New Google Search Console: Is It Better for SEO results in 2019?

After being tested for a year, the new version of Google Search Console is out of beta. Google announced this recently on its Webmaster Central blog. Over a span of year, the search engine giant has invited users’ feedbacks, and based on them, it has been migrating features from its classic search console.

Google has dropped of the word “beta” from the top menu bar, and has grouped together some of the features on the left sidebar and added new features and options in the new Google Search Console.

 “We are graduating the new search console out of beta With this graduation we are also launching the Manual Actions report and a “Test Live” capability to the recently launched URL inspection tool, which are joining a stream of reports and features we launched in the new Search Console over the past few months,” Google revealed this on its webmaster central blog page.

The new Search Console is built by developing most actionable insights and creating an interaction model. This new version of the Search Console is intended to help find issues that impact the performance of a website and fix them quickly. The new version also comes with ability to share reports within an organization in order to simplify internal collaboration.

What New Version Gives You?

Google has always wanted to make its products easily accessible and more helpful to users. And that you can see with its new Search Console that has tools like URL Inspection  with “live test” capability, key reports, and performance report that play a great role in Search Engine Optimization.

The new version of Search Console provides:

More Data:

• The accurate view of your website content in the Index Coverage report.
• Search Analytics data of 16 months in the Performance report.
• Details on links pointing to your site and within your site in the Links report.
• An option to retrieve crawling, indexing, and serving information for any URL directly from the Google index

Alerts on Issues and fixes required:

Now with new version, you can:

• Get automatic alerts and find out pages that are by Crawling, Indexing, AMP, Mobile Usability, Recipes, or Job posting issues.
• Get reports that show the HTML code where a fix seems necessary (if applicable).
• Share information quickly with all relevant people in your organization to help fix the issues in no time.
•  Notify Google about fixed issues for  review  and validation

Simplified sitemaps and account settings management:

• You can let Google know how your site is structured by submitting sitemaps
• You can also submit individual URLs for indexing
• And add new sites to your account, invite and manage users.

What Is Out Of Beta?

The new Search Console is rebuilt from the ground level with advanced insights and an interaction model to allow you find the issues and get them fixed quickly. The new version is also packed with the features such as ability to share reports within a group, and this helps simplify the collaboration within an organization.

From search performance, index coverage, amp status, and job posting reports, new Search Console has a stream of features that will have a huge impact on the SEO strategy in 2019.

Here is a list of most actionable tools and the kind of impact they have on the structure of SEO services.

Search Performance:

The old Search Console provides data of only three months, and this has been a common concern of most marketers. If you have not been happy with this, you are, for sure, going to love the new search console’s search performance report that will provide you 16 months of data which will help you study the longer term trends and make year over year comparisons. 

Understanding longer terms trends makes keyword analysis easy and more effective. This means the search performance report in the new console is going to be great tool for marketers and SEO services that want to help their clients rank for the keywords relevant to their business.

Index Coverage:

One of the most crucial features with the new console, index coverage report gives you an insight into how the search engine indexes URLs of your website. It provides you details of URLs correctly indexed, alerts on potential issues, and reasons for your URLs not being indexed.

The advanced tracking functionality that the console uses to build report provides you alerts when new issues are found and suggests you the best solutions to fix them.

It is easy to use the feature. All you need to do is just drill into the certain issue. You will have a sample of URLs from your site. As you click the error URLs, you have the page details that include links to tools you will need to fix the error.

As the new console allows you to share the information with many people in a group, the right people get the information about the current status. And thus you can solve the issues quickly. You can also tell the Google about errors that have been fixed.

This feature best works with websites having sitemaps that help search engine to identify your pages and index them accordingly.

Search Enhancements:

The new Search Console is going to be of a great help for SEO. It has the features that help you with search enhancements. The new console is good for job listing sites. The console also helps enhance automated mobile pages (AMP).

With search enhancement reports, you get the details on specific errors and warnings that the search engine has spotted for these topics. Also, the report provides faster feedback so you can fix the issues quickly. You can run several tests at the same time and get the result by clicking the “validate fix button”. If your pages fail the test, you are given a quick notification about this. Or sometimes, the console will do the same once again.

Manual Actions Report:

The new console aims to ensure you do not miss any critical alerts for your site. Manual actions and security issues are shown on the Overview Page in the console. The Manual actions have got easier in the new console. You can easily review the details for any pending Manual Action. And if necessary, you can file a pending request.

URL Inspection – Live mode and request indexing

 This tool has been launched a few months ago. But now it has been added with feature such as “live mode” that enables you to run the inspection on the live version of the page. With this, you can debug and fix issues in a live page or conform whether the reported issues are still there on the page. If the issues are fixed, you can ask Google to recrawl and index the page.

To Wind Up

The new Google Search Console which is now out of beta has incorporated tools that work wonders for marketers and are easy to use. But it does still miss out several tools from the old version.  So rather than It is better completely depending on any one version, it is better to switch between the new and old consoles.