How to Take Advantage of Google Search Consoles New Features
Google’s new Search Console has arrived (well, a beta version anyways).
It comes with a raft of new features that will be useful for any business that relies on search results, which, let’s face it, is pretty much everyone in this day and age.
Without further ado, let’s take a look at some of the main new features and how you can benefit from them.
1. Search Performance Report
The search analytics have been improved in this release. You can choose between 3, 6, 12 and 16 months of displayed data, effectively quadrupling the previous maximum amount. This allows you greater ability to spot trends as you can now overlap yearly comparisons.
Filtering has also been improved. Previously you could only filter by one variable at a time such as search type, page, query, country, device, etc, you can now filter using multiple options. This leads to much more powerful comparisons and insights. The image below shows a comparison between total impressions and average click through rate.
2. Index Coverage Report
Google have combined their Index Status and Crawl Error reports into all-new Index Coverage reports. You can check out how successfully your website is indexed in Google and repair errors where you find them.
The new report lets you view the following data:
- pages with errors
- valid pages with warnings
- valid indexed pages
- excluded pages
The report also creates a table that provides greater detail on the type of issues found and clickable URL links to go directly to the affected pages.
3. Search enhancement reports: AMP status and job posting reports
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a project run by Google to increase the loading speed of webpages on mobile devices. The updated AMP report lets you validate any AMP pages. The new version allows you to directly request that Google reprocess any amended links across a number of pages. Google then assigns a high priority to these pages.
The job posting report lets you view stats related to job listings, highlighting indexing problems and potential fixes.
4. Other features in the pipeline
There are some notable omissions from the old release in the beta version, so it’s likely that Google will continue to update the Search Console over the coming months.
In recent years, Google have been highly focused on rich content results and structured data and it is rumored that they are looking to integrate their brand new Rich Results Testing Tool into the Search Console. This will create a simple solution to identify and repair pages that should display as rich results, but contain errors.
Internal and external link reporting is another useful feature that is so far missing from the new Search Console. As this is such an important feature for SEO, it will almost certainly make a return soon.
Summary
Although it’s only in it’s Beta stage, the new Search Console is looking very promising in terms of helping businesses boost their SEO results. The inclusion of multiple features and 16 months of historical data alone make this far more powerful than previous versions.
With more features and tools to come over the coming months and years, now is the time to get to grips with the new version and start harnessing its power to help improve your search rankings.
SOURCES:
https://searchengineland.com/google-roll-new-search-console-features-upcoming-weeks-289184
