The Google Search Console is the only tool that provides data directly from Google.
It offers the following functions:
- Data on the performance of your own website: number of times it appears in search results, search terms, number of clicks and the average click-through rate and position
- The option to check and submit new or updated pages to Google
- Remove pages from the index
- Receive data on the indexing of pages
- List of any problems that Google has discovered on the pages
- Notification by e-mail in the event of problems
The data is available in the Search Console for the last 500 days. However, some SEO tools such as RYTE can query the data via an interface and save it permanently.
Evaluations can also be downloaded as a Google spreadsheet, Excel or CSV file, but only up to 1,000 data records at a time.
How do I set up the Google Search Console?
You need a Google account. If you don't already have one, first create a free e-mail account with Google. You will need the Google account for other functions, such as managing your company profile on Google.
You can access the Google Search Console via https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=de
To obtain data about your website, you must first set it up. To do this, you need to add a new 'property'. A property is an independent element that can be managed in the Search Console. Up to 1,000 properties can be managed in one Google account.
Domain property or URL prefix?
When creating a new property, you first have the choice between a domain property or a URL prefix.
With a domain property, the data for all subdomains and directories is recorded together.
With a URL prefix property, the data is only recorded for the exact spelling of the domain or subdomain and, if applicable, the directory path. It is therefore possible to record the data for individual subdomains or directories separately by creating corresponding URL prefixes. The use of URL prefixes is therefore more flexible.
In both cases, access to the domain data must be validated. With the domain property, this is done via an entry in the name server of the domain. This requires access to the DNS settings in the domain administration.
With the URL prefix property, on the other hand, there are several options for validation:
- Upload an HTML file to the web server
- Add a meta tag to the HTML code of the start page
- Link to an existing Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager account
If you do not have any options for validation yourself, you must ask the domain owner to do this.
After successful validation, it can take 2-3 days for the first data to become visible in the Search Console. In general, the data is not available in real time but with a time delay of a few hours.
Incidentally, all time data in the GSC is based on Pacific Time (California), the time offset to Central European Time is -9 hours.
The domain is known to Google at the latest when the property is created and the crawling, i.e. the retrieval of the pages by the Google bot and their inclusion in the search index, begins.
You can wait for Google to find all the pages within the domain itself over time - after all, the pages are linked to each other.
However, you can speed up this process by submitting a 'sitemap'. This is a file in XML format that contains a list of all URLs to be indexed. Most content management systems can automatically keep such a sitemap.xml file up to date. Google retrieves this file again and again and checks whether new web addresses have been added.
Use of the Search Console
We recommend checking the data in the Search Console at least once a month.
Here is an example of the display of performance data with impressions, clicks, average click rate and position. If you move the mouse over a data point, the data for that day is displayed.
The next graph shows the behavior of pages on cell phones. Here you can see a drop in 'good' pages to 0.8% from the beginning of November, with a simultaneous drop in impressions (display of the page in the search results). The webmaster needs to take action here! Without the use of Google Search Console, the problem would probably have been overlooked.
In the sitemap coverage you can see how many of the submitted pages were actually included in the search index by Google. Either some pages have been deliberately excluded from indexing or Google has decided that some content is not relevant enough.
Resubmit or update pages to Google
If you have created a new content page or updated an existing page, you can submit it to Google via the Google Search Console. This will get the page into the Google search index faster than if you wait until the Google bot finds the URL on its own or the sitemap is reprocessed. The page is checked directly and any errors are displayed.
To submit a page to Google, enter the address at the top of the search field ("Check every URL in www.domain.com"). After a short time, you will receive a result and can apply directly for indexing. Inclusion in the search index often takes place within a few hours.
