Upgrade for Google Search Console

Google has rolled out an upgrade for Search Console, with which you can now also gain insight into properties that are not linked to an account in Google Analytics.
Google Search Console is a free web service that allows webmasters to monitor and optimize the indexing status, position and visibility of websites in Google, among other things. By measuring the performance of your website, you gain insight into what your target group finds important, how they find your content and whether that content actually appears in the search results. For example, the service includes tools that webmasters can use to:

• Monitor the crawl rate and see statistics about when Google's bot visits a particular site.
• See a list of internal and external pages that link to the website.
• View a list of links from pages that Google's bot had a hard time crawling, including the error the bot received when accessing those URLs.
• Can see for which searches and keywords the website was found, and the total number of clicks, the total number of impressions and the average click-through rates.

The new upgrade now extends these capabilities to websites that are not associated with a Google Analytics property. There are also new overviews, such as an overview of the most popular searches that your site is searched for, and a new 'Growing content' report, which shows the changes in the number of impressions and clicks for a specific time period. Reports that can provide important insights to understand how Google's search engine interacts with your website and how you can improve your website.

Set up Google Search Console for your website

So you can now link a Search Console property to a property in another Google service, such as an Android Play Store app, a Play Console developer account, or a Google Ads account. The only downside is that when you delete a link, its history is lost.
To get started with Google Search Console, go to the main page and click the [Start now] button. After that, sign in to the Google account you want to link to your site's Search Console account. If this is your first time using Search Console, you'll need to specify which property type you want to create: a domain property or a URL prefix property - a comprehensive summary of the entire site's performance, including all URLs in all subdomains, or a summary of only the URLs with a specified prefix. Naturally, verification is an important part of the installation process.

On the main page you will also find a number of online training courses that will help you find your way around Google Search Console. But it is best to simply go through all available reports and overviews to see which reports you can use best to substantiate your digital strategy.

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