What is Google Search Console and What Every Small Business Leader Needs to Know About It
You’re in the business of making the most out of the resources you have. One available resource to you that you may not be using is Google Search Console. If you’re not using it, you’re missing out. In today’s blog, we uncover what Google Search Console is and how to get started with it.
What is Google Search Console?
Google Search Console is a way of reporting analytics that has more of an emphasis in SEO (search engine optimization). It details major components such as measuring your search traffic, alerting you of code issues on your site that make it hard to index and performance measurements for mobile and beyond.
What does Google Search Console do?
Google Search Console provides analytics and insight that ultimately impacts how your business appears in Google Search Results. Because Google is a primary search engine, businesses want to make sure that the information Google is reading off their site is easy to understand, correlates to query searches and delivers quick and authentic results. By creating a Google Search Console account and optimizing how your site is structured and read by Google will ultimately streamline the process of how Google “talks” to your site, making it more likely that your business will be served up as an answer to a query (search).
Are Google Analytics and Google Search Console the Same thing? Do you need both?
Google Analytics and Google Search Console are not the same thing. Google Analytics focuses on how users interact with your site whereas Google Search Console focuses on search engine metrics. Each reporting system offers valuable insight into optimizing your business for greater conversion and therefore every small business should participate in each platform. The information that you receive from both will provide excellent data points on changes that you may need to make to your website.
What does every Small Business Leader Need to Know About Google Search Console?
At minimum, every small business leader should verify their business on Google Search Console through your hosting (this will ensure that all urls associated with your domain have the opportunity to be crawled and indexed). Once your business has been verified, you will want to submit your sitemap to Google (if you use plugins like Yoast, this sitemap is already generated and easy to find). After your sitemap has been successfully submitted, you’ll want to ask Google to start indexing pages on your website. By providing those details to Google, it will more quickly understand how your site is structured and how it is to interact with your pages, increasing the likelihood that your business will be found in search results.
How to get started with putting your business on Google Search Console
Get started with your Google Search Console by logging on with the email associated with your business. (You can simply search “Google Search Console” in Google to get to your Google Search Console.) Once you have done that, you will select, “add property” on the far left side under the heading, “Google Search Console.” From there, you will select “Domain Property” and input your website url. This will then take you to a spot where it will ask you to verify your domain ownership through your dns record (most of the time, it will automatically find your hosting provider). At this time, it will ask you to sign into your account from the hosting provider and you will go from there. Most of the time, verification can be done in as little as 1 hour.
Every business owner should make the most out of the resources available to them. Supercharge your businesses search engine optimization by adding your property to Google Search Console. Want to know more about using SEO to supercharge your business? Book a FREE SEO consultation with us here.
