Google Search Console is a free tool that shows how Google sees your website. It tells you which searches you appear for, which pages Google has included, and whether anything is stopping you being found. If you only use one SEO tool, make it this one.
Setting it up
- Go to Google Search Console and sign in with a Google account you'll keep long term, ideally a business account rather than a personal one.
- Choose a Domain property and enter your domain, such as example.com. This covers every version of your site: with and without www, and http and https.
- Verify it by adding the TXT record Google gives you at your domain or DNS provider. If that's tricky, a URL-prefix property can be verified with a tag or file on your website instead.
- Submit your sitemap, usually at /sitemap.xml, under Sitemaps.
- Add anyone who helps with your website or marketing under Settings → Users and permissions, rather than sharing your login.
Data starts collecting from the day you verify, so set it up as early as you can.
The reports that matter
Performance
The most useful report. It shows:
- Clicks: how often people clicked through to your site from Google.
- Impressions: how often your site was shown in results.
- CTR (click-through rate): clicks divided by impressions.
- Average position: roughly where you appeared. It's an average across many searches and locations, so treat it as a trend rather than an exact ranking.
Switch between Queries (the searches) and Pages to see which searches bring people to which pages. You can filter by country, which is useful if you serve both the UK and Ireland, and by device.
Pages (indexing)
Shows which pages Google has included in its index and why others aren't. Common statuses:
- Crawled – currently not indexed: Google saw the page but chose not to include it. Often a sign the page is thin or similar to another.
- Discovered – currently not indexed: Google knows about the page but hasn't crawled it yet.
- Duplicate without user-selected canonical: Google sees the page as a copy of another.
- Excluded by 'noindex' tag: the page is telling Google not to index it. Fine for things like thank-you pages, a problem if it's a service page.
Not every page needs to be indexed. Focus on your important ones.
URL Inspection
Enter any page address to see whether it's indexed, when Google last crawled it, and any problems. After improving an important page, you can use Request indexing to ask Google to look again.
Experience: Core Web Vitals and HTTPS
Shows whether real visitors find your pages fast and stable, on mobile and desktop, and whether pages load securely over HTTPS.
Links
Shows which sites link to you and which of your pages are linked most, both from other sites and within your own.
Manual actions and Security issues
If Google has taken action against your site for breaking its spam policies, or found a security problem such as hacking, it appears here. Ideally both say "No issues detected".
A 15-minute monthly routine
- Performance, last 3 months vs previous: are clicks and impressions going up?
- Top queries: are these the searches you want to be found for? Anything surprising?
- Quick wins: filter queries or pages with an average position between about 8 and 20. These are close to page one. Improve those pages: answer the search more fully, improve the title and add internal links.
- Low CTR, high impressions: pages shown often but rarely clicked may need a clearer title and description.
- Pages report: are any important pages not indexed? Find out why.
- Manual actions and security: quick check that both are clear.
- Note what you changed, so next month you can see what worked.
Also set up Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing Webmaster Tools works much like Search Console, and you can import your site from Search Console in a couple of minutes. It's worth doing, because Bing's index is also used by other search and AI tools. See how to get into AI Overviews and ChatGPT.
Related reading: the technical SEO checklist, how long SEO takes to work and the local SEO checklist.
If you'd like someone to keep an eye on this every month and act on it, our SEO service includes Search Console monitoring and plain-English monthly reports.
