What does a Google Search Console Auditor do?
Rather than a standalone job, it is more a task performed by anyone who works in search marketing / SEO. Search console audits tell you what's really going on with your website. They use real data from your website, rather than estimated data from third party tools such as SEMRush / Ahrefs / Sistrix. They do not need to be vague or caveated with exceptions. Here's what these audits generally flag (assuming everything is set up right – if not, see the end).
1. They Find Website Search Health Problems
Is your website slow? Is Google ignoring your pages? The auditor finds out why. They’re the web equivalent of a doctor who gives your site a thorough check-up, identifies the maladies, and sometimes delivers news you don’t want to hear.
For example, sometimes Google refuses to index some pages submitted to them – these pages sit there in a purgatory state, ‘discovered but not indexed’. Here’s an example from a project of ours, BeCivil, which has around 7,500 pages. At first almost all 7,500 pages Google knew of, but it wasn’t particularly interested in putting them into its index. All large(r) sites without a pre-existing profile have this problem when starting out. It is particularly prevalent in e-commerce.
Luckily with some tweaks (and time), you can see that the total number of indexed pages is increasing over time, and unindexed pages is decreasing. This is the sort of thing a GSC audit would flag and make recommendations to improve upon (ie, internal link structure, backlinks, page speed, robots.txt and so forth). All very similar to most technical seo audits.
2. They Review Website Performance Over Time
Are your SEO strategies actually working? A GSC audit will tell you straight from Google (or Bing’s) mouth. Below is the search profile for a new website, Flamenco With Rafael, which is an online flamenco guitar course. In this example we can see that whatever they’re doing (content marketing), it is working – as clicks are increasing over time.
3. They Refine an Existing SEO Strategy
Although this is essentially the same as an SEO agency’s remit, we consider that Search Console Audits are effectively one part of an SEO agency’s role. It’s all SEO. Their role should be to look at what is working and build on that.
One common example that comes to mind is using search console to discover new keywords that were not flagged while doing keyword research using a third party tool:
In the example above, we can see many long-tail keywords (that is, specialised ones) that do not often surface on third party SEO analytics and research tools. Because this data is sourced from Google directly, it is often more valuable than what third party tools can offer. Google is already showing the page to some searchers (hence the impressions), but given the content is not being targeted as part of the content strategy, you have a viable path go to explore with a content writing team...
4. GSC Audits Are Useful in Technical SEO
Technical SEO usually refers to more programmatic and software-based parts of ranking a website in Google’s eyes, appropriate for ‘large’ websites (let’s say over 2,000 pages). Things like crawl budget, page depth, internal linking structure and so on.
While this sits outside of things measured directly by Search Console, often these tasks require looking into Search Console to verify if changes are working.
For example, crawl budget can be improved by speeding up a website, which often takes re-factoring the existing codebase. To measure if a given batch of changes worked, one often uses GSC:
Another example comes up in the world of redirects: if you’ve acquired a different domain, or are redirecting an old domain to a new one, one needs to migrate the old domain to the new one, which takes some thinking about how to sensibly set up redirects. This is outside the scope of this note but I write here because GSC will flag redirects directly on its console.
5. They Ensure Everything Is Set Up Correctly!
Having a GSC audit assumes you’ve set up a search console property to begin with. Even then, they can flag if sitemaps are missing, if certain aspects of a domain are unverified, whether the property is connected to GA4, or the myriad of other minor things that might be applicable (depending on things such as your website’s platform – custom, WordPress, WebFlow etc).
In Conclusion
Google Search Console Auditors are the reality check in an industry often clouded by jargon and false promises. They wade through the data and provide clear, actionable advice. No fluff, no pretense – just the facts and the strategies you need to improve your website's performance in search rankings. In the digital world, they’re the equivalent of a splash of cold water to the face - shocking, but refreshingly effective.
We're happy to help with GSC audits if you're interested –just get in touch.
