There is a plethora of paid tools and software which can help with your SEO strategy, and no doubt each of them has it merits. However, there is a free tool, which means it is often overlooked or given the credit it deserves.
That tool is the Google Search Console, and it has several excellent features which can give your SEO efforts a significant helping hand in terms of being able to see how Google sees your website.
Google Search Console isn’t one tool but is instead a collection of tools that provide information relating to search traffic, crawling data, and search engine appearance. You may have heard of it being called one of its previous names, which were Google Webmaster Central and, more recently, Google Webmaster Tools.
To start using Google Search Console, there are a few steps you need to complete, which include opening a Google account if you do not already have one and then verifying your account, which can be done in several ways, including using SEO plugins such as Yoast.
You will then need to select settings such as whether you want your website to have ‘www.’ or not, how often you want Google to crawl your website, and if others work on your website, adding them as users.
Once you have everything set up, you can take advantage of the Google Search Console’s reporting features and, more importantly, start using them to make any changes to your SEO strategy that the information they provide suggests.
