It used to be called Google WebMaster Tools, and it was renamed to Google Search Console in late 2023. Google Search Console is free and provided by Google to help website owners, SEO marketers, and developers monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot their site’s presence in Google Search results. It offers insights into how a website is performing on google, identifies issues that might affect rankings, and provides data to optimize content for better visibility.
What Keywords People Use: See what search terms people type on Google that lead them to your website.
Page Indexing: Check if your pages are indexed and visible on Google.
Crawling Issues: Find out if Google can access your pages or if there are errors like “404 Page Not Found.”
Site Performance: Learn how often people click on your site from search results and how well your pages rank.
Mobile Usability: Ensure your site works well on mobile devices.
Connecting Google Search Console (GSC) with Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) is not required. Still, it can be beneficial if you want to create custom visual reports of your website’s search performance.
For that reason, we use the below Chrome extensions in GrowthRocks. They are nice extensions, adding up a lot of functionality.
* Advanced GSC Visualizer
* Agital – GSC Calculations
Having Google Search Console (GSC) for your website is not mandatory, but it is highly recommended if you care about your site’s visibility on Google Search.
Integrating Google Search Console (GSC) with Google Analytics (GA) is not mandatory, but it can be very beneficial for gaining deeper insights into your website’s performance. If you care about analysing your organic traffic (and you should) that’s a must.