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Overview

What are SEO Insights?

The SEO Insights term covers a range of SEO-related information that 4SEO can obtain and process for you in order to extract practical data that you can use to improve your results in Google search results.

The Google Search Console is a great source of useful but raw SEO information about how your site performs in search. But this data is hard to use as is. And the Search Console website only provides a small subset of the information actually available.

4SEO does 2 things to provide you with more extensive and more directly usable SEO Insights for your site:

  • it integrates with the Search Console API to obtain a much larger volume of data
  • it processes this data to extract information that's not present in the Search Console website, information that's more directly useable to improve your website

Sample website search results performance chart displayed on 4SEO dashboard

What is the Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a website run by Google that collect information about Search Results and how your website performs in search.

To use it, you only need to create an account on that website and enter the address of the website you want to have search results for. You'll need to prove that you own this website of course - but 4SEO can make this entire process extremely simple.

Once you create your account, Google starts collecting a lot of data and information about how your site performs and behaves in their search results. If you are serious about SEO, and even if you don't plan on using it with 4SEO, you should always connect your website to a Google Search Console account to have access to this information.

Search Console is not Google Analytics

Although both services are provided by Google, are free and gather data about your site, they are very different in how they work:

  • Google Analytics measures what happens on your site: which pages are viewed by visitors, where they come from, which device they use, etc

  • Google Search Console measures what happens on Google website (google.com, google.fr, google.in,...): how often a page from your site is proposed as a response to someone searching on Google, whether your page was shown on page 1 or page 5, what people were searching for when that page of your site was shown as a response, etc

One of the consequences is that you do not have to worry about privacy, cookies banner or consent when using Google Search Console: nothing happens on your site, no Google code or cookie is added to your site. It's only and all about what's happening at google.com.

Also note that you do not need to use Google Analytics to use Google Search Console. You can use any analytics tool you want, or none at all. Google Search Console is a completely separate service.

Connecting 4SEO to your Google Search Console account also allows 4SEO to directly submit your sitemap to Google. See the Sitemaps page for all details.

How to set up and use SEO Insights in 4SEO

There are 3 steps:

  1. Create an account at the Google Search Console - if you don't already have one
  2. Connect 4SEO to your account and add your website: a one-click process entirely done from inside 4SEO
  3. Consult the SEO Insights reports in 4SEO control panel

After adding a website to the Search Console, it will usually take a few days before any actual data becomes available from Google, so please be patient.

What information SEO Insights provide you with?

4SEO's SEO Insights currently build 3 reports - plus a quick search results overview chart displayed on your dashboard and a detailed state of what Google knows about each pages on your site.

Learn more here:

On the Pages page, each URL listed also has a new item in its action menu: Google Status. 4SEO will obtain and display the current state of Google assesment of that page, including:

  • whether Google has indexed the page
  • whether Google has found any issue with the page
  • whether Google has found any issue with the page's content (mobile compatibility for instance or invalid structured data)