Back to blog
alphadigital
December 7, 2018

How To Use and Set Up Google Search Console

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console (previously Google Webmaster Tools) is another free web service by Google that helps you to learn about your website and the people who use it. It shows you how many people are visiting your website, the queries they type into Google to find it, and which pages are the most popular in the search engine results pages (SERPs). It also allows you to check your website’s indexing status and search engine visibility.

You can also use Google Search Console to:

  • Submit and check a sitemap to get a website indexed.
  • Check and set the crawl rate, and view statistics about when Googlebot accesses a particular site.
  • Write and check a robots.txt file to help discover pages that are blocked in robots.txt accidentally.
  • List internal and external pages that link to the site.
  • Get a list of links which Googlebot had difficulty crawling, including the error that Googlebot received when accessing the URLs in question.
  • See what keyword searches on Google led to the site being listed in the SERPs, as well as the impressions, clicks, click through rate and position of each keyword.
  • Set a preferred domain (e.g. prefer example.com over www.example.com or vice versa), which determines how the site URL is displayed in SERPs.
  • Highlight to Google Search elements of structured data which are used to enrich search hit entries (Google Data Highlighter).
  • Receive notifications from Google for manual penalties.
  • Check for Mobile Responsiveness Errors

How to Set Up Search Console

Step 1

Create a Google Search Console account and log in. Click the ‘Add a Property’ button.

Google Search Console Set Up

Step 2

Add the client website by filling in the information below:

Step 3

The next step is to verify that you own the website.

WMT 03

The easiest way to verify your site is by selecting the Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager options (under ‘Alternate methods’).

Why You Need Google Tag Manager

If you’re using the same account that Google Analytics is set up on (and Tag Manager is not able to be used), select this option and select verify.

WMT 04

Step 4

Once the site has been verified, ensure to add your client to your search console account. To do this, click the ‘Settings’ drop down in the top right of the screen and select ‘Users & Property Owners’.

Select ‘Add a new user’ on the top right of the new screen

Add the client as a new user with ‘full’ permission and you’re done!

To learn more about how to use Google Search Console and other tracking improvements for brands, talk to our digital tracking agency.

/> />
/> />