Definition

Google Search Console is a free service from Google that helps site owners monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot their site's presence in Google Search results. It reports on crawling, indexing, search traffic, and issues Google detects on a site.

Google describes Search Console as useful for several audiences, including business owners, SEO specialists, site administrators, and developers. It can confirm whether Google is able to crawl a site, surface indexing problems, show the queries and pages that bring search traffic, list sites that link to yours, and send alerts about errors or security issues. A site or property must be verified before its data appears, and the reported figures reflect Google Search only rather than total website traffic.

Examples

• Diagnosing an indexing drop

  A site owner notices fewer impressions and opens the Page Indexing report in Search Console to see which URLs Google has excluded and why.

• Reviewing search queries

  A marketer uses the Performance report in Search Console to compare clicks and average position for a set of target queries over three months.

Sources

• Google Search Console Help — About Search Console

Related terms

• URL Inspection Tool
  A Google Search Console feature that reports Google's indexed version of a specific page and tests whether a URL can be indexed.
• Page Indexing Report
  A Google Search Console report showing which of a site's URLs Google has indexed and the reasons others have not been.
• Impressions
  In Google Search Console, the number of times a link to a site appeared in Google Search results for a user, regardless of whether the user clicked it.
• Click-Through Rate
  The percentage of search impressions that resulted in a click. CTR = clicks ÷ impressions × 100.
• Average Position
  A Search Console metric showing the average ranking of a site's topmost result for a query across all impressions, where 1 is the highest position.

Where QueryCatch uses this

• Search Performance
• Crawling & Indexing