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Formerly WMT (Webmaster Tools), Google’s Search Console is a helpful tool for web developers, site owners, site administrators, SEO specialists or online marketers. It provides numerous amounts of data that is helpful in monitoring site performance, for making marketing decisions, monitoring website traffic and learning how Google views your site as well as a host of other data.
Monitoring Website Performance
For monitoring performance issues, the search traffic links to your site and internal links tools can uncover unwanted, suspicious files. The mobile usability tool provides information about how your site is performing on mobile devices. The Google Index Index Status tool can provide information on whether or not Google is indexing your site. Under the crawl tab, the crawl errors, crawl stats, fetch as Google (fetch & render) and sitemaps tools can indicate performance issues for your site or confirm that things are working properly.
Marketing Decision Makers
Marketing decisions can be impacted by the data found with the HTML Improvements tool under the search appearance tab. Long meta descriptions & short metadescriptions can be improved to better enitice a searcher to click your result. the Search Analytics tool can help dial in page’s that get impressions but low click through rates. Do your meta descriptions need a re-work? The Content Keywords tool can help dial in specific keywords that may need to have a boost. Work them in to your new marketing content.
Monitoring Traffic
Monitoring website traffic is done mostly with the Search Analytics tool found under the Search Traffic menu. Here you can find data about clicks, impressions, ctr (click-thru-rate) and position by search query term, page, country or device. You can filter your data set down to an individual search query, page, country or device. Find out what search query is best performing or what page is clicked on most in the search results.
Much More In Search Console
While there is so much more in Google’s Search Console, the tools above are some of the go to tools for those new to using this free software from Google.
Mark Gray, Senior SEO Manager
