Introduction

If you are looking for a better organic ranking in Google search results, then one of the steps is taking care of your Google Search Console (Previously Google Webmaster Tools) results.

• Dashboard

Once you opened Google Search Console, you will see a dashboard like the below one, It gives you an overview of everything from what keywords you are ranking for to how much traffic you are getting. In addition to that you’ll see if the Google bot is experiencing any Crawl Errors when going through your website, the number of sites linking to yours, and how many pages Google has indexed.

• Email Notifications

Google Search Console will send you email notifications if your site seems to have an issue. You need to set up the messaging forwarding using this link so you can get these notifications. The emails may inform you about some problems like increases in crawl errors, malware alerts, unnatural link warnings, and more.

• Sitemap(s) Generation

Submitting a sitemap will help Google determine what pages you have on your website to index them. If you have multiple websites or/and multiple store views (Arabic and English) so you need to add a sitemap for each store view in each website. Follow this Article from the Welcome to Growth stage to understand more about Sitemap generation and submitting into your Google Search Console account.

• Crawl Errors

The Crawl Errors is a report about the site URLs that Google could not successfully be crawled.

The most common error is 404, usually, it caused due to older URLs you had in the store sitemap, like old product, old page, or enabling/disabling store code on your store backend (ar/en).

For every 404 error the Google bot encounters, Google lets you know where it is linked from: Another website, Another URL on your website, or your sitemaps.

The growth specialist will help you to fix the crawl errors during the call.

• Identify HTML improvements

Google tells you exactly what SEO features you should focus on as you optimize your site for search engines by “HTML Improvements.”

• From the left-side navigation on your Google Search Console click on Search Appearance
• Click on “HTML Improvements”, a box like the below will open

By clicking on the Blue highlighted sections, you will be able to investigate what type of HTML improvements you can implement in your online store.

• Sitelinks

Sitelinks are the links that Google lists below your main site in the search results when a user performs a direct search. For example, here are the site links for shopgo.me

You can’t control whether or not Google shows sitelinks for your site. It’s an algorithmic-generated feature. You can, however, ensure that you have a clear site structure and a Sitemap, which will probably generate sitelinks.

Outcome

By the end of this article, you should have a good overview of the basic elements of Google Search Console.