Get started with Search Console

How you use Search Console depends on your role, your site, and your personal needs. Read the appropriate section to get started.

What is your role?

Just a little time Not much time to manage my site
If you have a website on an automated web hosting platform like Blogger, Wix, or Squarespace, or run a small business and don't have much time to put into your website, you might not need to use Search Console at all.
However, it's still worth learning to manage your presence in search engines by reading the following guides. A little knowledge can go a long way toward helping people find your site. It should take less than half an hour to go through these materials.
 Beginning user (willing to learn)
If you're interested in improving your site's appearance on Google Search, and you're willing to put in a little time learning about search engine optimization (SEO) and Search Console, here is your getting started guide.
You don't need to understand HTML or coding, but you do need to spend some time thinking about how your site is organized and written, and be willing to make some changes to your site. The good news is that a little effort can go a long way in improving your search results.
 

Get started

 

 SEO (advanced user)
If you're ready to spend more time digging into Search Console's reports, learning how Google Search works, and redesigning your site, you can really analyze and customize your site's performance on Google Search. This track assumes that you are familiar with basic SEO practices and terms.
  1. Understand how Google works with your site. There are a lot of things to know about how Google crawls and presents your site content. Start with this guide and learn what you need to know for your specific site.
  2. Browse the list of key tools and reports in Search Console. This list shows the most important tools and reports in Search Console. Be sure you read the full documentation for a tool at least once before you use it; otherwise you might misunderstand some subtle concepts in the tool, which will end up costing you more time and effort in the long run. You can find the full list of reports here.
  3. Learn how impressions, clicks, and position are calculated in Search Console
  4. Take advantage of the online help community, SEO office hours, twitter feed, blog.
 
 Web developer
If you build or manage the website, implement structured data, or generally do most of your work in a code editor, you'll use Search Console for monitoring, testing, and debugging your site code. Here are our recommendations:

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