What is Google Search Console and why it is important for your business? Let’s explore how business owners like you could benefit from this free tool. In the digital era where online business competition continuously rises, getting your website to rank at the top of Google search results has become an essential factor that cannot be overlooked. This is because it both increases website visibility and significantly reduces advertising costs that companies need to spend when SEO achieves good rankings.

If you’re a business owner, you might not be familiar with what Google Search Console is. In this article, we will guide everyone through a detailed introduction to Google Search Console, along with learning how to use it for maximum benefit. This will ensure that both business owners and marketers who are working on SEO for your website receive information that can be properly implemented in the right direction.

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a free tool developed by Google to help website owners track, analyze, and improve their website’s performance in Google search results. This tool provides important insights about website visibility, technical issues, and opportunities to improve SEO for better rankings or to have your website appear at the top.

Main Benefits of Google Search Console

1. Effective monitoring and search data

 Google Search Console is an important source of information about various search performance metrics, helping you understand how your website appears in searches and how users interact with your search results, such as:

• Number of impressions
• Click-through Rate (CTR)
• Average position in search results
• Total clicks
• Keywords that bring users to your website

All of these help you understand how your website appears in searches and how users interact with your search results.

2. Help detect and fix technical issues

Google Search Console helps identify technical issues that may affect your website’s ranking, such as Googlebot crawling problems, mobile usability errors, schema markup issues, HTML errors, and page accessibility issues.

3. itemap and URL management

Google Search Console is a helper that allows you to submit new sitemaps to Google, as well as check the indexing status of URLs. It also lets you request Google to crawl new URLs and remove unwanted URLs from search results.

How to Set Up and Use Google Search Console

Start by visiting the Google Search Console website and choose a method to verify website ownership such as adding an HTML tag, uploading an HTML file, using Google Analytics, using Google Tag Manager, or adding a DNS record.

Using key features, divided into 4 main categories as follows:

1. Viewing performance reports: Go to the “Performance” section and select the time period for which you want to view data. Then you can analyze information such as popular keywords, best performing web pages, countries with the most searches, or devices used for access.
2. Checking Core Web Vitals: Google Search Console is a tool that allows you to view Core Web Vitals reports and check values for Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
3. Identifying web pages that need improvement: For Google Search Console strategies to improve SEO, we divide as follows:

– Keyword analysis: Check which keywords bring traffic to your website and find new opportunities from keywords with high impressions but low CTR. Also improve Meta Title and Meta Description to increase CTR.

– Content improvement: Google Search Console is a resource that will help you use data to identify content that needs improvement or if you want to update low-performing content. It also helps create new content based on user needs.– Technical issue fixes: Whether checking and fixing 404 errors, improving mobile usability, or fixing schema markup issues.

Using Google Search Console More Effectively

1. Using API for intelligent automation: The capabilities of the API in Google Search Console unlock powerful automation possibilities, including:

• Integrating data with other analytics systems: Connect Google Search Console data with existing analytics for comprehensive performance insights.
• Automated reporting: Create scheduled reports that highlight key metrics and changes without manual intervention.
• Real-time monitoring: Use systems that alert you immediately when rankings fluctuate or critical technical issues arise.

2. Need to use with other tools: Since Google Search Console is a tool that cannot directly improve rankings, but only allows viewing various data to help SEO professionals work in the right direction, therefore, for a complete picture, the most powerful SEO optimization occurs when using Google Search Console together with these tools:

• Google Analytics: Link search data with website user behavior for better user experience.
• Google Ads: Align organic and paid search data for a holistic marketing strategy.

Professional SEO tools: Enhance Google’s data with in-depth analysis from specialized SEO platforms such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz Pro, Screaming Frog, SE Ranking, and Serpstat.

Data Display Limitations

1. Data is not displayed in real-time: Since data is typically delayed by 2-3 days, it’s not possible to check changes immediately, and some data may only be updated once a week. If you need real-time data, you should check the last update date in each section again.
2. Limitations in historical data storage: Performance data is stored retroactively for only 16 months. If changes occur beyond that period, they cannot be analyzed for comparison.
3. Analysis limitations: Cannot directly view competitor data, unlike paid SEO tools, and there is no detailed keyword ranking tracking (only average position is shown). There is no detailed information about backlinks, such as link quality or anchor text.
4. Data inconsistency: Sometimes data may not be consistent with other Google tools, and the calculation of average position may be misleading in some cases. Also, changes in Google’s algorithm may cause some data to change without notification.

Although Google Search Console is an important tool for website development, as mentioned above, it has quite a few limitations in terms of important data coverage, which may cause analysis discrepancies in many areas. So if you find it difficult to use this tool for SEO, our company is always available for consultation. In addition to Google Search Console, we also have other paid SEO tools that provide even deeper insights, especially for analyzing competitor data from any website to better plan SEO without limitations.

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