There is no question about whether or not you should be using Google Search Console. If you’re going to be doing any SEO work, this tool is paramount to your success.
Why is it so important?
With Google Search Console, you are basically hand-delivering your website to Google and telling them “My website exists!”. Without this crucial step, your site may never be discovered. It is still possible to be found, but it could take months or even years before Google discovers your website.
Orphaned Pages & Sitemaps
Moreover, your website may contain lots of valuable pages that are hard to get to. Pages that can’t be discovered by a crawler are called orphan pages, or pages that have no way of being found. By using Google Search Console, you are able to submit a list of every web page on your site. This list is located on its own web page on your site and guarantees that every page has at least one page linking to it.
Performance Tool
The performance tool is an incredibly powerful way to measure your website’s performance in search. Here, you can see exactly how many clicks and impressions your website gets from Google search results. Additionally, you can see historical data for your click-through rates (CTR) and positions ranking.
Once you’ve gotten comfortable with viewing these stats, you can begin to refine the data by filtering it by date, query, and specific pages. Understanding this data is the key to unlocking hundreds of opportunities for getting more traffic.
URL Inspection Tool
The URL inspection tool is a little trade secret that is a gift from Google that many SEOs love to use. The secret in this tool is the ability to request a brand new page to get added to Google’s search index. If you’re creating a lot of highly targeted content, this tool can bring you lots of traffic overnight.
It is also a great way to force Google to re-crawl an existing page. If you’ve made some significant on-page optimizations, you will definitely want to get that page re-crawled.