Search Console is a free tool from Google developed to monitor and manage the quality of your store URLs indexed in the search mechanism.
Through a simple and intuitive interface, Search Console makes analytical data available for directing strategic actions for all sectors of your ecommerce website.
Search Console provides easy and free access to the following information:
- Top search terms
- Top URLs viewed
- Total indexed URLs
- Total URLs with error
- Tracking statistics
- Store security issues
The update from Webmaster Tools to Search Console focused on expanding the profile of users. It was previously adopted only by Webmasters and search optimization professionals.
Search Console is an excellent tool for entrepreneurs to monitor the positioning and reach of their brands; for ecommerce managers to measure the quality of indexed store content; for Webmasters to check the total URLs indexed and their store’s tracking data; for developers to structure content and optimize the store interface for different devices; and for the marketing team to identify content relevance and new opportunities.
See below all information about Google Search Console for VTEX stores.
Tracking
Search Console provides a list of indexed URLs with tracking errors, main URL parameters, store traceability statistics, robot testing, and new URLs and sitemaps.
- Tracking errors: A list of URLs with tracking errors, segmented by device and type of error. Learn more in Google Search Console Tracking - Tracking Errors.
- Tracking statistics: Details information about Google’s crawler activity in all store contents, such as HTML, CSS, images and JS.
- Search with Google: This feature allows you to simulate how Google searches and indexes your store.
- Robots.txt: Validates the content and structure of your store’s robot.txt file. Learn more in Google Search Console Tracking - robots.txt.
- Sitemaps: Allows you to make your store’s sitemap available and generate a report with the rate of URLs sent vs. URLs indexed.
- URL Parameters: Lists all parameters identified in your store’s URLs and allows you to define what action Google will apply for each parameter. Learn more in Google Search Console Tracking - Sitemap.
Google Index
Through Google Search Console, you can monitor your store's steady increase or sharp drops in the number of indexed URLs, identify the most relevant terms in your content, and remove improperly indexed URLs.
- Index status: Shows the indexation history of your store’s URLs.
- Content keywords: A list containing the main keywords of your store’s content, and their relevance in relation to the whole content of the website.
- Blocked resources: Shows all your store’s URLs that have been blocked from being indexed.
- Remove URLs: Allows you to delete improperly indexed URLs.
Search Traffic
Access reports on how your store is found on Google, with lists of main queries, pages, devices and regions. You can also access the list of internal and external links.
- Search Analytics: Provides metrics such as Clicks, Prints, CTR and Position, which are segmented by Queries, Pages, Countries, Devices, Search Type and Date.
- Links to your website: Shows domains with the greatest number of links directed to your store, store URLs with the highest number of external links, and the contents related to these links.
- Internal links: Shows the store’s URLs with the greatest number of internal links.
- Manual actions: Lists the manual actions required to reverse a possible classification of the store as spam.
- International segmentation: Lists the languages in which your store is available.
- Mobile usability: Shows any usability issues regarding mobile devices.
Search Aspects
This section of Google Search Console groups together functions that enable you to analyze and optimize how your content is displayed in search results, known as snippet.
The snippet is a block of content related to your store's link displayed in the SERP.
- Data marker: Allows you to define the data types rendered on each page of your store to facilitate indexation and classification by crawlers.
- Structured data: Shows the data types defined in your store.
- HTML improvements: Shows the main contents that should be optimized because they are duplicated, too short, too long, or missing.
- Sitelinks: Allows you to demote snippets’ sitelinks.