So you’ve got your website online and you can find it on Google. All is well in the world.
Or is it?
Conveniently Google (and Bing) provide a tool to connect to your website to basically run diagnostics on it and ensure everything is running smoothly (according to search engines).
Whether your site may have spam on it, or a bunch of broken links, this is how you’ll find out easily.
Connecting Google Search Console
Recently Google has rebranded their Webmaster Tools app to Search Console
They just love changing the names of things to confuse us…
The website address still says webmaster though: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home
Head over there, and all you’ll have to do is log in with the same Google account that has Analytics installed on the site, and that’ll verify your ownership.
What phrases are people searching and Google is providing your website?
That’s right. With this powerful tool, you can see what phrases people have searched and Google provides your website.
On top of that valuable insight, you can track what ranking improvements have been made, month after month.
Here’s an example of what that looks like:
Ultimately you’ll want to see the month after month climbing in impressions and decreasing in position (1 is the “highest”).
You can find this report inside Search Traffic > Search Analytics
And there’s more
There’s a huge list of features inside this tool.
Next we’ll touch briefly on what structured data is.