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27 min read
May 19, 2021

Since its launch in 2015, Google Search Console has changed a lot, giving webmasters more tools and reports to improve their websites. 

Basically, Google Search Console is designed to help site owners understand how Google sees their websites, as well as identify and fix issues in order to enhance their performance in search results. Being a great instrument for marketers, SEO experts, site administrators and web developers, Search Console is an indispensable tool to identify and resolve indexing issues, make sure that Google can crawl all the website pages, see which sites link back to their websites, troubleshoot mobile usability issues, and more.

Taking into account a wide range of Search Console reports, it may be difficult to figure out where to start. We will be happy to help you handle all the essential GSC reports, from Performance to Mobile Usability, and explain how to use them for your SEO purposes. Let’s not wait around.

First, get your website on Google Search Console

Basically, there are 5 different ways to add your website to GSC, including domain ownership verification, adding a tag, uploading an HTML file, using Google Analytics tracking code, and Google Tag Manager container snippet. To make sure you’re completing all the necessary steps for getting your website on Google Search Console, follow our detailed step-by-step guide . Now, let’s just cut to the overview of all the tools and reports. 

High-priority GSC reports and tools 

On the left side of the Google Search Console main page, you can find the list of all the available reports and tools grouped in several sections. An Overview section allows site owners to see the clickable summaries of four essential reports: Performance, Coverage, Experience, and Enhancements . Under the Overview section, users can see the full list of all the reports available in GSC that can help see how a website performs on Google Search, identify indexation errors, manage sitemaps, get a UX report, find usability problems according to the new rules implemented by Google, and more. 

GSC Interface

We’ll dive deeper into each tool.

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Overview page

The overview page displays charts showing the website’s performance, indexing issues, and user experience figures. Here you can find the four most important reports: Performance, Coverage, Experienc e, and Enhancements . After clicking Open Report, users can see each of them in detail.

Overview page in GSC
Overview page in GSC

URL Inspection tool 

The URL Inspectio n tool provides information about how Google sees every URL of your site. This tool allows you to:

  • See the current index status of a certain URL and the reasons why it wasn’t indexed.
  • Request page indexing or re-indexing by Google.
  • Get a screenshot of how Googlebot sees a particular page.
  • View page code.
  • Troubleshoot the reasons for not indexing a particular URL.
  • Check if your pages are mobile-friendly. 

Note that the Test live URL option is not available in the URL Inspection tool. It means that you can only see the recently indexed page version that may have already disappeared from search results as of the last crawling.

To find out if a particular page is still appearing in results, you can check it manually by inserting the URL in Google Search.

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Performance reports

You can now evaluate the performance of your website on Search Results, Discover, and Google News. 

Performance on Search Results

Performance in Search Results

Here is how GSC calculates data for each report:

1. Impressions. Search Console records impressions when a URL appears in search results for a user, even if that URL has been below the fold. For example, if your website is number 8 out of 10 (even if it is not visible for a user), it will count as an impression. 

Here is an example of a search result that has one URL “2022世界杯买球平台 ” that counts as an impression when a visitor clicks on it.

What is an impression

Note that the impressions you see on the chart and in the table are aggregated by property. 

However, the table allows grouping the results by page to count each unique URL separately, whenever a SERP element contains several links to your site.

Impressions by page

2. Clicks . The number of clicks from a Google Search that brought a user to your website.

3. Position . The Search Console shows the average highest position of your website in a property report. GSC calculates the average position for all queries, and if your site has had different positions for one query, Search Console will show the highest one to determine the average. If you check metrics aggregated by page or search appearance , you will see the topmost position of a particular page in the results, averaged across all queries in which this page appeared. 

For example, if a page took positions 3 and 5 for one query at different times, its topmost position would be shown as 3. If the second query returned at positions 1 and 4, that would be 1, and the average position would be (3+1)/2=2. If the number were 2.2, your actual average position will still be 2. 

4. The CTR can be aggregated by property and page and is calculated as the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions multiplied by 100. For example, if you had 100 clicks and 1000 impressions, then your CTR would be 10%. 

The Search Console also allows comparing figures, setting up filters, and visualizing them in different ways, so you can easily match the data. For example, you can group data by queries and countries to find out what people search for in a particular region or you can check which pages are most viewed from a certain device. Such combinations provide a more dimensional picture of your website performance because you can see how various metrics are related to each other. 

Performance report filters

You can access filters by clicking on the New button to apply the following parameters:

  • Querie s—are applied to see keywords searched by users on Google. 
  • Pages —collect search performance data by page. 
  • Countries —allow you to check where the search comes from.
  • Devices —show statistics depending on the type of device used for searching.
  • Search Appearance —provides data grouped by the specific search appearance features or search result types.
  • Dates —groups information by day. 
  • Search type —shows the image, video, news, or web results.
Compare the results in Performance report

GSC also allows exporting this data to Google Sheets, Excel, or a CSV file with just one click. Values shown as “not available” or “not a number” will be replaced by zeros in the downloaded file. 

Export results in Google Search Console

GSC has its own limits—you can download only 1000 URLs or Queries at a time. This is not very convenient for larger-scale sites, as analyzing them becomes more difficult when you download multiple files. However, there are a few possible solutions to this problem.

The first one is using application programming interfaces, or APIs. In fact, this method is only appropriate for users with a technical background making data export quite complicated and time-consuming. 

You can also export data from Google Search Console with the help of the Google Sheets add-on. After enabling it, you will get information about rankings, queries, clicks, and more directly into a spreadsheet that can display up to 5000 rows, which is the API’s maximum.

If you are not a very tech person or don’t have a developer in your team, you can overcome GSC limitations using third-party services. 

At 2022世界杯买球平台 we gather data from SC and present it in a convenient form so that it would be easier for you to perform advanced analysis or visualize the data differently. 

With 2022世界杯买球平台 , you can export up to 10 000 rows in .xls format and an unlimited number of rows in an SCV file. This way, you will download all the data with just a click and have all the information gathered in one place. 

How to overcome limitations
When Search Console data is updated

In the top right corner of the GSC, you’ll see the information on the last update. When you add your website to Search Console for the first time, it may take about a week to display the data. 

Note that the data in SC may be delayed and thus differ from the data shown in other tools. That could happen because Google didn’t scan your website since your last update, or Google Search Console needed more time to process additional data.

Performance on Discover

The Discover Performance report displays the number of impressions and clicks on Discover —a feed, created for mobile devices, which recommends content to users depending on their past Google searches. All data is aggregated by page for the selected time frame. You can group the information by country, appearance type, and compare different figures. Note that this report will be visible for you only if your site has reached a minimum amount of impressions on Discover.

Performance on Discover

Performance on Google News

The Google News Performance report gathers data on website performance from news.google.com and the Google News apps. Google News is a search engine that gathers news and headlines from millions of articles worldwide. Although there is no surefire way of getting your article listed with the news stories, you can raise your chances if you share your content by submitting RSS feeds, website URLs, or videos through the Publisher Center

If you see any of your website pages in this report, you can check how they perform by taking a look at clicks, impressions, and average CTR. These metrics can be grouped by page, country, date, and device type. 

If you want to compare data, note that you can use only one comparison filter at a time. For example, if you’ve compared data by country but now want to match mobile and desktop devices, the country filter will be removed. 

Performance on Google News

Coverage report

The GSC Coverage report allows you to see which pages have been indexed by Google and to discover any issues found during crawling.

This report shows the Google-index state of all URLs grouped by status, which can be Error, Warning, Excluded, and Valid.

Error status means that the page failed to be indexed by Google, while Excluded status says that you either deliberately excluded the page from indexing or added duplicate content. A Warning status shows indexed pages that have some issues, and the green Valid status is a sign of a successfully indexed page. 

Under the “error,” “valid with warnings,” “valid” and “excluded” options, you can see the Impressions diagram aligned with the statistics bars. Analyzing it, you can find connections between the number of impressions and URLs.

Impressions in Coverage report

If your website contains over 500 pages, make sure that you regularly check the Coverage report. If you own a smaller website, skip this tool and enter site:your_site on Google, where your_site is a URL of your site’s home page. 

If you click on a particular status from the top-level summary, you will see a specific reason for each status. The most common issues include server errors, 404 error, missing pages, submitted URL blocked by robots.txt.

Coverage report

You can also filter index results by clicking on the dropdown filter, which by default is displayed as All known pages and shows all URLs that Google has discovered. Alternatively, you can choose All submitted pages to see only pages submitted in a sitemap or choose URLs listed in a specific sitemap.

All known pages

Sitemaps

The Sitemaps report gives you access to your sitemap submission history and displays any errors that occurred when parsing your submitted sitemaps by Google.

This report shows the URL where the sitemap is posted, the date of its submission and the last time when it was processed by Google. It also provides information on the sitemap type and status, which has three possible values: Success, Has Errors, and Couldn’t Fetch. In the column Discovered URLs, you can see the number of URLs listed in your sitemap. If you sitemap’s status is Has Errors or Couldn’t Fetch, use our sitemap polishing guide to find solutions to all the issues you have.

Sitemaps

Experience 

The Experience section of Google Search Console includes the newly added Page Experience report, Core Web Vitals report, and Mobile Usability report. 

Page Experience report

The Page Experience report has recently been rolled out by GSC to help professionals create pages that provide an improved user experience on mobile devices. Google evaluated this experience by taking into account the following criteria: Core Web Vitals (the speed and stability of the page loading), mobile usability, security issues, HTTPS usage , and Ad Experience. 

The Page Experience report shows the percentage of good URLs, or in other words, those that have a Good status in the Core Web Vitals report, no mobile usability issues and security problems. In this report, you can also find the total number of impressions generated by good URLs. 

The chart represented in the Page Experience section displays the percentage of pages considered good on each given day. 

Page Experience report
What if the Experience report chart shows a small percentage of good URLs?

We must admit that the rules are pretty strict here. Google will mark a URL as Good only if all of the following criteria are met:

  • The Core Web Vitals report assigns a Good status to the URL.
  • The URL has no mobile usability problems.
  • Your website has no security issues.
  • The URL starts with HTTPS rather than HTTP.
  • Your entire site is not flagged as having a bad ad experience.

If you fail to meet even one of the above-mentioned criteria, the URL will be assigned a Failed status. 

Core Web Vitals report

The Core Web Vitals report evaluates the performance of indexed URLs based on the speed and stability of page loading. It is divided into Mobile and Desktop reports and assigns several statuses: Good, Needs improvement, or Poor. 

Core Web Vitals report

This report uses the following parameters:

  • LCP stands for largest contentful paint and shows the amount of time needed to load the largest element visible within the viewport, which is typically an image or video. 
  • FID, or first input delay, is the time interval from the first user interaction with a page (link click, button tap, etc.) to the browser response to that interaction. 
  • CLS, or cumulative layout shift, represents the total number of all individual layout changes. 

To put it in simple terms, the first render should load fast, be stable, and quickly respond to users’ actions.

After the evaluation of LCP, FID and CLS metrics, the URL gets one of the following statuses: Poor, Needs improvement, or Good.

To see how your website URLs perform, you need to click on the Poor, Needs improvement, or Good tabs located on top of the overview page. 

Details table

Mobile Usability report

We bet you have seen it too many times when using your phone to access a website: the content was wider than screen, text was too small to read, buttons too close together. This is, what Google calls, mobile usability (or, more accurately, its absence).

The Mobile Usability report helps to discover pages that are poorly displayed on mobile. The chart shows the number of pages with both Error and Valid statuses. 

Mobile Usability report

The Impressions checkbox offers the information on website page impressions from mobile devices. 

By clicking on a specific issue, you can discover more details as well as the information about how to fix a particular problem and notify Google about the changes you’ve made.

The Mobile Usability report can reveal the following errors:

Unsupported plugins 

If your page has plugins that are not supported by most mobile browsers, you should redesign it using up-to-date technologies, for example HTML5. 

Content wider than screen

If visitors use horizontal scrolling to see all page content, you should set relative width and position values for CSS elements.

Text too small to read

If the font size is so small that it requires users to zoom, you can set proper font scaling.

Clickable elements too close together

If buttons, navigational links, or other clickable elements are located so close to each other that it’s impossible to easily tap one of them, you should resize them and make them suitable for mobile users.

Enhancements

Some of the latest Google Search Console reports can be found under the Enhancements tab. They include:

  • The Logo Enhancement report. It should be checked by those who are using Logo markup as it provides the performance details and information on the errors around your Logo. 
  • The Sitelinks Searchbox report. This enhancement report shows the issues and warnings associated with searchbox .
  • The Unparsable Structured Data report. This section gathers parsing issues on your website and helps troubleshoot them.
Enhancements report

Other tools and reports in GSC

Google Search Console offers some other vital tools and reports that should be taken into account but are not displayed on the Overview page, such as Removals, Ad Experience, Security Issues, Manual Actions, and more. 

GSC interface

Removals

If you want to quickly clean up unnecessary content, this tool will be a big help. Remember that it temporarily blocks the needed pages from appearing in Google Search results, not from the Internet. 

With the Removals tool, you can also check the history of removal requests and see any URLs that were reported as containing adult content. However, note that you can’t block a page on a website that you don’t own. This tool cannot remove a URL from Search permanently, but you can use it as a first step. You can also stop a specific URL from being indexed with the help of the noindex directive and robots.txt file. 

Removals report

Manual Actions report

The Manual Actions report enables you to see if your website was affected by a penalty from Google for not following the webmaster guidelines. Since manual action usually results in pages being ranked lower or even omitted from Google search results, it’s important to know your site’s history.

Manual actions might be taken due to various reasons. For example, if site visitors spammed on you, aggressively promoting their business, your website has a chance to be penalized by Google. People working in so-called grey niches often add links to a company website on forum pages or in user profiles. While their business gains more visibility, your site becomes spammy. That’s why you must always monitor any suspicious user activity. 

Google also punishes for publishing low-quality or plagiarized content or adding too many keywords to text. You must make sure that all keywords look natural in the text and your content carries value for users. 

To see the full list of manual actions as well as how to fix them, visit the Search Console Help Center.  

Manual actions report

Security issues

The Security Issues report shows Google findings if the search engine detects that your site was hacked, or what’s on your website can be potentially harmful for visitors. The report provides data on issues falling into a few categories: hacked content, malware and unwanted software, and social engineering.

Let’s look closer at hacked content issues. In simple words, hacked content is any information placed on your site without your permission. Hackers may either inject malicious text into existing posts or add new pages. Sometimes, they do it using CSS or HTML, so it gets harder to spot. One of the most common cases of content hacking is adding code that redirects users to unwanted spammy pages, which might be betting platforms, adult, or other grey-niche websites.

You should regularly monitor the Security Issues report to keep your site safe. If any of your pages are affected, you’ll see the list of security issues at the top of the report. Otherwise, you’ll see the message “No issues detected” and a green check mark.

Security issues

Legacy or external reports and tools

These tools have been taken from the old GSC and do not yet have a full replacement in the new version. Even though not all of these items are fully functional now, you can benefit from them in many ways. 

International Targeting report

The International Targeting report helps check hreflang tag usage and locate errors associated with it. It also gives an opportunity to choose which countries are most important to you. 

In the language tab, you can see the number of Hreflang Tags with errors in the section of your pages, in the HTTP header, and in a sitemap. With this report, you can also check how many language code mistakes your site has.

Since search results can vary for users in different countries, you can specify a target country with the help of the International Targeting report. However, if you have content in English, that you want users from all over the world to read, there is no need to set a specific country as the only geographic target. 

International targeting report

Messages 

The Message tab on the new GSC enables you to access all messages. This feature makes all the necessary information more available and helps to better a workflow. Webmasters can now quickly check whether their websites have new issues, learn about updates, and get advice to improve their presence on Google—without leaving the main page.

Messages

URL Parameters

You can use this tool if you need to prevent Google from crawling particular URLs with specific parameters to avoid duplicate content issues. 

You should use this tool only if you have enough experience in SEO and your site meets the following requirements:

  • It contains more than 1000 pages.
  • It has a significant number of duplicates indexed by Googlebot and all duplicate pages vary only by URL parameters.

You should configure this tool carefully as you may accidentally recommend Google ignore some important URLs on your site. If you adjust URL Parameters settings incorrectly, this may result in excluding important pages from search results. 

Web Tools 

In this section, you will find tools that can help to improve your site’s structure and to enhance the quality of user experience. They include Ad Experience, Abusive Experience and Notifications Reports, Testing Tools, and Other Resources listed below.

Ad Experience Report

The Ad Experience report helps to identify whether your ads violate the Better Ads Standards. For example, if you have any autoplaying video ads on a page, or if a page has too many ads that are considered highly distracting for visitors from Google’s perspective. With the help of this tool, you can find out what kind of ad experience you provide to your visitors and how you can improve it. 

Abusive Experiences Report

This report displays the cases of abusive experience that misleads website visitors. The list of issues may include fake messages, deceiving warnings or system dialogs that force users to click on them. The Abusive Experience Report briefly explains each problem and shows the URL of the page where it was detected. Sometimes, it also provides images showing particular issues in your website.

Abusive Notifications Report

Abusive notifications are also designed to mislead site visitors. They appear in a browser and attempt to trick users into sharing personal information or promote malware or unwanted software. In fact, the report provides information in the same form as the Abusive Experiences Report. 

Testing Tools

This toolset includes three instruments that help check and manipulate your structured data. The first one is the Structured Data Testing Tool, which checks how Google parses your data and displays it in search results. The next one is the Structured Data Markup Helper that adds a site description to your HTML. And the last tool is the Email Markup Tester that lets you test your markup.

Other Resources

This GSC section shows other tools for analyzing and optimizing your website performance, such as Google My Business, Google Merchant Center, PageSpeed Insights, Custom Search, Google Domain, Webmaster Academy, Google Ads, and Google Analytics.

Links

The Links report provides insights on internal and external links to and from your site. 

Here you can see what sites link to you the most—instead of website URLs, you will see the list of their root domains: https://www.google.com/ will be shown as google.com

To get there, click on Links report > Top linking sites > More.

This information will help you make sure that all the sites that link to you are relevant and reliable. You should regularly check this report because links from unknown and possibly spammy platforms may harm your appearance in search results. Google recommends disavowing such links to avoid having problems with ranking. 

Links report in GSC

What’s more, it would be great to get rid of the links from websites that are not related to your niche. For example, if you run a travel agency website, it’s more logical to have mentions from high-authority travel blogs. 

The Links report allows users to see in greater detail which pages link the most to the particular pages in your property. For example, if you go to the Top linked pages – externally and then click on the data in the Linking sites column, you’ll see the list of top sites linking to a particular page. You can further click on the Links column to see the full list of Top linking pages — exact external URLs pointing to a particular page of your website. 

Linking pages

Which words other websites use when linking to your site: Links report > Top linking text.

Top linking text

Which are the top sites pointing to different pages on your site: Top linking sites > [URL]

Top linking sites

Which pages on your site link to a specific page: Internal links > More, then choose a URL among the Top internally-linked pages to see how many and what pages on your website link to it.

internally linked pages

Although the Links report provides quite detailed data, it may be challenging to figure out what type of information to look at to evaluate how your link profile is changing over time. 

With the help of 2022世界杯买球平台 ’s Backlink Monitoring tool, you can easily keep an eye on your backlinks, analyze which domains point to the linking page, evaluate their quality, and get control over spam backlinks that might harm your image. All these details will be available to you with just one screen. 

Backlink Monitoring tool

To start tracking your backlinks, create a project and click on the Backlink Monitor tab in the drop-down menu. 

If you don’t have an 2022世界杯买球平台 subscription, no worries. The tool is available with a 14-day trial period for free. 

Settings

The Settings page allows you to view and manage different settings for your website. You can modify its verification method, manage the page roles, change the domain address, manage the site status, limit the crawling request rate, and make other necessary adjustments. 

How to connect Google Search Console to 2022世界杯买球平台

By connecting GSC and Google Analytics (GA) to 2022世界杯买球平台 , you can get reports that consolidate the daily ranking updates made by 2022世界杯买球平台 , website performance data from Search Console, and details about the visitors on your website from GA—all from a single unified interface.

With all information neatly located in one place, it’s much easier to analyze and filter keywords, pages, countries, and devices according to a specific criteria as well as to see the accurate ranking information provided by 2022世界杯买球平台 —unlike GSC that updates your rankings once in three days, 2022世界杯买球平台 can provide you with the latest data.

Eventually, the integration of these tools can help you expand the database of keywords, improve rankings for underperforming keywords, optimize URLs with a low CTR, and identify the content type that drives traffic. 

To connect GSC to 2022世界杯买球平台 , you have to select your project, choose the Analytics & Traffic section, click on the Connect Google Search Console button, and Continue. Make sure that beforehand you’ve logged in to your Google account that is linked to Google Search Console. 

If you want to connect to Google Analytics as well, you can do it in the same window. 

2022世界杯买球平台 and Google Search Console

Conclusion 

The recently updated Google Search Console can help you take a fresh look at your website to see how well you will be scoring with the new Performance and Page Experience reports. With even more data available, you can easily assess which pages perform well and which need further improvement, thus build a well thought out promotion strategy.

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comments 4
  1. Great info. Newbie SEO Specialist here.

    1. Thanks, Mike!

  2. I have to say that I am a new to Search console and I think this information very helpful. The reports I use the most are Performance and URL inspection, where you can check the pages for indexing.

    1. Hi John, thank you! Hopefully it’ll give you lots of opportunities to rank your content.

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