Google Search Console 1. Intro
The Google Search Console is a tool to display what Google knows about a website—which pages Google has indexed, which pages are selected by Google users, conversion rates and other statistics.
Summary
The Google Search Console offers all the knowledge you need of how Google sees your site (and, by extension, how other search engines may be indexing a site). When you think about it, Google don’t need to provide this information at all, so good. And it has excellent presentation of data. However, it is sometimes unclear how to interact with the console, and it not always clear that you can get a mine of information from this tool.
Google Search Console vs. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a full website administration system. It can tell you site visits overall, visit rates per page, browsers used, the country of origin of users and so forth. The price for this is a signup procedure, some management, and JavaScript and cookies embedded in the site webpages. Google couldn’t gather this kind of data without that load.
Google Search Console is a much lighter tool that is only part of Google Analytics. It tells you what Google knows about the site. So it is not gathering facts about pages. It’s only looking at which links Google knows about, and when they are used. The Search Console only needs to know that you are the owner of the site, so asks for a logon and verification. It adds no load to website pages or infrastructure.
Which do I use?
Website statistics are not easy to deduce facts from. Despite what you see in blurbs and PR, a site owner has little idea if visits come from robots or humans. And, when a site goes wrong, it can be hard to detect or deduce the issues—why are those URLs returning ‘404 ‐ Not Found’? So most people would like to know as much as they can, so use Google Analytics—it is a hugely popular tool. Further, some people who make websites commercially would like to know their their visit rates—an increase in visit rates may justify work done to the site, or statistics may point to where work is needed.
I’m unusual. For my own reasons I don’t need to know site performance. I need only to know what Google thinks of my site. So I need only the Search Console. Which has it’s advantages—the Search Console is one easy page to use (for all sites), and has much less verification and identification needs—a single logon.