queries. Once you get most of the relevant keywords, you can update the article and optimize it for all the relevant keywords you get from your account.
It will eventually start ranking for all those relevant keywords. At least, it benefitted me in my case. (Try it on any of your pages for verification first – I am not responsible for any loss).
It will also improve your rankings for your main keyword as well. And hence gets you tons of free traffic from Google.
If you know some other benefits of Google Search Console, you can share your opinions.
Why is google search console important?
It’s important to see how your site is doing on Google. It helps you improve your SEO, grow your business and get huge organic traffic. There are 2 secretive benefits that I have shared in this guide.
Why should I use google search console?
Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool that helps businesses in SEO. If you have a website – it can be a business site or a blog – Google Search Console will give you many opportunities to get huge organic traffic for free.
There is much more that I have discussed in detail in the guide. Once you study this in-depth you will realize the significance of the Google Search Console.
What does search console do?
It provides you the complete data of how a website is performing on the search engine. If you appropriately use that data, you can take many financial advantages from the given free data.