So, you’ve got a blog. You’ve got amazing content, and you’ve got some traffic. Now what? Well, now you need to build on that solid foundation, and work at getting better at building out content, and seeing what types of content or keywords are attracting users to your site. This is where Google Search Console comes in.

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that empowers website owners, content marketers and SEO consultants to monitor and optimise their website’s performance and organic search rankings on Google.

How do you use Google Search Console?

You can use Google Search Console to:

• Track the progress of keywords you are ranking for
• Monitor and troubleshoot your site’s mobile usability
• Manage sitemaps and site crawling
• View overall website’s SEO performance
• Troubleshoot implementation of rich result displays such as FAQ schemas
• Track which sites are linking to your site’s content

Let’s unpack these features and go into more detail in each one.

Track Keyword Progress

With the performance feature, you can look at how your keywords on your site are performing over time, and if your rankings for particular keywords have improved, dropped, or if you have new keywords trending up and providing additional organic visits to your site.

It’s also useful to see how a particular keyword is trending over time.

Here you can see the trend for the search term “cfd for beginners” has been trending up for my site, starting from around position 70, trending up to the current position ~20. As the position trends upward, my impressions, and click opportunities go up as well.

Troubleshoot Mobile Usability

With the bulk of people visiting sites on their mobile devices today, it’s important to make sure your site works just as well, if not better, on mobile as it does on desktop.

Search Console helps identify potential issues and gives you tips on how to resolve any readability or loading issues on mobile devices.

All these also factors into how well your site will rank on Google.

Manage Sitemaps and Crawling

Search Console is also the place where you can upload/manage your sitemap and inform Google about your new posts and pages to crawl.

This helps keep your site up to date, and lets Google have the opportunity to crawl your site for new content as soon as it’s live.

Overall SEO Health

One metric I like to look at, is the overall number of impressions and clicks that the site generates over time, and if done right, both metrics should point up and to the right.

This means your site is getting more visibility, and will grow in organic visits over time. Free traffic, anyone?

Troubleshoot Rich Results Display

Do you remember googling for a recipe, and then seeing a Google result that shows the steps of the recipe, right on the Google search results page?

That’s called a rich snippet. And no, it’s not reserved for some high end publisher who’s super chummy with Google. It’s something everyone can implement on their content, and it’s called Rich Results or Rich Snippets.

It’s simply a structured data markup you can add to the HTML of a post, which allows search engines to better understand the content on the page.

Track Inbound Links

Lastly, when you start to make internet friends, and your content resonates with others, you’ll start getting links from other sites to yours.

There’s a report in Search Console that tells you all of the external sites that are linking to your content!

So yes, if you’re being serious about being a blogger and putting out awesome content, you definitely should get a Search Console account and don’t forget to link it to your Google Analytics account!