what is google search console?
Google Search Console is a free tool provided by Google that helps you understand how your website is performing on the internet. It shows how much traffic is coming to your website from Google search, which pages are getting clicks, and how many impressions your website is receiving in search results. With the help of this tool, you can see which keywords are bringing visitors to your website and how your site is appearing on Google.
How to connect the website.
- First, go to Google Search Console by visiting the website search.google.com in your browser. Log in with your Gmail ID, because Google uses this email to create and manage your Search Console account. After logging in, you will see an option to add a new website property.
- Now enter the URL of your website, for example: https://digitalmarketingbissau.com/. Select the “URL prefix” option if you only want to verify this exact URL version of your website. After that, click on Continue. Now Google will ask you to verify that you are the owner of this website.
- For verification, you will get different methods. Choose the “HTML tag” method and copy the meta tag code provided there. Then go to your WordPress website and paste this HTML meta tag inside the head section of your site. You can do this either through the theme editor or by using any header or SEO plugin that allows you to insert code in the head area.
- After pasting the code, save the changes on your website. Now come back to Google Search Console and click on the “Verify” or “Done” button. If the code has been added correctly, your property will be verified and your website will be successfully added to Google Search Console. From now on, Search Console will start collecting data and you will be able to use this tool to monitor and improve your website’s performance.
Managing multiple sites with one account
With a single Google Search Console account, you can manage many different websites together. If you have more than one site, you can add each one separately using the “Add property” option and switch between them whenever you want. This makes it easy to compare performance and handle all your projects from one dashboard.
1. Uses of Google Search Console
Google Search Console is not only for checking clicks and impressions, it works like a complete health report for your website. It has sections like Performance, URL Inspection, Coverage (Page indexing), Links, Mobile usability and Security that help you monitor technical problems, indexing issues and backlinks.
2. Performance report (Clicks, Impressions, CTR)
The Performance report is the most important part for understanding your results in Google Search. Here you can see Total Clicks, Total Impressions, Average CTR and Average Position, and you can compare them for different date ranges such as last 7, 28 or 3 months. In the Queries, Pages, Countries and Devices tabs you can check which keyword, which page, which country and which device is bringing more traffic to your site.
3. URL Inspection tool
The URL Inspection tool is used to check a single URL in detail. When you paste your page URL in the top input box, it shows whether the URL is indexed or not, when it was last crawled, what the canonical URL is and if there are any errors or warnings. If you have published a new or updated post, you can inspect that URL and click “Request indexing” so that Google crawls and indexes it again quickly.
4. Coverage and Messages
The Coverage or Page indexing report shows the indexing status of the whole website – how many pages are valid, how many have errors and which ones are excluded. From here you can find issues like 404 pages, server errors, redirect problems, noindex tags or pages blocked by robots.txt and then fix them on your site. The Messages section is like an inbox where Google sends important notifications such as indexing issues, security problems, manual actions or other big changes on your site.
5. Links report and backlinks
With the Links report you can see both external backlinks and internal links of your site. In “Top linking sites” and “Top linked pages” you can find which websites are linking to you and which of your pages are receiving the most backlinks. “Top internally linked pages” helps you understand which pages inside your own site have more internal links and which important pages have fewer, so you can add more relevant internal links and improve their rankings.
6. Overall benefit
If you regularly use all these sections of Google Search Console – Performance, URL Inspection, Coverage, Links and Messages – your overall SEO strategy becomes much stronger. It becomes easier to decide what content to create next, which pages to update and which technical mistakes to fix first, so that your website ranks higher on Google and your organic traffic keeps growing.
7. Submitting your sitemap
A very important step after verifying your site is submitting your XML sitemap. A sitemap is a simple file that lists all important URLs of your website so that Google can discover them faster. In Search Console, go to the “Sitemaps” section, enter the sitemap URL such as sitemap.xml or sitemap_index.xml, and click “Submit”. Once the sitemap is processed, you will see how many URLs were discovered and whether there were any problems reading the file.
8. Checking page experience and mobile usability
Google also measures how user‑friendly your pages are, especially on mobile devices. In the “Page Experience” and “Mobile Usability” reports you can see if your pages have issues like text being too small, clickable elements too close together or content wider than the screen. Fixing these issues improves user experience and can indirectly help your rankings over time.
9. Using data to improve your content
Search Console data is very useful for planning new blog posts and updating old ones. In the Performance report you can filter queries with high impressions but low CTR or low average position, then improve those pages by rewriting titles, adding more detailed information, or covering related sub‑topics. You can also compare “before and after” periods to check whether your updates really increased clicks and impressions.
10. Best practices for beginners
Beginners should log in to Search Console at least a few times every week and quickly scan the main reports. Check Performance for traffic trends, Coverage for new errors, URL Inspection for new posts, and Links for important backlinks so that no problem is missed for too long. If you make this a habit, your site will stay healthier, and you will have a clear direction for SEO work instead of guessing what to do next.
Note: If you still do not understand any step of this Google Search Console guide, you can ask your doubt anytime. Just send me a message or write your question in the comment box below, and I will reply to your message as soon as possible. Visit My contact page
