Google Search Console is an invaluable free tool for monitoring and improving your site’s SEO and search performance. Google frequently rolls out updates to Search Console with new reports, data, and functionality.
Knowing these new features allows you to take full advantage of everything Search Console has to offer. Below are some of the most useful recent additions to be aware of:
Enhanced Search Analytics Report
An improved version of the old Search Analytics report provides more insightful stats on your site’s search performance:
- Click and impression data by keyword, country and device.
- Metrics on position distribution, CTR and average rank.
- Search type filters for web, image and video search.
- Comparison of your performance vs overall vertical averages.
The enhanced report offers a clearer picture of keyword success and opportunities.
Specific Content Feedback
Within the Index Coverage report, Google may now provide feedback on individual pages that need improvements to be indexed properly:
- Clarify if the content is in English or primarily image-based.
- Make text more readable through HTML formatting.
- Add more original text content to pages with thin or boilerplate content.
- Fix mobile usability issues affecting indexing like small text or links.
Specific optimization suggestions help resolve discoverability issues.
Links Report
A dedicated Links report provides insights into external sites linking to your domain:
- Number of unique linking root domains.
- Links by type – follow vs nofollow, redirected, etc.
- Linking page authority distribution.
- Geographic summary of linking domains.
The links data powers SEO visibility, so these added insights are extremely helpful.
Core Web Vitals Metrics
Core Web Vitals measure key user experience metrics weighted by Google’s ranking algorithms:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – loading performance
- First Input Delay (FID) – responsiveness
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – visual stability
Search Console now displays your URLs’ metrics in these critical categories and identifies issues to fix.
Product Structured Data Insights
For ecommerce sites using product schema markup, you can now see:
- Product Rich Results validations – fix errors.
- Most clicked products in SERPs – optimize pages driving clicks.
- Your products appearing in image search results.
Leverage this data to improve structured data implementation.
Index Coverage by Page Type
The Index Coverage report can break down your site’s indexed URLs by page type:
- Product pages
- Category pages
- Article pages
- Homepage
See which sections may have indexing gaps limiting their visibility.
Page Experience Segments
Google will begin grouping URLs by page experience factors with good, needs improvement, and poor designations. This helps you quickly identify problems impacting rankings on key pages.
Visual URL Inspection
Now you can click into crawl stats for individual URLs to see a screenshot of how Googlebot sees the page, text content, links, images and markup. Extremely useful for identifying issues.
Better Insights for Hard to Reach Pages
For URLs requiring complex interactions to access like contact forms or multi-step checkouts, Search Console provides details on whether Googlebot can successfully reach and render each URL.
Streamlined Filters
Simplified filters, preset date ranges, and saved filter combinations make it easier to segment your critical SEO data.
Smarter Recommendations
The new action plan provides smart, personalized recommendations to implement based on your site’s data and performance opportunities.
The Ongoing Value of Search Console
Monitoring Search Console monthly should be a regular SEO best practice. Keeping up with Google’s latest refinements ensures you capitalize on the full potential of the platform.
Frequent checks allow you to:
- Diagnose critical errors like hacked pages.
- See new pages indexed and impression growth.
- Discover high-performing keywords.
- Identity site speed problems.
- Be alerted to potential security threats.
- Track crawling inconsistencies.
- Check for index coverage gaps.
- Monitor clicks and CTR by market.
- Implement Google recommendations.
Search Console intelligence informs an agile SEO strategy responsive to constant SERP shifts. Tap into all the actionable data Google provides through this free essential tool.