What is Google Search Console?

In today’s competitive market, SEO is more important than ever. Search engines serve millions of users per day looking for answers to their questions or for solutions to their problems. If you have a website, blog, or online store, SEO can help your business grow and meet the business objectives.

Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor and maintain your site’s presence in Google Search results.

You don’t have to sign up for Search Console for your site to be included in Google’s search results, but doing so can help you understand how Google views your site and optimize its performance in search results.

Google announced it has added a new report to help publishers learn more about how searchers are finding their site through the Google Discover feature. Google said it is “adding a new report in Google Search Console to share relevant statistics” regarding Google discover.

If your website gets a lot of traffic from Google Discover you may see a new report in the Google Search Console to help you analyze that data.

What is Google Discover? 

To enumerate, Google Discover is the new name for Google Feed and shows you topics and news items around items that interest you.

With Google Discover, you can get information about your interests, like your favorite sports team or news site, without searching for them.

Discover report

The Discover report in Google Search Console will answer the following questions:

• How often is my site shown in users’ Discover? How large is my traffic?
• Which pieces of content perform well in Discover?
• How does my content perform differently in Discover compared to traditional search results?

Where can I see this report?

Google said this report is available in the new Google Search Console for “websites that have accumulated meaningful visibility in Discover.”

The data is going back to March 2019 and will continue to grow from there.

AMP Storie’s data

Google also said you can see the AMP Stories specific data in these reports.

Signs this was coming

Earlier this week we saw signs this was coming. And I suspect most SEOs, webmasters, and developers are happy that we are going to see more visibility into Google Discover performance.

Why use Google Search Console?

A Google help document explains “The Performance report for Discover shows important metrics about how your site performs in Discover.

This report will only be visible if your property has reached a minimum threshold of impressions in Discover.” You can learn more over here.

In that case, the more you understand how traffic from Google is coming to your site, the better you can tailor your marketing efforts going forward.

By understanding your Android app is bringing in Y amount of traffic, and the Google Discover feed is bringing in X amount of traffic, you can better leverage your marketing and development resources.

Specifically, in a smarter and more informed manner. Below are more tangible benefits;

Monitor your site’s performance in Google Search results:

• Make sure that Google can access your content
• Submit new content for crawling and remove content you don’t want to be shown in search results
• Create and monitor the content that delivers visually engaging search results
• Maintain your site with minimal disruption to search performance
• Monitor and resolve malware or spam issues so your site stays clean

Discover how Google Search—and the world—see your site;

• Which queries caused your site to appear in search results?
• Did some queries result in more traffic to your site than others?
• Are your product prices, company contact info, or events highlighted in rich search results?
• Which sites are linking to your website?
• Is your mobile site performing well for visitors searching on mobile?

Read and learn more about Who should use the Google Search Console?