Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) is a free online tool by Google consisting of a series of dashboards showing you how your site is performing on Google.

It allows you to access a wide range of important data about your website. For example, you can:

• see how your p...

Setting up Google Search Console is quite easy. Head over to its welcome page and log in with your Google credentials.

After signing up, you will be asked to enter your web address in one of two boxes. The left-hand box is for a Domain Property and the right-hand box is for a URL Prefix Pro...

Most people using Search Console select the domain property option. You’ll get the information on how your whole website is performing on Google. This includes all the URLs, subdomains and web protocols (http://, https://, www).

In the past, you had to verify all the protocols separately bu...

You should use this option if you only want to cover an exact URL format. For example, if you enter https://www.website.com/blog into the required field, only this URL format will be tracked. This option is often used for targeting a specific language mutation on a multilingual website, ...

There are three different permissions levels in the Search Console:

Owners: This will probably be you. Owners can view all the site’s data and use all the tools. They can also give other people access to the Search Console. You can also create delegated owners, who have the same control ove...

The Overview Report is the first page that loads when you access Search Console. The dashboard contains a snapshot of key information about your site.

• Site performance report: How many people have clicked on your website from Google
• Coverage report: Information whether your pag...

There are 3 main sections you can adjust or click on to show the data you need:

• top filter
• 4 main metrics
• data tabs

The various variables you can add include:

• Search: Choose to filter the results by web, image, or video
• Date: Filter the re...

There are four metrics above the graph:

• Clicks: number of people who visited your site from Google
• Impressions: total number of times your content was seen on Google
• CTR: what %age of impressions resulted in a click
• Position: avg ranking your content has in Goog...

The index report shows the total number of pages that appear in the search results. If everything is green then things are good.

The red box is where problem pages are displayed. You want the number of problematic pages to be as low as possible, ideally zero.

Under the details section...

A sitemap is an XML document that outlines how your website is structured. Your sitemap will help Google crawlers navigate your site. This helps Google find and index your content quickly.

You can tell Search Console where your sitemap is located on your site by entering the URL.

An e...

The Enhancements page allows you to view the enhancements you have made to the site.

There are many reports you can find under Enhancements, and many of them will appear only if you have the specific feature implemented on your site.

The 3 most basic reports:

• Mobile usabili...

Hopefully, you will never have to view this report. By default, it will show No issues detected. If a manual penalty has been applied to your site by a Google employee, then the penalty will appear in this tab.

Google will apply manual penalties to your site if they think you have been doin...

You can view the backlinks pointing to your website. From the table, you can see the pages that have the most internal and external links.

You can see the top linking sites and anchor texts.

The report is a great starting point to find:

• which pages of your website have the ...

These are some features from the old Search Console. They are not available for domain property so we won’t go into much detail here.

The legacy tools include:

• International targeting – you can set a specific target country (used for hreflang)
• Removals – you can remove UR...