Google Search Console: Data and Functionality You Can Get

Website owners who have relied on Google contextual advertising realize that it is insufficient for long-term success. Without optimizing web pages for search engine algorithms, it is almost impossible to achieve sustainable results. Therefore, many people wonder what SEO tools to use to achieve higher rankings in SERPs and attract organic traffic.

One obvious piece of advice is to use Google Search Console (GSC). Since it is a native tool of Google Corporation, it should consider all the nuances of website ranking. Moreover, users can perform all actions for free, which also adds to its attractiveness.

How rational is this decision in relation to opportunities gained and lost from using Google Search Console? In this article, I will consider in detail the features of this tool, its capabilities, scope of application, etc. I will also compare it with other popular SEO services such as Semrush, Ahrefs, and others. Following my thoughts, you will understand whether the capabilities of GSC are sufficient for your tasks or whether it is better to opt for more advanced SEO tools.

Quick Introduction: Purposes of Google Search Console

The main goal of the Google Search Console developers is to provide webmasters and SEO specialists with an effective tool for evaluating and improving the SEO of websites. First, GSC focuses on strengthening technical SEO, which is essential for promoting a site in search results. This tool has existed for almost 20 years, although until 2015, it was presented by Google under a different name ‒ Google Webmaster Tools. The rebranding occurred due to the expansion of the user audience of this software. Its benefits were obvious for SEO specialists, marketers, and website owners. Therefore, the word “Webmaster” was clearly narrow in comparison with the scope of its application.

Why is Google Search Console important for any specialist engaged in website promotion on the Internet? Because this tool allows users to solve many tasks:

Evaluate and monitor the visibility of a website in search results;
Detect many technical and SEO errors that negatively affect the position of a website in SERP;
Identify issues related to crawling and indexing;
Report indexing errors to Google;
Improve the search appearance of the website;
Evaluate organic traffic from the Google search engine;
Learn which keywords are driving users to your website;
Discover the sections of your website that are most popular with users;
Analyze backlinks and internal links;
Receive notifications about website errors and much more.

By using all these opportunities, you can achieve great results in optimizing your website for Google SERP. Since all this information is provided for free, you will do it without any significant investment.

How to Work with Google Search Console

One of the advantages of GSC is its ease of use, as you do not need any special skills or knowledge to get the information you need. Setting up this tool to serve your website is simple:

Open the Google Search Console page and log in using your Google account.
When you first log in to the application, GSC will ask you to “Add Property.” Paste the URL of your website’s home page in the Domain field. In this case, GSC will analyze all pages of the website. You can go the other way and add the website address as a URL prefix. With this user choice, SEO tools will analyze only subsections of your site, such as blog, store, finance, etc.
Verify your site using one of the seven methods offered by Google. For example, it can be a unique HTML file, HTML Code Snippet, CNAME Record, or something else.
Set the target country for which you will analyze the information.
Link your two accounts in GSC and Google Analytics to get more data, such as clicks, CTR, impressions, etc.
Check for security problems using the “Security Issues” option to avoid harming your site’s SEO.
If you have a large site with thousands of pages, add a Sitemap. If your site is small, you can avoid this step, but it is still a good idea to do it. Copy your sitemap URL, go to the Sitemaps tab, paste the address, and submit it.

Adding a sitemap file is necessary so that Google knows which web pages of your site you want search engines to crawl and index. If you don’t upload a sitemap, it will still do this eventually. But if you use Google Search Console, this task will be done faster.

If you want to add any more users to manage your account in GSC, use “Settings.” Open the “Users and Permissions” tab and add other team members. This is a convenient feature of this SEO tool because other SEO SaaS services require an additional fee for connecting other team members to manage the account. Google leaves this issue entirely to your discretion and does not require any extra fees.

After these steps, GSC activation for your website is complete. Now, you can take advantage of all the features that will help you optimize your website’s SEO.

Useful Features of Google Search Console

Carefully study all SEO tools and evaluate the heuristic potential of GSC reports for optimizing your website. Here are the main modules that Google offers for increasing the visibility of websites and promoting them in search results.

Performance Report

I’ll start with my favorite section of Google Search Console, as I use it all the time to increase organic traffic. It gives you an overall view of how your website is performing in Google. However, the report also provides you with a lot of details that will be useful for analyzing and optimizing your website:

Total clicks: Find out how many users are coming to your website from Gthe oogle search results page.
Total impressions: Discover how many times Google suggested a link to your website in SERP.
Average click-through rate (CTR): Learn what percentage of impressions prompted users to click the link to visit your website.
Average position: Find out the average position of your website in SERP during a certain period

The old version of Google Webmaster Tools and Search Console also had these capabilities, but in the new version, they have been expanded. Google has also extended the period for comparison. In previous versions, users could analyze history for up to 90 days. Now, you can evaluate the performance of your website over a wider time range ‒ up to 16 months. There is also the possibility of customization if you have any special tasks.

To get the Performance Report data, click the “Search Results” button on the left toolbar. These four metrics will be presented as numbers and as a graph. The latter visualizes the fluctuation of all indicators over the period that you select for analysis. Moreover, you will find out the details of the traffic to your website. In particular, in the table, you will see the following useful data:

Queries
Pages
Countries
Devices
Search appearance
Dates

How to Optimize Your Website with Data from the Performance Report

Here are some website performance issues you can identify with this feature.

High SERP Rank but Low CTR

This combination of metrics shows that your site is regularly featured in search results but does not attract user’s attention. They do not click on the link to visit it. To increase the number of views, pay attention to meta descriptions and title tags. They may not be convincing to searchers, so you should rewrite them.

Always pay attention to the number of website impressions. This metric shows you the maximum traffic you can get. And your task is to make sure every user who sees your site in search results clicks its link.

After you have identified the problems and made all the changes, check the performance of your website after 10 days. This frequency is not accidental because a shorter number of days will not give you meaningful results. Google will re-index your web page after a few days. However, it will take at least another week for it to show its new qualities. During this period, it will be offered to users in the SERP again and again. If the CTR percentage has increased, you have achieved your goal and successfully interested users.

Finding Missing Keywords and Opportunity Keywords

Your website may not rank for some keywords simply because they are missing from the content. Google search engines then do not consider the information relevant to user queries and do not show the website in search results. Performance Report allows users to find those keywords that rank highly in Google search engines. By integrating them into your content, you will get more website impressions.

The same applies to opportunity keywords that can help you achieve great success. To find keywords of such high quality, define the following two indicators in the settings:

The period you are interested in;
Keyword rating.

After that, sort the table by the number of impressions, and you will understand which keywords stimulate Google to show your web page more often.

Additional Tips for Google Search Rankings

You will notice an interesting detail if you enter any topic into the Google search engine and compare the top 10 search results. Google ranks websites with more text as more relevant to the topic. The average content word count for the top 10 websites is about 1,500 words. So, fill your website with solid texts with opportunity keywords for better results.
Add videos to your web pages to increase Dwell Time. Wistia research shows that users stay on web pages with videos more than 2.5 times longer. And the longer your website is open in their browser, the more useful it appears to Google search engines. So, by adding videos, you influence user interest and your website’s Google rankings.
Fill the content with internal links. Google Search Console helps optimize internal linking, which is also essential for website promotion in search results. By adding links to other web pages of the site, you can easily raise its ranking with search engines.
Pay serious attention to backlinks. One of the most effective methods to advance in SERP is to link to a web page from other websites because this convinces search engines of the value of the information presented on your website.

Index Coverage Report

The visibility of a website for users in search results depends on the successful indexing of web pages. It is necessary so that the website can get into a database index, which is needed to provide the requested information to users quickly. Therefore, checking indexing is critically important if you want your website and its pages to be visible to users in SERP.

To find out how Google sees your website, use the Index Coverage function in GSC. The Google Search Console report will allow you to detect all errors with page indexing, eliminate those that depend on you, or contact Google if fixing the shortcomings depends on it.

To start the check, select the “Pages” category under the Indexation section on the left sidebar. The Index Coverage Report will show you results in four categories of web pages:

Valid: Web pages that have no problems with indexation.
Valid with warnings: Pages you need to pay attention to if you want them to be shown in SERP without any problem.
Error: Pages that were not indexed due to certain technical reasons.
Excluded: Web pages that are not subject to indexation. For example, these can be pages with confidential information, pages in the development stage with unfinished content, etc.

Once you get the report, carefully study the reasons for the errors, which are listed in a separate table. For example, it could be a crawl issue, redirect error, server error, etc. For each error, you will see the number of pages that must be corrected.

How to Fix Errors

For example, you see several web pages in the “Submitted URL not found (404)” section. Click on the status of this error to get a full list of web pages that had a validation problem for this reason. Review each of them. Perhaps they contained products or services that you no longer offer. In this case, you do not need to do anything, since Google will deindex the page later without your intervention.

If the pages are not indexed due to “Soft 404” errors, you can send Google crawlers to this location again:

First, check the page URL using the URL Inspection tool.
Select the “Test Live URL” button to start crawling and show you how Googlebot sees your page.
If Googlebot finds this page, it will take a screenshot of it. You can view the result by clicking “View Tested Page.” If the image matches what you see on your website, the problem is fixed, and users will now be able to see this information in SERP. But for this, there is one last step left to do ‒ ask Google to repeat the indexing.
Click the “Request Indexing” button to finalize the error fix by Google crawlers and make the page available to searchers.

You can do the same with other types of errors. Run a URL Inspection on each page with an error in the Google Search Console report. Analyze the specific issues that prevented the page from being validated. Fix the problem and ask Google to index it again. After some time, check Index Coverage again to make sure all the issues have been resolved.

How to Fix Technical Issues in the “Valid with Warnings” Category

Pages in this category have been validated, so they are searchable. Still, they have certain issues that Google wants to notify you about. For example, this could be a robots.txt block. To fix this issue, select the “Test Robots.txt Blocking” option on the right side of the interactive graph. Find out why the page was blocked and decide what to do next:

Unblock
Delete
Unblock but keep unindexed

Problems That May Occur with Valid Web Pages

If you want to maintain effective visibility of your website on the Internet, monitoring of indexing should be done regularly. Because technical errors may occur outside your field of vision, and you will not be aware of them. Index Coverage Report will reveal all errors, allowing you to fix the problem in time. And if you think that there can be no misunderstandings with the Valid Pages category, this is a misconception. Webmasters and website owners should monitor them as well to prevent sharp drop or growth in their number.

A sharp increase in the number of Valid Pages means that Google has indexed some web pages that were previously Excluded. This means that users will be able to access information on your website that you blocked from public viewing or from Google indexing.
A sharp decrease in the number of Valid Pages means that Googlebot was not able to access them for some reason. Perhaps a noindex tag appeared on them, and crawlers simply followed your command.

In any case, such anomalies should alert you, since they indicate that the website has become less visible to users, or, conversely, visible in those details that you would prefer to hide.

Reasons Why Web Pages an Be Excluded

After receiving the Index Coverage Report, you may find thousands of pages in the Excluded section. But if you want to get maximum visibility of your website in SERPs, you should study the reasons for excluding each of them. However, this is not so difficult, since all of them will be grouped into several categories. Clicking on each of the categories will give you a complete list of URLs of pages with this problem.

Of course, this does not mean that you want to index each of these pages. Many of them you have blocked from indexing yourself by specifying the noindex tag. However, some of them should be optimized so that Googlebot considers them worthy of indexing. In particular, pay attention to the “Crawled – currently not indexed” category. This category includes those web pages that Google has considered incomplete or not useful for users. Perhaps there is duplicate content, or there is a product without a description, etc. If you improve the quality of your content and request indexing, it will appear in search results.

Index Coverage Report Summary

Website owners or webmasters who do not check the indexation of pages are like people who do not look in the mirror. They do not know what they look like and how other people perceive them. You can develop a great website but mistakenly block the important pages from indexing. Or Googlebot will find duplicate information in your content and exclude the page from indexing. There are many reasons why pages of your website will no longer be visible to searchers. As a result, organic traffic will drop, and sales will decrease.

To be sure that all important pages are available for search results, evaluate website indexing. This can be done with Google Search Console and through other SEO services. However, GSC is too good at this to pay other SEO tools for this task. Moreover, as soon as you fix the error, you can immediately request indexing from Google, which is also convenient.

Therefore, if this is the main task for which you want to use SEO software, I recommend you try the free GSC. It is highly effective in track indexing, identifying problems, and communicating with Googlebot.

Other Useful GSC Features to Boost Your Website

If you know the logic of Google search engines, you can achieve the highest rankings in SERP. Google Search Console will effectively help you with this task. You will easily and free of charge check the effectiveness of the SEO of your website. Also, you will be able to use additional GSC features that will help give your website more credibility.

Crawl Report

If your organic traffic remains low despite the optimization of web pages, there may be a problem with the crawling of your website. To identify this, generate and examine the Crawl Report.

Click the Crawl Stats option in the drop-down menu of the Crawl section. You will get a detailed graph that shows how many pages of your website are crawled per day.

If your site is too large, Google crawlers simply cannot cope with the fast indexing of pages. In this case, consider reducing the number of pages. For example, if you run an e-commerce website, exclude pages of color alternatives of products from indexing. By reducing the task for crawlers, you will get faster results.

Another reason could be in too slow loading of your website. In such a case, crawlers have time to index only a few pages. You will also find a metric on loading time in the report. And if it is too long, consider moving your website to another server. This will have a positive effect on your Google ranking and user experience.

The number of backlinks also increases your Crawl Budget or the number of pages crawled daily. So, by increasing your link mass, you directly and indirectly improve the ranking of your website in Google.

Use the Power of Internal Links

The trick of internal links to increase organic traffic is well known. However, inexperienced SEO specialists or webmasters can achieve the opposite effect if they use links incorrectly. To evaluate the effectiveness of your internal links, use the Link Report. This feature can be found at the bottom of the left sidebar of the toolbar. Users can find the following details in the report:

Total number of internal links;
Top linked pages;
A number of links to each of these pages.

You can evaluate internal links to each of these pages separately. Just click on its address in the interactive report and get a full list of links. If there are a few of them, add more from other web pages that are not included in this list. This way, you can strengthen any page of your site that you consider significant and helpful for potential customers.

Still, you should know which pages are best for internal linking. If you want to boost a certain URL from your website, link to it from the Top Linked Pages. You will find them in the report, which contains internal links and backlinks. You can view this information by the total number of backlinks and the number of linking sites. Choose top positions from this list to use their power to redirect traffic to other pages.

Page Experience Report

Another useful tool for assessing the user experience on your website is the Page Experience Report. It evaluates the platform on several variables:

Core Web Vitals: A comprehensive metric that takes into account the speed of web page loading, interactivity, and visual stability.
Mobile Usability: The ease of navigation on mobile devices.
HTTPS: The security of the connection to your website for users.

You can find this feature on the left sidebar under the “Experience” section. Once you get the report, you can evaluate what percentage of URLs provide a good page experience on mobile devices and desktops.

The Core Web Vitals test will show you which pages of your website fail to provide an optimal user experience. However, this report is good for its statistics and the ability to optimize each of these pages. To do this, you need to click on the number of pages that failed the test. You will get a full list of URLs that need improvement. Study the GSC explanation of why the page didn’t pass the test and fix technical or SEO issues. After you fix all the flaws on the failed pages, report it to Google for revalidation. To do this, find the “VALIDATE FIX” button in the error report and click on it.

URL Inspection

If you want to evaluate a specific website page in detail, use the URL Inspection tool. It is accessible at the top of the sidebar. Enter the URL of the page you want to analyze, and you will get a lot of useful information:

Index status: Whether the page has successfully passed the validation process to be indexed by Google
Last crawl date: The date of the last contact of Googlebot with the web page.
Mobile usability: Whether the page is adapted for display on mobile devices according to Google criteria.
Structured data: The presence of structured data and other issues on the page.

If you want to see how Googlebot perceives this page, click the “TEST LIVE URL” button. Among other information that Google Search Console will offer you, you will find a screenshot of the page taken by Googlebot. Compare it with the content that opens in your browser.

Also, the URL inspection feature can be useful if you have introduced new pages to your website. By adding the full URL of the new page for inspection, you will get the following result in the report: “URL is not on Google.” Click the “REQUIRE INDEXATION” button, which is located under this phrase, so that Google crawlers can validate it. Of course, you can go other ways to index new pages, but this is the fastest one because the whole indexing process will take only a few minutes. So, you should use Google Search Console at least for these purposes.

The URL Inspection tool is also suitable if you have not added a new page but simply updated the content on the old one. In this case, you can wait until Google crawlers discover the new content naturally. However, this can take too much time, especially if you have a large site. Using the “Fetch As Google” option in the URL Inspection section is much more effective. By indexing the updated page, you will get a significant increase in organic traffic if it was optimized.

Benefits of Google Search Console: Why It Should Be in Your Arsenal of Effective SEO Tools

A quick analysis of all critical SEO factors. If you want to evaluate the overall performance of your website and its visibility in search results, start with Google Search Console. It offers inspection of many parameters, including crawling, indexing, page experience, search rankings, backlinks, etc. Moreover, it is a free tool that does not limit users in the number of checks. Therefore, it is a great start for further technical and SEO optimization of web pages.
Accuracy of data. If your main goal is to evaluate the performance of your website in Google search results, GSC is ideal for this purpose. All data on crawling, indexing, etc. comes directly from Google. Therefore, you can be sure that it will be complete and accurate. Of course, if you are interested in the performance of your website in other search engines, Google Search Console will not be able to provide you with such information. In this case, you should turn to other SEO services, such as Ahrefs.
Data freshness. Even popular SEO services may have problems with updating data for some tools. For example, the Rank Tracker tool on Ahrefs updates data only once a week. With Google Search Console, you will not experience such disappointments since you will be able to access fresh data every few hours.
Useful Alerts. You don’t need to look through all the reports about your website’s performance frequently to identify any shortcomings in its performance. Set up alerts to your email to know about all new problems that arise. If GSC detects problems with site security, crawling, indexing of pages, etc., you will receive an instant alert. This feature saves you time and allows you to solve all the problems that arise quickly.
Ease of Website Optimization for Mobile Devices. GSC is an effective website tester from the point of view of mobile users. It meticulously evaluates the mobile version of the site in terms of usability on mobile phones. Mobile Usability Report will show all web pages that have not passed the test for good usability. You will also be able to find out what specific shortcomings GSC suggests to fix. For example, it may be too small text or close placement of clickable elements. Fix these shortcomings, and your website’s ranking for mobile users will increase.

Disadvantages of Google Search Console

The new version of GSC does not have all the features of the old one. For example, in the previous version, users could easily delete web pages using the URL Removal Tool. The latest version of the application does not yet include this option. Therefore, you need to switch to the old version of the program to perform this operation. Moreover, this deletion will be valid only for 90 days and then be cached again. So, if you do not want to repeat this operation over and over again, perform this task using another tool.
Historical data tracking limitations. While the latest versions of GSC have expanded the time range of data for analysis, it is still quite narrow. In the first versions of this SEO tool, users could only look back 90 days. Now, this timeline has been expanded to 16 months. This is definitely an improvement in Google Search Console policy, but for advanced SEOs, such historical data is not enough because you won’t be able to analyze the evolution of the website and long-term trends for such periods.
Averaging of some metrics. GSC often offers average metrics in its reports. This means that users will not be able to see the details of these metrics. For example, this applies to average CTR or average position in search results. So, you will not be able to know if there was a significant variation in positions in search results or whether your website was offered to users in a position close to the average.
Lack of focus on content. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has many aspects, including technical, content, backlinks, etc. However, Google Search Console focuses primarily on technical issues. Backlinks also receive some attention, but the data on them is less complete than on other SEO services. As for content, this is the weakest point of GSC. Therefore, working only with this SEO tool, you will not get a holistic view of the strengths and weaknesses of your website.
Limitations when building a link profile. Google Search Console provides extensive information on backlinks and internal links. However, it will not be as complete and detailed as on other SEO platforms like Semrush and Ahrefs. For example, tables with links in GSC show only 1,000 rows of data. And you can even export no more than 100,000 links. Of course, for an ordinary website, such data will be enough. However, for leading websites with millions of links, such limited information will not be enough for analysis. Moreover, you will not be able to filter follow from nofollow links since this SEO tool does not differentiate them.
Problems when working with a large number of projects. If you use Google Search Console to improve the ranking and visibility of your website, you will most likely be happy with this service. But if you want to manage several projects, you will have difficulties. Because the GSC interface does not allow you to group projects, include them in one list for comparing key metrics, etc.

Google Search Console Alternatives You Might Be Interested In

As you can see from this review, Google Search Console is a great tool, but it has limited capabilities. If you want to analyze your website’s performance in other search engines, monitor competitors, and study keywords, content, and backlinks more thoroughly, you will need other SEO services. Let’s see how they can expand your SEO website optimization capabilities.

Semrush

Google Search Console offers SEO tools for internal analytics only. Thanks to this, you can improve your website’s SERP position. However, users cannot study competitors’ websites to compare their digital assets’ performance with their own. To access GSC tools and all reports, users must verify the website’s ownership. Therefore, you cannot simply enter your competitors’ URLs and get detailed analysis from their websites.

In contrast, Semrush provides quality competitive intelligence. It allows you to evaluate your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses and see how you can improve your website to attract more organic traffic.

Semrush is also great for evaluating your ad campaigns. It lets you see how much traffic they drive to your website. You can also find out the same for your competitors, including information about each of their ads.

Semrush provides various content and keyword tools, some of which are AI-powered, such as AI writing tools.

However, some features are present in GSC but not available in Semrush. For example, you can ask Google to index your page or receive notifications if Google has questions about your site. Google Search Console can also provide feedback on issues such as sitemap processing and structured data.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is aimed not only at SEO specialists, webmasters, and website owners. Digital agencies, marketers, content marketers, and other specialists involved in promoting business on the Internet also use it. Therefore, the set of tools that it offers is much wider. This service also has its crawlers, which are in 2nd place in activity after Google. Therefore, Ahrefs offers huge databases based on which users can receive vital insights for optimizing content, keywords, backlinks, etc.

Like Semrush, Ahrefs uses AI-based technologies to enhance link-building efforts, discover keywords, and optimize website content. AI technologies have also proven effective in generating personalized recommendations for building and improving a link profile.

Ahrefs suggests analyzing website performance in Google and other search engines, such as Bing. That is why SEO agencies and digital marketing agencies prefer to use such complex tools as SEO. To perform many tasks for their clients, they need advanced SEO tools to optimize different aspects of website performance. However, this does not mean they refuse to work with Google Search Console. They use essential GSC features, such as Page Indexing Report, Crawling Report, and Performance Report, but complement them with useful SEO tools from other advanced services, such as Ahrefs.

The Bottom Line

Google Search Console offers a way to delve into the details of the website’s presentation in Google search results. By specifying the website domain and verifying its ownership, you will receive many helpful reports. Study the Performance Report, Page Indexing Report, Page Experience Report, etc. to learn more about the weak points of your website. GSC details the page indexing errors, failure of the good user experience test, etc. Thus, you will receive comprehensive statistics, beautiful graphs, and recommendations on what needs to be fixed.

After inspecting all the errors and fixing them, you can request web page indexing from Googlebot. To do this, just press one key, and the optimized page will be indexed in a few hours. This speeds up the delivery of information about your website to Google search results. Moreover, by fixing all the shortcomings that you can find with GSC, you will increase the ranking of your website in Google. This will allow it to rise in SERP and increase organic traffic.

Despite the effectiveness of this SEO tool, it does have some limitations. Unlike other SEO platforms, such as Semrush or Ahrefs, it offers fewer tools for SEO optimization of websites. And although marketers use Google Search Console, it offers them less information for analysis than alternative services. This tool focuses exclusively on Google search results, so it will not allow you to analyze the performance of a website in other search engines. That is why if your work tasks are broader, GSC will be a necessary but not sufficient tool. In this case, it should be combined with more versatile SEO platforms.

Natalia Sukhina