How to Use the New Google Search Console in 2020

Last updated: January 7, 2020

Google Search Console is the must-have SEO tool for every website that wants to grow your organic traffic.

Want to know the best part?

It is 100% free to use and provides a ton of excellent features that will help to boost your search engine optimisation performance!

In this guide, I’ll cover what it is, how to set it up, explain all the features and my top tips to use Google Search Console to grow organic traffic.

Quick Navigation

1. What is Google Search Console?
2. Set up Google Search Console
3. New Google Search Console features
4. Old features missing from Google Search Console
5. Get insights from Google Search Console

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console (GSC) is a free platform offered by Google to help you optimise your site in Google Search Results.

Here’s how Google themselves describe it:

Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results. You don’t have to sign up for Search Console to be included in Google Search results, but Search Console helps you understand and improve how Google sees your site.

Google Search Console Help Center

Google Search Console is a powerful tool that serves many purposes, such as:

• A communication channel between you and Google.
• A control centre for the day-to-day management of your website.
• A performance dashboard to identify trends in your search traffic.
• A data source you can tap into and unlock insights to drive revenue.

Let’s dive into each of these use cases a little more.

Your communication channel with Google

Google Search Console is one of the best ways to communicate with Google even though it’s often one way.

Google tends to send important announcements that impact your website through the console. For example, they sent out a message when your website got moved to mobile-first indexing.

You’ll also receive a message if Google finds errors with your websites, such as structured data and mobile usability.

Finally, you can send a request for Google to manual review any penalties that your website may have encountered.

The control centre for your website

Google Search Console is critical for the day-to-day management of your website. I use it multiple times a day.

It’s excellent for submitting new URLs to Google for indexing as soon as you push them live. Or to upload XML sitemaps to monitor the indexing status of your website.

Finally, you might have new people join, or people leave your website, so you can manage the task of adding or deleting users right in the console.

A performance dashboard

Google Search Console has all the data you need right at your fingertips to answer any questions you have about your organic traffic.

Want to know what keywords drive traffic to your site? It’s in the console.

Want to know the pages driving the most traffic? It’s in the console.

Other things like what locations people visit from and the device they are using. You get the point it’s all in Google Search Console!

A data source

Other than viewing the metrics you care about in the console, you can also get them out into other tools for further analysis.

Some common use cases are syncing Google Search Console up with Google Analytics or Data Studio to create impressive reports and visualisations to share around.

Google Search Console also has an epic API that lets you send data anywhere, such as Google Sheets or export to CSV to use in Excel.

---

How to set up and verify Google Search Console

Setting up and verifying a Google Search Console account is straightforward. However, you will need access to a couple of things before we get started:

1. Your website’s domain name account
2. Your website’s hosting account
3. You’re website’s backend (file editor, FTP or Cpanel)

Now let us dive right into the 6 step process to setting up and verifying Google Search Console.

1. Sign in to your Google Account and create an account

First, you need to create your account by visiting the Google Search Console sign up page and click ‘Start now’.

You will need to have a Google account to use the Search Console. I recommend you use a business email account rather than your email.

Once you’ve signed in, you can move onto the next step.

2. Choose your type of website property

With the new Google Search Console, you can create a Domain or URL-prefix property. Here you need to decide which one you want to use, and I recommend Domain property.

Here’s the caveat: Domain properties require DNS verification (you need access to hosting account).

The URL-prefix option is more straightforward with several options for verification:

It doesn’t matter what option you choose. Both will give you access to Google Search Console.

3. Add a property to Google Search Console

If you’ve decided on a Domain or URL-prefix account, the next step is to add your website and press continue.

4. Verifying your Google Search Console property

Now depending on the option you picked verifying the property will be different. For brevity, I will cover how to verify via DNS for a Domain property.

If you want to use another verification method, Google has an extensive guide you can read.

Using DNS to verify

To verify using a DNS record, follow these steps:

1. Get your TXT record: you get this when you select the DNS option for verifying a property.
2. Add the TXT record to your domain provider: login to your domain name provider. Go to the area where you can manage DNS records. Add new TXT record to your domain and paste it the file Google Search Console assigned you.
3. Verify your property in Search Console: go back to Google Search Console and click verify.

Here’s the detailed summary from Google’s documentation:

Once you’ve completed verification, you should be able to access your new Google Search Console account!

5. Add or remove users to Google Search Console

Now you’re in your Google Search Console account you probably want to add some users if you have a team. If you’re going solo, then you can skip this step.

To add users to Google Search Console, follow these steps:

To remove users from Google Search Console, follow these steps:

6. Enable Google Search Console in Google Analytics

If you’re using Google Analytics (you should be), then you can link up Google Search Console to see the data in your analytics account.

To link, you must have administrator permissions on both the Google Analytics and Search Console accounts.

To enable Google Search Console in Google Analytics follow these steps:

1. Sign in to your Analytics account.
2. Click Admin, and navigate to the property in which you want to enable Search Console.
3. In the propertycolumn, click Property Settings.
4. Scroll down to Search Console Settings.
5. Under Search Console, select the reporting view(s) in which you want to see Search Console data.
6. Click Save.

One thing to be aware of is an Analytics property can be associated with only one site.

You’re done! Now your Google Search Console account is set up and ready to go!

Important note: it will take a few days for data to appear in Google Search console, so don’t worry if you do not see anything straight away.

---

Features in Google Search Console (from top to bottom)

Now the setup is out of the way to let’s dive right into how to use Google Search Console to help with your SEO efforts.

Overview Report

The Overview tab is the first thing you see when you jump into Google Search Console. It consists of three sections performance, coverage and enhancements.

Performance

At a glance, the performance visualisation gives you a snapshot of how many clicks you’ve got in the last 90 days from Google.

Coverage

At a glance, the coverage visualisation gives you a snapshot of any errors Google has encountered with your pages in the last 90 days.

Enhancements

At a glance, the enhancements visualisation gives you a snapshot of any errors Google has encountered with mobile usability or structured data implementation in the last 90 days.

URL Inspection Tool

The URL inspection tool lets you pull data about any URL on your website from Google’s Index. You can also request indexing for the inspected URL.

To use the URL inspection Tool, follow these steps:

1. Click URL inspection in the navigation sidebar of Google Search Console:
2. Enter the full URL to inspect.
3. Press enter and wait for results.

There are several tasks that you can complete using the URL Inspection Tool:

• Retrieve information from Google’s index about a URL.
• Test to see if a URL is in the Google Index or not.
• Request Google to crawl a new URL.
• View the rendered HTML of the URL to see how Googlebot sees the page.
• See when Googlebot last visited a URL.

Performance Reports

The performance reports are Google Search Console’s most notable feature because they tell you the keywords people are using and landing pages people are finding on Google.

Search Results

The Search Results report gives you access to the last 16 months of Google Search data for your website.

It includes the following metrics:

• Total Clicks
• Total Impressions
• Average Click Through Rate (CTR)
• Average Position

You can filter this data by:

• Queries
• Pages
• Countries
• Devices
• Search appearance

This data is valuable to gain insights about your website, which I will cover in the final section of this guide.

Discover

The Discover report gives you access to data about how your site is performing in Google’s Discover product. If you don’t know what that is you can find out more here. It includes the following metrics:

• Total Clicks
• Total Impressions
• Average Click Through Rate (CTR)

Currently, you can only filter this data by:

• Pages
• Countries

The Discover report is especially useful for publishers as news styled content usually features in the Discover product.

Index Reports

The Index reports are fantastic for understanding the pages that Google indexes, and also how to fix pages that could not be indexed. The index report tab is also where you can submit your website to Google.

Coverage

The coverage report is one of my favourite features in Google Search Console, especially when paired with XML sitemaps (I’ll expand on this in the final section).

By clicking on one of the tabs, you will be able to see how this is trending over the last 90 days. The real value of this feature is when you scroll down and can see the details about each filter type.

• Pages with errors: Google has not indexed pages with errors.
• Pages with warnings: pages with warnings generally need some action. Google may or may not have indexed them.
• Valid pages: Google has indexed pages with valid status.
• Excluded pages: Google doesn’t usually index pages with an excluded status, and that’s the expected behaviour. Here are the reasons why they get excluded.

You can read about all the message above in detail in Google’s Index Coverage documentation.

Sitemaps

The Sitemaps report is another excellent feature to learn how to use in Google Search Console. The Sitemaps report lets you submit XML sitemaps to Google.

Note: when you submit a sitemap you will get the status “Couldn’t fetch” this should be “pending” because it takes a while for Google to fetch the information required to populate my report. If you find the data hasn’t filled after 24 hrs, Google probably does have a problem fetching the sitemap.

Enhancements Reports

The enhancement reports are useful but not something I find myself using every day. There are two types of reports: mobile usability and structured data types. In this report, Google flags if there are any errors on specific pages or if they are valid.

Mobile Usability

The mobile usability tells you which pages on your website have mobile usability issues. Google uses mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor, so it’s crucial that you try to fix any issues flagged in this report.

If you are finding that many pages on your website are getting errors, I recommend you get the assistance of a front-end web developer to fix them.

Unparsable Structured Data

The structured data report is handy for identifying any issues with your implementation that might be preventing you from capturing rich results on Google Search.

Security & Manual Actions Reports

The Security and Manual Actions reports consist of three sections Links, Settings and Submit Feedback. If you have a manual action against your website, you will find it here.

Links

The links report will inform you of the top linked pages internally on your website and also from external websites. The report covers the most used anchor text and even the external sites that link to you the most.

It contains four reports:

• The Top linked pages (external) report shows you three data points a URL, how many backlinks it has, and from how many unique websites those links originate.
• The Top linking sites (external) report shows which websites link to you, from how many pages and to how many different pages on your website.
• The Top linking text (external) report shows you the most common text used to link to your website. I like this report it’s useful to check that your anchor text profile isn’t spammy.
• The Top linked pages (internal) report shows you the pages you link to the most internally on your website. This report is handy for a quick audit of your internal link structure.

Settings

In the new Google Search Console, you can only edit users and change the method of ownership verifications in the settings tab.

Submit Feedback

The submit Feedback tag isn’t a super exciting thing to cover, so I won’t spend long on it. However, I think it’s vital that you send feedback to the Google Search Console team of features you would like to see and any bugs. If everyone does this, it will result in a much better product!

---

Missing features in the new version of Google Search Console

Early in 2018, Google announced that its new beta Google Search Console was open to the public. Since then the product has improved a lot, and many features have moved to the new one.

However, there are still a bunch of features not supported in the new one, so you need to use the old Google Search Console to access. Here’s a list of all the features still on the old Search Console:

• Crawl Stats data (pages crawled per day, KB downloaded per day, page download times)
• Robots.txt tester
• Managing URL parameters in Google Search
• Data highlighter tool
• Reading and managing your messages
• Change of address tool
• Setting a preferred domain
• Associating your Search Console property with an Analytics property
• Disavow links
• Removing outdated content from the index

Ok, let us dive into the reports.

Crawl Stats

The crawl stats report is a snapshot of how frequently Googlebot is visiting your site, known as your crawl budget.

I don’t find this report useful. I prefer to look at raw server log files and perform log file analysis. But if getting access to your server log files isn’t an option this report is the best you can get.

Robots.txt tester

The Robots.txt tester lets you test if your robots.txt file blocks a URL.

This tool is pretty useful if you want to:

• Debug why a URL isn’t getting crawled by Googlebot.
• Test a new directive to your file without putting it live on your website.

I hope this tool gets moved to the new version with some significant feature updates.

URL parameters

The URL parameters tool helps you control how Googlebot crawl parameters on your website. You can tell Googlebot how to handle specific parameters on your websites. For example, tell Googlebot which parameters are for sorting and that they don’t need to crawl it.

In my personal experience, this tool isn’t an effective way of managing parameter crawling. It’s better to use other tools at your disposal, such as deleting unused parameters or blocking parameters that don’t need crawling in the robots.txt file.

Data highlighter tool

Google explain the tool in the video below:

Reading and managing your messages

You will need to view any messages sent to you via the old version of Google Search Console.

Change of address tool

The change of address tool lets you tell Google that you’ve moved your site from one domain name to another. For example, from your old website, example.com to your new website coolnewdomain.com.

Be very careful using this tool. I recommend contacting an SEO professional if you are unsure about what you are doing.

Setting a preferred domain

Update: Google won’t migrate this feature to the new Google Search Console and will no longer use any existing Search Console preferred domain configuration.

The preferred domain tool let you tell Google if you’d rather be in the Google index with www or non-www in your domain name.

Associating your Search Console property with an Analytics property

The old version of Google Search Console is still required to link your Search Console property with a Google Analytics property.

Disavow links

The disavow links tool lets you tell Google to ignore particular backlinks to your site. For example, if you’ve used dodgy tactics to get links in the past, you may get a manual action, and one way to get it removed is to disavow the links.

Note: Google has said you no don’t need to disavow links unless you have a manual action. And they can detect spammy links, and their algorithm ignores them. But you can use the tool for peace of mind.

With regards to sites that don’t have a manual action for link issues. We do try to kind of take those links out of the equation automatically when we can recognize them. In general that’s something we’re pretty good at. We have quite a bit of practice doing that, so most of the time we can get that pretty well.

If you’re unsure as to whether or not Google is actually taking those into account or kind of taking those out of the equation then the disavow file is a great way to kind of get peace of mind and to say well I’m sure these won’t get taken into account by any of Google’s algorithms. And that way you’re like absolutely certain that you’re not associated with those links to your site that you can’t remove or kind of change.

John Muller

Removing outdated content from the index

This tool lets you remove snippets and cached content for pages that you don’t own on Google. I have personally never used this tool, so check out the remove outdated content tool documentation.

---

My top tips for using Google Search Console reports

How to best use Google Search Console is limited only by your imagination. It’s an excellent tool, and I appreciate Google is investing in the new version to make it better.

Below are my top tips on how to use the new Google Search Console reports.

1. Use the overview report to monitor data anomalies

The overview report should not be your only dashboard for monitoring data anomalies. However, I find it useful to use the overview report to check how I’m doing over the last 90 days in terms of clicks and coverage errors.

2. Use the URL Inspection tool to update the index

There are many use cases for the URL Inspection Tool, but my favourite thing is that I can get content updated in the index quickly.

For example, I recently added a table of contents to my blog posts. I noticed that the text on my jump to links was long, so they were getting truncated. I changed the anchor text to be shorter then submitted the URL again via the tool, and it updated in Google Search within a couple of minutes.

3. Use the performance report to test title tags and meta descriptions

SEO experiments are super valuable. However, not every business has the resources to run them properly.

If this sounds like you, then you can use the performance report to run some small tests. I like to try to optimise CTR for underperforming pages.

If you want to try this out, follow these steps:

1. Filter the report by pages ranking in position 3-8
2. Look for CTR outliers (below the average)
3. Review the title and meta description
4. Change to an optimised version
5. See if CTR improves

Don’t forget to run your results through a statistical significance calculator.

4. Use the coverage report to identify crawl waste with non-indexable pages

Crawl budget is a valuable resource that gets allocated to your website, and you don’t want to burn through it. One way you can waste it is by having a higher number of non-indexable pages than indexable pages.

I like to use the coverage report to keep tabs on this ratio. To do this, you need to look at:

• The number of valid submitted and indexed pages
• vs
• The number of excluded by ‘noindex’ tag

Remember that pages marked noindex still get crawled by Googlebot and you might need to reconsider if you need to block these pages from crawling.

5. Use XML sitemaps to monitor indexation

My favourite way to use the XML sitemap report is to structure your sitemap files the same as the folder structure of your website.

For example:

• sitemap-index.xml
  • folder-a.xml
  • folder-b.xml
  • folder-c.xml

By doing this, you can then filter the coverage report by an XML sitemap to understand how Google is displaying that section in their index. You may find that a bunch of URLs are not in the Google Index, and you can then look into why that’s the case.

6. Use mobile usability to identify mobile-friendly issues

Mobile-friendliness is an essential factor for Google evaluating a website, so it’s crucial you monitor the mobile usability report.

Send any errors you find to a developer to look into and fix.

7. Use unparsable structured data for auditing schema errors

Schema.org markup is becoming more prominent in SEO to help search engines understand the context of your webpages. The unparsable structured data flags any errors that Google is finding with your markup.

If the errors are critical (e.g. required values) then you must have your developer fix them as soon as possible.

8. Use the links report to optimise internal linking strategy

Internal links are one of the most powerful levers you can pull on your website to improve SEO performance. Use the links report; specifically, the Top linked pages – internally report, to check that the top pages are the most important on your website.

If that’s not the case, I recommend evaluating how your top-level navigation is set up and what pages you link to in your content, ultimately, how you can bring your most important pages to the top of the report.

---

Over to you

And that’s how to use the new Google Search Console for organic search.