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Google Search Console is a search engine optimization software solution offered by Google.A good first step to understanding and addressing search performanceWe use Google Search Console to support our public-facing website within a single unit in our organization (though it may also be in use on other sites). It serves a few different purposes: identifying and solving Google indexing and crawling errors, tracking our organic search performance, and identifying and addressing optimization issues.,Clearly flags areas where there are technical errors or "low-hanging fruit" we can address, such as duplicate title tags, security issues, or crawl errors. Provides an easy way to keep Google up to date on our content/site organization - for example, the ability to upload/update sitemaps. Offers sortable search analytics that allows us to determine if we're ranking for terms we think we should be, find unexpected search terms, or identify areas of underperformance. This helps us strategize around what content to create/optimize and potentially feeds into our paid search strategy.,I'd like more instructions about how to respond to certain errors I see - it can be difficult to understand when you see a red error message what it really means and how to fix it. I'd appreciate warnings being 'ranked' somehow to understand what's really a big deal, and what might be a minor issue. Search analytics is helpful but not comprehensive - you can only go back so far in the data, and can't see all the search terms that are sending traffic to your site.,9,Given that this is a free tool, the return on investment has been particularly high - we've identified and addressed a few site issues that could have meant a reduction in search traffic. Our organic search traffic has been on the rise in part due to the insights gained from the search traffic analytics provided within the console.,Google Analytics, Moz, Yoast Wordpress SEO Plugins and Screaming Frog SEO Spider,WordPress, Yoast Wordpress SEO Plugins, Google Tag ManagerNecessary - But Not Great!I use Google Search Console to support public-facing websites within a single unit in our organization. Linked with Google Tag Manager, Analytics and Ads, it provides a powerful resource for us to: Identify Google indexing and crawling errors, track our organic search performance, identify and address optimization issues, submit sitemaps to Google, check security status of the site, demote links and maps that we no longer want promoted, among others.,Demote sitelinks Submit sitemaps to Google Review structured data elements on the Listing external and internal links on the site Disavow bad links Fetching as Google,Poor UI Significant data discrepancy between Analytics and Search Console Unclear messaging around when a sitemap was submitted and when it was processed Terrible support Massive learning curve,10,Free to use, has low ROI Just the beginning of the funnel, mandatory to have a CRM to track how users came to the site Can provide useful ROI analytics, only in conjunction with other tools. Nothing in the tool itself is useful on its own.,Moz, Ahrefs Site Explorer, Majestic SEO and Screaming Frog SEO Spider,Moz, Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Majestic SEOAn Insightful Tool Everyone NeedsIt's mainly for the marketing team. It helps us monitor our site health, such as if we have broken links to fix, if our pages are mobile friendly or not, etc.,Good tracking on the broken links Great insights on how you can fix the pages to make them mobile friendly,For some broken links, they have limited information of where it came from, so it's difficult to locate the real issue and fix.,7,It's been helping us a lot for website cleaning and health monitoring We are able to fix most of the broken links We are able to catch the website issues in time,Google Search Console Keeps My Sites HealthyGoogle Search Console is used across my whole organization and my client base. I use it to find crawl errors, test structured data, check the links to and within my sites, and much more. Google Search Console helps me keep my sites healthy and findable on the web. I have Google Search Console connected to Google Analytics and to third-party tools like SEMRush to give me a detailed view of how my sites are seen and indexed by Google.,Google Search Console lets me know if there are any crawl errors on my sites, so that I can fix them. Google Search Console tells me when I have errors in my structured data. This is particularly helpful, because structured data can be extremely intricate. It's nice to have Google looking at the whole thing while I'm lost in the details. Google Search Console helps me keep track of the links coming to my sites and the links within them. Both back-linking and cross-linking are necessary strategies for good SEO, so I appreciate being able to check them at a glance.,Google Search Console can be difficult to use when you first start. There's a bit of a learning curve, but Google also does a nice job of providing training and help docs. As with anything that involves Google, I always wish that I could contact a human being when I have questions I can't answer or problems I can't solve. Unfortunately, contacting Google is next to impossible sometimes. Google Search Console does an excellent job of detecting errors in structured data, but it can be very difficult to find instructions for fixing those errors.,9,Google Search console has helped my business achieve our objectives of increasing our online presence and findability. Google Search Console has also helped us to remain competitive within our market by adding structured data to everything from our job posts to our blog articles. Google Search Console has helped us increase our SEO and the SEO of our clients through quality back-linking and cross-linking strategies.,Google Analytics, SEMRush, Crazy EggSearcherGoogle search is easy to use and it finds many related links. It also 'remembers' your search history and I find this feature is helpful especially when I forget how I found a particular site in the past. The only downside I can think of is that it's difficult to find less popular items/links.,Search a location nearby Search particular items Search reviews of a particular item or establishment,Searching less popular items/reviews is a challenge.,9,Able to find info we need most of the time.,
  3. Google Search Console Reviews
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Google Search Console
75 Ratings
Score 8.6 out of 101
TRScore

Google Search Console Reviews

Google Search Console
75 Ratings
Score 8.6 out of 101
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Ben Rubenstein profile photo
June 21, 2018

Google Search Console Review: "A good first step to understanding and addressing search performance"

Ben Rubenstein
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We use Google Search Console to support our public-facing website within a single unit in our organization (though it may also be in use on other sites). It serves a few different purposes: identifying and solving Google indexing and crawling errors, tracking our organic search performance, and identifying and addressing optimization issues.
  • Clearly flags areas where there are technical errors or "low-hanging fruit" we can address, such as duplicate title tags, security issues, or crawl errors.
  • Provides an easy way to keep Google up to date on our content/site organization - for example, the ability to upload/update sitemaps.
  • Offers sortable search analytics that allows us to determine if we're ranking for terms we think we should be, find unexpected search terms, or identify areas of underperformance. This helps us strategize around what content to create/optimize and potentially feeds into our paid search strategy.
  • I'd like more instructions about how to respond to certain errors I see - it can be difficult to understand when you see a red error message what it really means and how to fix it.
  • I'd appreciate warnings being 'ranked' somehow to understand what's really a big deal, and what might be a minor issue.
  • Search analytics is helpful but not comprehensive - you can only go back so far in the data, and can't see all the search terms that are sending traffic to your site.
I think Google Search Console is a very useful tool for someone/a team charged with managing a website and ensuring that it's set up to perform well in Google search. It does not cover everything, and you'll often need other tools or expertise to address issues that it might flag, but it's certainly a good starting point to find what might be holding your site back.
Read Ben Rubenstein's full review
Sean Pomory profile photo
November 16, 2018

Google Search Console Review: "Necessary - But Not Great!"

Sean Pomory
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
I use Google Search Console to support public-facing websites within a single unit in our organization. Linked with Google Tag Manager, Analytics and Ads, it provides a powerful resource for us to: Identify Google indexing and crawling errors, track our organic search performance, identify and address optimization issues, submit sitemaps to Google, check security status of the site, demote links and maps that we no longer want promoted, among others.
  • Demote sitelinks
  • Submit sitemaps to Google
  • Review structured data elements on the
  • Listing external and internal links on the site
  • Disavow bad links
  • Fetching as Google
  • Poor UI
  • Significant data discrepancy between Analytics and Search Console
  • Unclear messaging around when a sitemap was submitted and when it was processed
  • Terrible support
  • Massive learning curve
Google Search Console is good. It is a solid tool that provides great analytics in many use cases. But it has many failings. To be clear, Marketers and Developers should certainly use Google Search Console, just in conjunction with other tools. I don't believe you can't recommend the tool in the SEO space because of its direct integration with Google. If you want to submit a site to Google directly, this is the only way to do it. So, business large and small, should use it.
Read Sean Pomory's full review
No photo available
November 18, 2018

Google Search Console Review: "An Insightful Tool Everyone Needs"

Verified User
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
It's mainly for the marketing team. It helps us monitor our site health, such as if we have broken links to fix, if our pages are mobile friendly or not, etc.
  • Good tracking on the broken links
  • Great insights on how you can fix the pages to make them mobile friendly
  • For some broken links, they have limited information of where it came from, so it's difficult to locate the real issue and fix.
Overall it is very useful for almost every organization. And if I remember correctly it is free to the public. So why not have it?
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Greg Dungan profile photo
March 28, 2018

Review: "Google Search Console Keeps My Sites Healthy"

Greg Dungan
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Google Search Console is used across my whole organization and my client base. I use it to find crawl errors, test structured data, check the links to and within my sites, and much more. Google Search Console helps me keep my sites healthy and findable on the web. I have Google Search Console connected to Google Analytics and to third-party tools like SEMRush to give me a detailed view of how my sites are seen and indexed by Google.
  • Google Search Console lets me know if there are any crawl errors on my sites, so that I can fix them.
  • Google Search Console tells me when I have errors in my structured data. This is particularly helpful, because structured data can be extremely intricate. It's nice to have Google looking at the whole thing while I'm lost in the details.
  • Google Search Console helps me keep track of the links coming to my sites and the links within them. Both back-linking and cross-linking are necessary strategies for good SEO, so I appreciate being able to check them at a glance.
  • Google Search Console can be difficult to use when you first start. There's a bit of a learning curve, but Google also does a nice job of providing training and help docs.
  • As with anything that involves Google, I always wish that I could contact a human being when I have questions I can't answer or problems I can't solve. Unfortunately, contacting Google is next to impossible sometimes.
  • Google Search Console does an excellent job of detecting errors in structured data, but it can be very difficult to find instructions for fixing those errors.
Google Search Console is an absolute must if you build, manage, or maintain websites. It's also helpful is you deal in a company's business analytics. Whether you're in sales or marketing, you should be keenly aware of the information Google Search Console provides regarding your website and your company's online presence.
Read Greg Dungan's full review
John Lam profile photo
February 22, 2018

Google Search Console Review: "Searcher"

John Lam
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Google search is easy to use and it finds many related links. It also 'remembers' your search history and I find this feature is helpful especially when I forget how I found a particular site in the past. The only downside I can think of is that it's difficult to find less popular items/links.
  • Search a location nearby
  • Search particular items
  • Search reviews of a particular item or establishment
  • Searching less popular items/reviews is a challenge.
Look for a particular store nearby.
Read John Lam's full review
No photo available
May 04, 2018

Review: "Google Search Console - finally updated!"

Verified User
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
I've used Google Search Console for all companies I worked for. It's a great FREE tool for tracking keyword positions, impressions, clicks and CTR and other metrics for your websites. The good part is that the ranking data is coming directly from Google (while ALL other tools pull it through Google's API).
  • Rankings tracking for pages and keywords on Google.
  • Impressions, clicks and CTR tracking for separate keywords and pages on Google.
  • Comparing rankings, impressions, clicks, and CTR for different time periods.
  • It shows information about recent Google and GSC updates on the graph.
  • They used to have a limitation on how far back you can go with data (the limitation was 90 days), meaning you couldn't see data from 100 days ago. However, the new version (I think it's in Beta now) doesn't have this limitation anymore.
  • Also, it's not possible to group keywords and pages and track performance for groups. Tools like Conductor Searchlight have this function.
Great starting tool for any small to mid-sized business. It provides all internal SEO information that you need, including on-site improvement suggestions and backlink information (on top of the most popular functions like positions and click tracking).
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No photo available
December 20, 2017

Review: "Pros and Cons of using Google Search Console"

Verified User
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We use Google Search Console all the time. One of my clients had once a case of Negative SEO when a competitor tried to lower their site's rankings in the search engines. It was really easy to disavow those untrusted links though GSC. This task cannot be accomplished anywhere else. You can get a list of bad links with other softwares but you can only disavow those links with this platform (GSC).
I also suggest adding your Google Console to your Yoast SEO plugin (if you don’t have you should have it) so you can track how Google is indexing your website.
  • Disavow bad links.
  • Search Analytics – so the viewer can quickly find all the search terms, pages and position of each term that brings traffic to the site.
  • Fetch as Google so you can test how Google crawls your site.
  • Google Search Console provides a list of HTML errors it discovered in the course of crawling your site but sometimes this feature is not up to date. Sometimes it shows errors that had been previously fixed.
Google Search Console is great for disavowing bad links and make sure there are no major issues when you launch a major update to your existing site.

One scenario that is less appropriate to use GSC is the Index Status section.
Because GSC allows you to authorize the http, https, www, and non-www version of your site independently, it can be confusing as to what is included in the Index Status metric.
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No photo available
November 28, 2017

Google Search Console Review: "Should be part of any SEO toolkit"

Verified User
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Google Search Console is used by several teams across the whole of the organization. These teams generally sit within Marketing departments. The tool is used primarily by those involved in SEO efforts, but it has also proven beneficial for detecting user experience issues that happen to impact SEO such as broken links on websites.
  • Google Search Console is a good resource for learning which keywords are driving organic traffic to our websites. We realize that much of that data is actually not made available by Google, but even the data we get is worthwhile.
  • GSC is also the primary method we use for submitting brand new or significantly revised pages to Google for indexing.
  • GSC also helps us identify issues on our websites which impact not just SEO but also other areas.
  • As mentioned, the keyword data available is far from complete. Like most people involved in SEO, I would love to see all the other data not shown.
  • It's unfortunate that users can only look back at the last 90 days of data at any point in time. Fortunately we are able to integrate GSC with other tools that store this data for future reference.
  • GSC does occasionally flag warnings that have been applied to our sites' presences in search results. Often, these warnings are unnecessary and GSC makes it possible to have them reviewed and removed, but it is annoying that unnecessary warnings are visible even for a short time.
Anyone working in SEO should be looking at Google Search Console data, ideally connecting it to Google Analytics in order to enjoy the flow of data from one tool to another. But the tool was originally named Google Webmaster Tools and to be honest there are several tools available that any webmaster/front-end web developer would find useful for monitoring the health of their site.
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Nicholas De Salvo profile photo
October 12, 2017

Google Search Console Review: "Free Is A Very Good Price"

Nicholas De Salvo
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We've used Google Search Console since it was introduced as Google Webmaster Tools as a way to upload sitemap information about websites. For years, it has been a standard line item in our website launch checklist as a vital resource for any site owner. Here you can interact with Google on how your site should be displayed, view any problems that may come up, see how Google views your website, and seemingly countless other useful things.
  • Verify site ownership with Google.
  • Upload real-time sitemaps to alert Google to new content on your website.
  • Review your website's search health.
  • View how Google looks at your website with specific page granularity.
  • I think the standard con here is that Google is a big business with lots of access to your data. We hope they behave responsibly with it, but there isn't as much transparency with how they analyze data or position your website as we might like.
I mentioned earlier that Google Search Console is a standard item on our website checklist because we believe that you need tools to be able to interact with Google if you expect to do business online. Every website should have this, and we do not say this about many tools.
Read Nicholas De Salvo's full review
Roel Timmermans profile photo
October 13, 2017

Google Search Console Review: "Must have, but not too great of a tool"

Roel Timmermans
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We use it to support our SEO efforts. Initially it was a main tool to work with sitemaps and update newly added pages. The latter is still a good option to manually submit new pages.

Mainly it's a useful addition to Google Analytics, which itself offers more value than Search Console.
  • Submit pages
  • Measure inbound links
  • Measuring indexed pages
  • Should be included in Analytics
It's a must have if you want to do well in SEO. Manually submitted pages and linked pages is a plus, submitting sitemaps as well. Overall though it offers too little to be a standalone product. Google should embed this into Analytics.

It often seems to show different information compared to Analytics and Google itself.
Read Roel Timmermans's full review
Amber Stanley-Kruth profile photo
April 10, 2017

Google Search Console Review: "The VIP Pass for Google Search Engine Results Page"

Amber Stanley-Kruth
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Google Search Console (Webmaster Tools) is the flip side of Google Analytics. Analytics gives you data on your website from the user's point of view, as well as aggregate data on user behavior. Search Console gives you data from Google Bot or the search engine view, from simple to read search query data to more technical features like AMP and structured snippets. Like other Google platforms, there is a plethora of easy to find step by step instructions and explanations of how to use Search Console. It isn't used by or necessary for everyone in the company and is used only by the individuals that need this technical data to make sure the website is performing without errors and taking advantage of the multifaceted options to be visible and on good standing with Google Search.
  • Submit sitemap and robots.txt to make sure Google indexes the most recent version of your website and there aren't errors.
  • View, sort and filter search queries that provide your website with impressions and clicks. Also see the average position and click through rate of those keywords.
  • Take advantage of more advanced SERP features like AMP, structured snippets.
  • Discover crawl errors, duplicate/missing HTML elements, pages blocked from bots.
  • The interface is not as user-friendly as Analytics.
  • The additional features, like snippets, is (or seems) too confusing to use without advanced knowledge.
  • Crawl errors need better guides/explanation for how to resolve.
  • It would be nice to have a customizable report that could be used to archive and share this information.
If you're just starting out, this is useful for syncing to Analytics to get the "Search Console" data. Also pretty easy to submit a sitemap (go to your website URL and add "/sitemap" to your root domain - www.mysite.com/sitemap) and the extension (e.g. ".xml") will appear. Copy "/sitemap.xml" and paste into Search Console. For more intermediate/advanced web designers/developers this is essential for seeing what the Google bot sees and making the necessary changes for better search performance and taking advantage of enhanced SERP features.
Read Amber Stanley-Kruth's full review

Google Search Console Scorecard Summary

Likelihood to Recommend (75)
8.6

Feature Scorecard Summary

Keyword analysis (10)
7.4
Backlink management (10)
7.0
SERP ranking tracking (10)
7.5
Page grader (8)
6.3
Competitive analysis (6)
5.9
Site audit / diagnostics (10)
8.4
Site recommendations (10)
7.7
Task management (4)
5.9
Local SEO (9)
7.8
Social SEO (5)
5.2
Mobile SEO (9)
7.8
Global SEO (8)
7.9
Multi-domain support (10)
7.8
Integration with web analytics tools (9)
8.1

About Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a search engine optimization software solution offered by Google.
Categories:  Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Google Search Console Technical Details

Operating Systems: Unspecified
Mobile Application:No