Plug Your Site into Google Search Console.

Google Search Console (GSC) is a free service that helps website owners, digital marketers, site administrators, and web developers monitor, maintain and troubleshoot their Google Search results presence.

While you don’t need to sign up for GSC for your website to be indexed by Google, it is highly recommended that you sign up so you can understand and optimise your Google ranking. 

Google Search Console was formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, and like the old tool, the new GSC allows you to measure your site's performance, web traffic, featured snippets, mobile performance and a whole range of other important metrics.

Using Google Search Console can help you keep track of your website performance in Google Search results. Here are the specific benefits of using Google Search Console: 

• Ensure that Google spiders are crawling your content 
• Submit new content that you want Google to index
• Eliminate content you don’t want to be indexed by Google 
• Develop and keep track of content, which delivers visually engaging search results (rich snippets)
• Maintain your website without disrupting your Google search performance
• Detect and take action on spam or malware issues so your website stays clean 

Using GSC can also help you discover how Google sees your website and access important data insights, such as specific queries that caused your website to appear in Google search results, or the list of websites that are linking back to your website.

Google Spiders will still crawl your website and Google will still index your pages even if you don’t sign up or regularly use Google Search Console. 

But if you are a website owner who is really interested in improving your website performance, you should definitely use this tool. 

Even if you do not use GSC yourself because you are planning to hire someone or outsource the job, you should still be aware of it, become familiar with the process, and understand the available features. 

Responsible site administrators should also use GSC to make sure that their websites are in good health. The tool can help site admins monitor errors and take immediate action. 

If you don’t have the time or the skillset to use Google Search Console, you may need to outsource this important job to an SEO agency.

Here are more specific signs that it’s time to work with an agency:  

• When you see your competitors ranking higher than you in Google's search results
• When you have tried everything and you still don’t see any meaningful results 
• When your website traffic stays the same and you want more 
• When you have a marketing budget and you need professional help so you can maximise your returns 
• When you don’t want to hire an in-house expert