SEO web basics with Google Search Console

Let's say you have a friend with a small online business with a website, but their products are not appearing in google search.

How would you help them troubleshoot it?

You'd probably start by going to the site, understand the products and pages and then run google searches for those products. Does you see results? even if you scroll down lots of results pages?

Is there a robots.txt for the site? what rules are specified? are there any exclusions? Check also for any robots meta tag in the html.

Is a sitemap.xml provided? What urls are in it?

You might also examine the html for the product pages. Are the basics present? title tag, meta tag for description which match the content on the page. Sensible use of h1 etc tags on the page. Useful and accurate content about each product page. Urls which are search friendly.

You might run Chrome Lighthouse checking SEO, Performance and Accessibility scores to see if any red flags exist.

So you find that your "friends" website products are not appearing in search results. But the in general the site looks like it should be (there are no clear reasons it shouldn't). Then what?

You need to use Google Search Console, a tool google provides to allow website owners better understand how google search views their site and pages. Anyone with a website that does business or shared content should be using. note: Google first crawls your pages, then indexes them and then checks if matches user search, so it's a multistep process.

To get started you need to add Google Search console file or a tag to your website so that google knows you're the owner and it can share info about the site with you. Adding a tag is easy (they provide instructions).

Once added and recognized by google then in Search Console you will see your website and information about it. 

More details:

  • Overview dashboard view shows 
    • searches which led to clicks; 
  • Performance 
    • lots of info on total clicks, total impressions, search result position as well as queries users use, pages hit etc.
    • indexing info on your pages
  • Url inspection
    • enter a url and see in detail what Google Search knows about it. Is it crawled? Is it indexed? What was last crawled etc.
    • test a url to understand if Google has any issues with it
    • request indexing for a url
  • Indexing section
    • Pages: info on indexed pages and reasons why not indexed
    • Sitemap: add a new sitemap
  • Settings
    • manage users and set owner


Google Search Console gives you the insights to troubleshoot website pages and understand how google search views you pages. Google provides lots of docs and videos to learn more about the reports in Google Search Console

Now you can troubleshoot. Is google search finding and crawling my pages? Are there indexing issues or not? How does search rank my pages versus others? What kinds of searches drive traffic to my site? and from where?

Then you can start fine tuning your site such as using structured data, best practices for setting title links. Lots of things you can do to improve ranking. A process of identifying improvements, making changes and then measuring outcomes (and repeat).

Google Search Central is a great resource for learning (google wants you on their search results, win for them, win for you)


Sitemaps - sitemap.xml, a file in which you provide information about pages on your site and their relationships. Not required by google search (if pages are linked properly) but can make crawling more efficient. Good to provide for a new site and has few external links. You can upload sitemap files in google search console in the sitemap section.



Overview page


Performance



Indexing -> Pages



URL inspection









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