Hi, I am Praneeth.
In this blog, you will learn everything related to the pros and cons or benefits and drawbacks of using the Google search console.
Without further ado, let’s get started.
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What is the Google search console?
Google search console is a web service tool that before May 20, 2015, was called google webmaster tools is now replaced as google search console as the name of the tool,
Using the tool, you can check a lot of things about your website including things like indexation status of your website in the google search database,
You can use this tool in many cool ways, you will learn all the pros and cons of using the tool now,
- By the way, click here to learn how to set up a google search console for your website in 2021.
Pros and cons of using Google search console.
Here is a quick table of pros and cons.
| S.No. | Pros of using google search console | Cons of using google search console. |
| 1. | Data is awesome. | You can’t submit an HTML sitemap. |
| 2. | You can track your website links and growth easily. | Errors can keep repeating and not get updated. |
| 3. | Neat and clean UI and UX. | Sometimes the average position is inaccurate. |
| 4. | Easy identification of issues on your website. | – |
| 5. | You can drive more traffic to your website using the tool. | – |
| 6. | Overall the tool can save a lot of your time and resources. | – |
Let’s learn the pros and cons in detail.
Pros of using Google search console.
Let’s learn the pros or advantages of using the google search console in detail.
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Data is awesome.
The most amazing thing about the Google search consoles is its features and the amount of data you would get from the search console is huge.
Let’s take an example if you are a complete beginner in blogging and website content creation and online marketing area.
Here is the deal,
You will have to publish blogs or content which are targeting to specific topics.
When all of your blogs are targeting specific topics you will need some data and some information regarding how much traffic and clicks you got from a blog that you published.
By signing up for a search console you can have access to some amazing piece of data including things like these,
- What are the total clicks you received for that blog filtering different periods from the past 1 week to the past 1 year?
- What are the total impressions of the blog in Google search?
- What is the average CTR and position of your blog in Google for that query?
- What are the additional other queries that your blog ranks for, gets impressions, and driving clicks?
- What are the countries which are driving the total or majority of clicks to that blog?
- What is the device the audience is using to visit the blog like mobile or desktop?
- What are the total clicks you drive to your website on specific dates?
Apart from the top features of the search console, you can use the tool to analyze the data in some cool ways like,
- You can filter the sources of traffic to your website which you are getting through four ways which are web, image, video, and news and you can compare the different data to get new observations and ideas.
At the end of the day, Google search console enables you to do things like,
You can analyze your website growth and how your blogs are performing on Google.
The data is so incredible that you can use the data to see what worked,
With this data of search console, you can find new opportunities for your blog like,
- You can keep an eye on the average position of your blogs, impressions from time to time, clicks, and CTR by filtering the data on a timely basis.
- You can find and learn more about your audience type by knowing some details like which device is driving traffic to your website filtering the data to the past 28 days either mobile, tablet, or desktop.
- You can find your target audience location by knowing countries from where you are driving a large amount of traffic to your website.
With that said let’s see the next advantage of using the Google search console.
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You can track your website backlinks.
Another interesting thing about Google search console is that,
You have this feature of links where you can track every bit of link both inbound and outbound of your website.
The good thing is that,
It is so user-friendly and in just a few clicks you can find the list of all and most linked pages of your website, the list of all and most linked anchor text, and
The most linked sites to your website on top of all the number of links your website received from external websites Infront.
The data is all there for you to be seen and start using it.
With such amazing data at your fingertips, you can easily find and remove or disavow links to your website and keep your backlink profile neat, natural, and clean.
Apart from external outbound links, you also have the feature called internal links within the links section.
This also enables you and gives you access to some incredible piece of information like you can find amazing data including things like,
- Which blogs and links on your website are highly internal linked.
- Which blogs and internal links are less linked.
- Read, pros and cons of building backlinks for your website.
You can use this feature to see which pages have got the most number of backlinks for your website and,
The internal link that page to other pages that have received fewer links and pass the link juice and authority properly.
By doing that you can boost rankings of your other blogs in Google, using the links that you received from other blogs.
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Neat and clean UI with good UX.
The most important thing and feature of Google search console are that it is so dumb and beginner-friendly I would not hesitate to say that I got hooked with this tool.
The user interface is so neat, clean, and in the proper order that it has made me get hooked with the tool for sure.
Compared to the old search console, the new one which we are talking about is simply gold and great.
You don’t have to click through many different settings and buttons to filter and find the data,
You can get it within a few clicks and it is so user friendly that if you start using this tool,
I bet you will get hooked with it along with the data you would receive and UI and UX are like the cherry on the cake.
You can look at some most important metrics of your website like,
- Clicks.
- Impressions.
- CTR and average position.
Right from the home page of the tool instead of clicking-through different sections of the tool.
It makes the tool so awesome and user friendly that you don’t have to go deep and inside the tool to get the data or keep on switching to different things to get the data.
Here is the image,
You can find amazing features right from the left bar of the tool you can get amazing features right there.
Here is an image,
Overall if I would like to rate the UI and UX that the new search console has then it would be 5/5 for sure as it is that good of a thing.
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Easy identification of issues with your website.
Another great thing about Google search console is the ability to find and identify issues with your website is better now.
Here is a list of a few things that you can do you easily with the search console.
- You can find and fix issues like crawl errors on your website.
- You can find and fix site loading issues.
- You can find and fix security issues with your websites like malware and hacks.
- You can find and fix website indexation issues and request reindexing to google.
- You can find and fix issues with mobile usability and amp issues of the website.
- You can find and fix or remove certain URLs and blogs from your website or request for no-indexation.
- You can find and fix errors and issues with structured data.
There are a lot of things you can do using the Google search console for your website and the best thing is it is free to use.
This tool is officially created and recommended by Google and it is free to use for anyone who owns a Website.
You don’t have to pay money to access the data which the tool offers.
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You can drive more traffic to your website using the tool.
With the amount of data that you get with the Google search console, you can stop producing new content and analyze the existing content on your blog in this tool, and,
Drive more traffic to your website with the existing number of blogs that you already published on your blog.
Here is a list of few things that you can do to improve your website traffic without adding new content.
- You can find keywords and queries that have a high click-through rate, look at the other keywords that your blog ranks for apart from your main keyword, and rank high for additional keywords updating your content better.
- You can find keywords that have a bad average position to promote those blogs, build some backlinks to them, or internal link it to the blogs that have gained the most backlinks to pass link juice and drive more traffic.
- You can find keywords and blogs with low CTR, find out the reason which could be because of not matching search intent or low-quality content, improve such content or delete the blog for better UX or consolidate it with other blogs.
It’s better to have to work on blogs that already drive traffic to your website through search engines than creating new content for more traffic which is a way more time-consuming process.
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Overall the tool can save a lot of your time and resources.
This is one of the best tools for bloggers and it is for a reason.
This tool overall saves a lot of your time and resources as a blogger and content creator.
Instead of investing in premium tools put your time into this tool and it can be a gold mine for you.
Here are the top ways this tool can save your resources.
- You can avoid keyword cannibalization issues by looking at the common pages that rank for similar keywords in the performance of the keywords report.
- Look at the backlinks and anchor text pointing to your website from external websites and disavow bad links to avoid Google penalty or improve internal linking to boost rankings.
- Work on keywords that are bringing high CTR to drive even more traffic instead of creating a new piece of content.
- Work on your branded keywords improving the CTR and authority of your blog.
- Compare your website performance on a timely basis to check if you are doing any mistakes.
With that said,
let’s consider having a look at the cons of using the new search console of Google.
Cons of using Google search console.
Let’s learn the cons or disadvantages of using the google search console.
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You can’t submit an HTML sitemap.
The problems we have with the Google search console are very few.
One of those problems include,
Not being able to submit HTML sitemap to search console.
For your kind information sitemap is a list of pages that are there within a website or a domain.
Html sitemaps help your website stay interconnected with each other by improving the internal links of your website,
Improving the site structure benefiting the user experience and passing the authority and link juice.
Unfortunately, you cannot submit an HTML sitemap in the Google search console.
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Errors can keep repeating and not get updated.
Another issue I have with the new Google search console is that errors can keep on repeating even after fixing them for validating the errors on the website.
I have seen many webmasters talking about the thing that the new search console is not up to date regarding the errors that show in the tool.
Errors keep on repeating in your notifications of the tool even after fixing them along back ago as they don’t get updated frequently which can be pretty disturbing.
If not the other case would be that,
Errors that the tool identifies are not that specific and clear or too technical which being a beginner probably would not understand the error.
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Sometimes the average position is inaccurate.
Here is the image of it,
The average position feature that you have in the performance section of the tool.
The feature can be sometimes inaccurate showing, not true data or results.
I have many keywords that are ranking high on the search engine but still,
They have a bad average ranking position in the tool compared to how and where Google is ranking the keyword at that moment.
Another issue we have is,
The data gets updated slowly and you can’t see how many clicks for the traffic you have received to your website on the exact day in the tool,
You will have to wait for a couple of days to receive the data of clicks and impressions you received to that blog in the new search console tool which means you don’t have real-time data access with the tool.
Overall the tool is quite new, being released a couple of years back in January 2018.
There are lots of features that are getting included in the new tool.
There are lots of features that are still in the beta stage, which are getting developed.
Google is constantly updating the tool,
We have seen some major features of the tool to be temporarily disabled like the request indexing feature for updating the tool for better performance and output for webmasters.
Google has enabled the option of taking the feedback from the users by,
Having a feature of submitting feedback in the tool is good for both those who use it and for Google to improve it for the better of usage.
Overall the tool is constantly getting updated and a great tool for bloggers in 2021.
Ending remarks.
There you go I have answered everything related to the pros and cons of using the Google search console.
Do comment on what do you think about the blog in the comment section below.
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Read my other blogs,
- Advantages and disadvantages of Google search engine.
- Is SEO worth it?
- Pros and cons of search engine marketing.
I will catch you next time,
Till then,
Keep learning and keep growing.