2 Free Digital Tools Waiting For You in Google Search Console
If you're not using this powerful free tool from Google, it's time!
Hey there!
If you have a website, you should be using Google Search Console.
It’s free, easy to set up, and provides loads of information to help you better understand how people are interacting with your site.
Know anyone who might appreciate what we’re doing here? Invite them to join us! As you know, we’re all really nice, and cool, and we all LOVE free digital tools!
Let’s dig in.
Google Search Console Search Results
Tool type: Web App
Once a month, I get an email from Google Search Console breaking down my monthly search results.
It tells me my top growing pages, my top performing pages, what search terms people are using to find me, and more.
It’s a quick snapshot, but it helps me understand which of my content is popping.
This month, I learned an old episode of Step Up Your Social was my top-growing page for the month (it’s a fun one, you can find it here).
Why is it blowing up? No idea!
But good to know, right?
Maybe I should update it. Or add in some links to the bottom of the post to keep folks on my site. If nothing else, it’s good to know that this post, from several years ago, is performing well so it can help inspire future such content.
Once I’ve looked through the very skimmable email, I can click through to my “Performance report.”
Once you're in, you can see search results broken down by queries, pages, and more.
Queries show you the exact terms people searched that led them to your site.
Pages show you which of your pages they landed on.
It’s invaluable data — if you care about people actually finding your site. ☺️
FREE or FREEmium: FREE
This powerful free digital tool from Google is totally free. Here’s info on getting started with.
Google Search Console URL Inspection Tool
Tool type: Web App
Google Search Console isn’t just for search results. It’s got a bunch of other useful tools in there.
One that’s definitely handy is its URL Inspection Tool.
Published a new blog post or made updates to a landing page? Drop the URL into this tool and you’ll see how Google sees it.
It will tell you whether the page is indexed (meaning if it’s searchable on Google), when it was last crawled, and if there are any errors you should know about.
If the page isn’t yet indexed, you can ask Google to go ahead and do so. Which is super cool! You could wait for Google to find it (their little digital spiders will get their eventually). Or you can just push the process and start the ranking process sooner.
If you want to really nerd out on this tool, here’s a blog post that goes deep.
FREE or FREEmium: FREE
This is another free tool just waiting for you in Google Search Console.
Do you use Google Search Console? Any tips or tricks I should know about? Hit reply and let me know!
If you like Free Digital Tools, you probably know others who will too. Invite them to join us. They’ll appreciate it… as will I! When you refer friends, you can also win free stuff!!
See you in a fortnight.
Josh
joshklemons.com
PS — I’ve had some great conversations with some really inspiring people on my podcast Hello Merge Tag the last few weeks. I’m now also sharing all of those episodes to YouTube, if you prefer watching your content to listening. Find all eps and more at HelloMergeTag.com (or wherever you stream podcasts).
What do you expect from GSC when trying to index new pages?
.
Just indexing fingers 🤞crossed.
.
What about Google search results in G?
.
You can get both and you don’t need any tools.
.