Google Search Console: the guide for business owners
Google’s free tool that tells you how your website is seen and found. Setup, the reports to check every month and the concrete actions to take from them.
By Léo Chuzel · Published on · 3 min read
If you could only use one tool to track your SEO, it would be this one. Google Search Console is free, provided by Google itself, and it answers the essential questions: which searches you appear for, at what position, how many people click, and which pages have problems. Yet many businesses have never opened it.
Search Console or Google Analytics?
The two are complementary. Google Analytics describes what visitors do once on your website. Search Console describes what happens before: how Google sees your website and how users find it in search results. For SEO, Search Console comes first.
Setting up Search Console
- Go to search.google.com/search-console with a Google account, preferably the company’s.
- Choose a “Domain” property: it covers all versions of your website (with or without www, http or https).
- Verify the property by adding the TXT record provided at your host or domain registrar.
- Submit your sitemap in the dedicated menu.
- Add your provider as a user rather than giving them your password.
The Performance report: your dashboard
It’s the most useful report. It shows four metrics:
- Clicks: the number of visits coming from Google.
- Impressions: the number of times your website appeared in the results.
- CTR: the share of impressions that turn into a click.
- Average position: your average rank across all queries.
Scroll down to the “Queries” tab to see the exact words users typed. You’ll often discover searches you hadn’t thought of, and real ideas for articles or pages.
Three analyses to do every month
- Queries in positions 5 to 20: you’re close to page one, a few optimisations may be enough.
- Pages with lots of impressions but a low CTR: rewrite their title and description to make people want to click.
- Pages declining over three months compared with the previous year: outdated content, a more relevant competitor, a technical problem?
The Pages report: are your pages indexed?
It lists the pages in Google’s index and those excluded from it, with the reason. Not all exclusions are errors: a redirected page or a duplicate page with a canonical are normal. However, if an important service page is marked “Crawled, currently not indexed”, that’s a signal to address. Our article why doesn’t my website show up on Google goes through the common causes.
The URL inspection tool
Paste a page’s address into the search bar at the top: you’ll find out whether it’s indexed and when Google last crawled it, and you can see the page as Google rendered it. It’s invaluable for checking that a JavaScript website is read properly, as we explain in our article on SSR and SEO. After a major change, you can also request re-indexing.
The other useful reports
- Core Web Vitals: your pages’ performance measured with real visitors. See our guide to Core Web Vitals.
- Enhancements: errors in your structured data (breadcrumbs, products, reviews).
- Links: the websites that point to yours and your most linked pages.
- Manual actions and security issues: normally empty. If not, it’s urgent.
A 15-minute monthly routine
Open the Performance report for the last three months, note how clicks have evolved, spot two queries to work on and one page to improve. Glance at the Pages report and the emails sent by Google. That’s it. If you’d rather delegate, our SEO agency in Marseille sends you a clear monthly report, with the actions taken and the results.