Google Search Console
A free Google tool that monitors, maintains, and troubleshoots website presence in Google Search results. Provides essential data on rankings, clicks, impressions, indexing, and technical issues.
Why It Matters
Search Console is the only official source of Google search performance data. It reveals which queries drive traffic, indexing issues preventing pages from ranking, manual penalties, and technical problems. Mandatory for professional SEO - you can't effectively optimize without it.
How It Works
After verifying site ownership, Search Console crawls your site regularly, reporting search performance data (queries, clicks, impressions, positions), indexing status, technical issues, security problems, and manual actions. It shows exactly how Google sees and ranks your site.
Use Cases
- An SEO discovers 200 pages blocked from indexing due to robots.txt misconfiguration
- A content team identifies high-impression, low-CTR queries as opportunities for meta description optimization
- A developer finds Core Web Vitals issues affecting mobile rankings and prioritizes fixes
Best Practices
- Check Search Console weekly for new indexing errors, security issues, or manual actions
- Submit new sitemaps and request indexing for high-priority pages
- Analyze Performance report to find queries where you rank 6-10 (optimization opportunities)
- Monitor Coverage report to ensure important pages are indexed properly
- Review Core Web Vitals report and fix pages with poor scores
- Use URL Inspection tool to troubleshoot individual page indexing issues
Frequently Asked Questions
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Related Terms
Combine Search Console insights with AI visibility data
Use search performance data alongside Zerply's AI visibility metrics so you can optimize for both traditional and AI search.
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