Its something of an understatement to say that most people are aware of Google and its importance when getting your business noticed. With them handling over 60% of search traffic, odds are good you found this article through their search engine! What a lot of budding entrepreneurs are less aware of however are the free tools the company offer to help improve your search visibility. Of particular note is Google Search Console. Ever heard of it? This incarnation certainly sounds less intimidating than its old moniker “Google Webmaster Tools” but the intention has always been the same – help measure and improve your site’s performance in the search index.

What does it do?

In short, Google Search Console provides a whole range of useful tools, resources and education aimed at helping you improve the SEO of your site for the low low price of absolutely free. Sounds too good to be true right? Remember, Google wants top quality content turning up in their users searches; ensuring as many people as possible know how build responsive, informative sites is key to their business. Helping you is a win win situation!

So what specifically can the search console offer you? Most obviously there is the whole mess of graphs it can produce for you on a range of site data – average search position, impressions, CTR, total clicks. These are great for understanding how your site is doing at a glance.

Another great function is ‘Links to Your Site’. This, unsurprisingly, is a reporting feature tasked with monitoring links to your site from external ones. It displays who is doing the linking and which of your pages are getting the most love. No doubt you’ll agree, it’s a fab resource for tracking any link building campaigns you undertake.

There’s also a suite of tools directed specifically at improving mobile usability. As you’ve probably heard, mobile now makes up the majority of internet use so having reports on a range of factors that could impact a mobile user’s experience and drive away traffic is a major boon. Small font size, touch elements (buttons) placed too close together, intrusive pop-ups and so on, are all checked for and alterations recommended.

Together, all of these hints and tips ensures the hard work and money you pour into your site won’t be wasted just because a design choice you made accidentally got you on to Google’s list of poorly built sites. Without the Search Console you might never know – cue months or even years of frustration as your search rankings languish at mysteriously low levels.

Still to come

Considering how integral to internet marketing they are it’s good to see a commitment to constant updates for Google Search Console. With an overhaul at the beginning of this year various excellent new features have been added and, going forward, there is a raft of additional functionality planned for the rest of this year.
Of particular note this January was the new ‘Search Performance’ reports. These give you the ability to compare various performance data against each other at the touch of a button (much to the joy of the SEO community).

Of those features still to come, one major expectation is an update to the mobile usability tool so it can monitor page speed. Most likely we’re looking at summer 2018 for that one – it would be in line with Google’s announcement that mobile speed will impact search rankings from July.

So there you have it. We hope this has been an interesting delve into the specifics of Google Search Console, what it does and why it’s useful for the budding online business. If you have other questions about getting started with marketing yourself online head on over to our blog for a range of handy ‘How To’ articles and other tips and tricks for the digital age.