Google Search Console: set it up, read it and act on Google’s own data

What Search Console is for

“Google Search Console” is searched 135,000 times a month in France, “search console” 49,500 times. Google describes it as a free service to monitor and maintain a site’s presence in its results, and to troubleshoot the problems that come up. It adds that you do not need to sign up to appear in Google: the tool is there to show you what Google sees.

In practice, its reports let you:

• confirm that Google finds and crawls your site;
• see the searches that show your pages, how many times they are seen and clicked, and at what position;
• spot pages that are not indexed, learn why, and ask for a new crawl once they are fixed;
• receive email alerts about indexing, spam or security;
• see which sites link to yours.

What it does not measure: what visitors do once they are on the site (enquiries, purchases). That is the job of Google Analytics or an equivalent tool; the two complement each other.

Setting up Search Console: property, verification, sitemap

Setup takes a quarter of an hour if you have access to the domain name or to the home page code. The important choice is the type of property:

1. 1
   Domain property: it covers the whole domain (example.com), with or without www, over http and https, and every subdomain. It is verified with a DNS record at your registrar. It is the best choice for a small business.
2. 2
   URL-prefix property: it covers only the addresses that start exactly with the prefix given, protocol included (https://www.example.com/). Useful to track a section separately, or if you have no access to the DNS.
3. 3
   Verification: depending on the type, an HTML file to upload, a tag in the home page, a Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager code already in place, or a DNS record. On WordPress, Wix or Shopify, the platform often offers its own method or a plugin.
4. 4
   Sitemap: submit the address of your sitemap in the Sitemaps report. Google says it finds your pages without this step, but that submitting can speed up the discovery of the site.
5. 5
   Patience: Google warns that it can take a week before data for a newly added site appears.

Reading the Performance report: four numbers

The Performance report is the one you will open most. By default, it shows the last 3 months of Google Search. Its four metrics have a precise definition:

• Clicks: the number of times someone clicked through to your site from Google’s results.
• Impressions: the number of times a link to your site was seen (or potentially seen) in the results. A link at the bottom of a results page counts; a link in a carousel that was not scrolled does not.
• CTR (click-through rate): clicks divided by impressions.
• Average position: the position of your site’s highest-ranking result, averaged over all the searches where it appeared.

The tabs below the chart group the data by query, page, country, device, search appearance or date. The most useful combination for a small business: filter on one page, then read the queries that show it.

Three reading precautions, all documented by Google. Data usually arrives within two or three days, and the last few days are provisional. Tables stop at 1,000 rows. And rare queries are hidden to protect privacy: on our sites, the query is visible for only 7% of clicks, the rest being searches too rare to be shown.

Links shown in Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode are counted in this same report, under the “Web” search type: an AI Overview takes a single position, shared by all its links.

Indexing: knowing which pages Google keeps, and why

The Page indexing report lists the indexed pages and the ones Google has left out, with the reason: page set to noindex, redirect, duplicate of another page, crawled but not indexed. Unlike most reports, which work on a sample, it gives complete totals, with at most 1,000 URLs listed.

The URL Inspection tool runs the same diagnosis for a single address: indexing status, canonical page chosen by Google, live test, and a button to request indexing.

1. 1
   Fix the cause first (a forgotten noindex tag, a blocked page, content that is too thin or duplicated).
2. 2
   Inspect the URL and run the live test to check that Google sees the fixed version.
3. 3
   Request indexing for important pages only: Google points out that each property has a daily quota and that repeating the request does not speed anything up.
4. 4
   For a problem affecting many pages, click “Validate fix”: validation usually takes about two weeks, sometimes much longer.

What to look at every month

Google says there is no need to log in every day: important problems arrive by email. It suggests a visit about once a month, or after each change to the site. Here is the routine we follow on our own sites:

1. 1
   Pages in positions 11 to 20: filter the Performance report by position. These are the pages Google already judges close to page one; improving them pays off faster than creating new ones.
2. 2
   Pages seen but rarely clicked: many impressions, a low CTR. Rewrite the title and description so they answer the query that shows them better.
3. 3
   New pages: inspect them one by one and check that they are indexed in the days that follow.
4. 4
   Sudden drop: compare the period with the previous one, page by page, before touching anything.
5. 5
   Manual actions and security: a glance is enough, the report should stay empty.

Links, and why the numbers differ from Google Analytics

The Links report shows the sites that link to you most, your most linked pages and the text of those links. It is a sample, not a complete list, and it does not say whether a link is nofollow.

Search Console figures never match Google Analytics figures exactly, and that is normal. Google gives the reasons: Search Console counts clicks in the results, the analytics tool counts visits to the site; the first removes duplicates and bots, the second only sees visitors whose browser runs its code (and, in Europe, who accept measurement); Search Console counts days in California time.