A quick guide on Google Search Console (2022)

In this blog, you will find answers to the following questions:-

1. Difference between Google Search Console and Google Analytics?
2. What is Google Search Console?
3. Why is Google Search Console used?
4. Should you use Google Search Console?

Difference between Google Search Console and Google Analytics?

Beginners in digital marketing often get confused between Google Search Console (GSC) and Google Analytics (GA).

A simple way to describe the difference is that Google Analytics is used to understand the behavior of users on the website while Google search console tells us about how the behavior of the website.

So let’s say, that you made a new website. The bot will crawl & index it but how is it going to communicate with you, how will you know if your web pages have been indexed or not? This is what you see in Search Console. It is basically a way of communication between you and Google’s robot.

This is one of the use cases of GSC. You may think of it as the customer service of Google. This is a free service by Google (at least until now 😉

Now let’s take a deeper look into GSC:-

What is Google Search Console?

When you set up a new website. There are certain issues that may arise during and after the website goes live. This tool helps you understand how Google’s robot views and interacts with your web pages.

You can check, analyse and improve your website’s presence in search results.

Why is Google Search Console used?

Search Console offers following insights and tools :-

• Status and timeline of crawling of webpages. How the site is crawled.
• Information of indexed and non-indexed pages.
• An overview of the performance of the website such as average position of the website on search results. (this report is extensively analysed in Google Analytics).
• Inspect how a URL is performing.
• Submit sitemaps.
• Remove content from search results.
• How website is performing on smartphones.
• Security issues in website.
• Information related to links present on website.

Should you use Google Search Console?

If you are a website owner, digital marketing professional and a web developer, this tool is very importnat to analyse the website, web pages and technicalities.

Ideally, you should learn to use this tool while doing SEO of your website.

All of the digital marketing tools need to be practically used. The more you get use it, the more use cases you will find. I will do a detailed analysis of GSC soon describing each and every feature.

I hope you found this post helpful. I try to write about topics that are often disregarded but they are the stepping stones for your success in digital marketing. If you would like to get in touch, feel free to comment or reach out to me on LinkedIn.

If you are wondering how to get started in digital marketing, check out my post on career roadmap.

Everything starts from a website so you want to make sure that it gets the attention it deserves. Happy learning 🙂