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What is Google Search Console? Difference between Webmaster Tools and GSC
Google recently transitioned its main site management platform from Webmaster Tools to the new Search Console.
For SEOs, understanding the capabilities of Search Console is essential for optimizing Google presence. Let’s explore what it offers and how it differs from old Webmaster Tools.
First, Webmaster Tools was Google’s original hub for webmasters. It provided key features like:
- Crawl Stats: View indexed pages and fix errors.
- Sitemaps: Submit XML sitemaps.
- Manual Actions: Identify spam penalties.
- Links: See external sites linking in.
This gave site owners tools to understand and control how Google bots interacted with their site. It was a vital resource for ensuring proper indexing.
Content of the Post
Key Differences
Managing Your Search Presence
Diagnosing Issues Impacting Rankings
Why Adopt Search Console?
Key Differences
Search Console keeps many of the same features but modernizes the interface and expands the capabilities. Some key enhancements include:
Streamlined Design
Google completely revamped the Search Console interface to align with its latest design philosophies. It now has a clean, uncluttered look following Google’s “Material Design” visual language.
All key metrics and data are prominently surfaced on the main dashboard for easy one-click access. The left sidebar navigation provides clear organizational structure to all features under sections like Performance, Enhancements, Coverage, etc.
Everything is optimized for mobile with a responsive layout that works seamlessly on all devices. Overall, the streamlined design is a major usability upgrade over the previous cluttered incarnation of Webmaster Tools. It enables much faster access to everything site owners need for day-to-day management and optimization.
Mobile-Friendliness & Page Speed Reports
Two of the most useful new reporting capabilities provided in Search Console are around mobile-friendliness and page speed. Dedicated reports now exist to evaluate your site’s: 1) Mobile-friendliness per Google’s mobile-readiness standards, and 2) Page speed performance metrics like Time-to-Interactive.
You can run these reports at a site-wide level or drill down to analyze specific pages or batches of pages together. The mobile-friendliness report identifies elements on each page that are problematic for mobile users such as small tap targets. The speed report surfaces key user experience metrics like Time-to-Interactive and First Contentful Paint to diagnose performance bottlenecks.
These reports make it easy to quickly pinpoint technical problems hurting your site’s mobile compatibility and load speed. You can then determine which pages to prioritize for fixes based on their severity grade. Over time, running comparative reports will demonstrate the positive impact optimization work had on these crucial ranking factors.
Real-Time Stats
One frustration with the old Webmaster Tools was how key stats like search queries, clicks, and impressions only refreshed once per day. This made it difficult to access timely data on the latest traffic trends. Search Console changes this by updating many key stats in real-time rather than with a 24 hour delay.
Now you can instantly access fresh search analytics whenever you need them. This enables linking recent search visibility changes or traffic spikes to site activities like launching new content or campaigns. With real-time stats, you have your hand on the pulse of the latest search ecosystem interactions.
Optimization becomes much more agile since you aren’t relying on potentially outdated snapshots of performance. If an issue arises, you can take swift action rather than waiting to confirm it the next day. Overall, real-time visibility results in smarter search management.
Integration with Google Products
A key theme across many of Google’s products is greater interconnectivity and unified data. Search Console is no exception – it now integrates tightly with several other Google platforms: Google Analytics provides user behavior data; Google PageSpeed supplies speed testing and optimizations;
Google Ads connects PPC campaign analytics; others like Data Studio and Google Lighthouse offer expanded analysis capabilities.
Bringing these products together into Search Console provides a complete 360 view of your site’s search presence by consolidating data into one centralized hub. You can understand precisely how changes made through one Google product affect the others.
This powers more insightful analysis and streamlined workflows since you don’t have to toggle between separate tools. With Search Console as the central nervous system, you get robust interconnectivity between the technologies that power your site’s search visibility, user experience, and traffic growth.
Managing Your Search Presence
Like its predecessor Webmaster Tools, Search Console provides numerous features to control Google’s access and indexing of your site. For example, you can easily submit XML sitemaps that guide Googlebot to discover new and updated pages.
The index coverage report lets you review the number of pages Google has indexed, filtered by type, platform, country, date range, etc. This helps identify gaps where Google may be missing important pages to focus on fixing. The crawl stats section enables diagnosing and addressing crawling errors such as 404s, soft 404s, robots.txt blocking, etc.
You can quickly access a list of URLs with fixable errors and recrawl specific pages to confirm issues are resolved. Search appearance testing allows verifying exactly how Google interprets and renders pages – you can confirm content, images, tags, etc. are indexed as you expect. Overall, Search Console provides indispensable tools to manage and optimize Google’s crawling and indexing of your site.
Diagnosing Issues Impacting Rankings
In addition to foundational search management capabilities, Search Console provides valuable diagnostics to uncover problems impacting rankings. The Page Experience section evaluates how your pages fare on Core Web Vitals metrics including Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift.
This helps surface usability bottlenecks hurting user experience. You can dig into technical barriers such as index coverage errors, manual spam actions, page speed load times, and more. The Queries section reveals top search queries driving traffic to your site along with click-through-rates.
This enables finding relevant long-tail keywords to target and optimizing targeted queries with low CTR. Taken together, these insights help diagnose site issues, find new growth opportunities, and inform high-impact optimizations.
Why Adopt Search Console?
In summary, Search Console is an indispensable platform for any site invested in SEO and maximizing search presence. As a free tool provided directly by Google, it should be the first stop for: monitoring and maintaining
Google access to your site, diagnosing technical problems and barriers that may be hurting rankings, reviewing visitor behavior data to optimize pages, identifying issues and growth opportunities, competitive benchmarking, and more.
With Google continuously expanding its capabilities, Search Console should be a core piece of any search marketing technology stack. It provides invaluable visibility into how Google interacts with and indexes your site along with powerful optimization insights – all freely available from the source.
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