What is it for?
Search Console answers three questions no other tool can settle, because the data comes from Google itself:
- Which queries do I appear on? With the number of impressions, clicks and your average position, query by query.
- Which pages are in Google's index? And above all which ones are not, with the exact reason for the refusal.
- Did something just break? Penalty, crawl problem, failing mobile page: Google emails you when it detects an issue.
Without it, you are flying blind: you see your traffic in your analytics, but not why it goes up or down, nor what Google thinks of your website.
Setup in 10 minutes
- Go to search.google.com/search-console and sign in with a Google account.
- Add a Domain property (it covers www, non-www, http and https all at once).
- Prove the domain is yours by adding the DNS TXT record Google gives you, at your host or registrar. It is a copy-paste in the DNS interface, and validation takes anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours.
- Once validated, submit your sitemap in the Sitemaps menu: the address is usually yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.
Data starts accumulating as soon as validation goes through. Allow two to three weeks to get usable curves.
The Performance report
This is the report to open first every month. It lists every query your website appeared on, with four numbers: impressions, clicks, click-through rate and average position. Two readings are worth your time:
Queries in positions 4 to 10. You are on the first page but not in the top three: this is where the work pays off fastest. Strengthen the page in question, its title tag, its content, its internal linking, and you gain clicks within a few weeks.
Queries with many impressions and few clicks. Google shows you, nobody clicks: your title and description are not compelling. Rewrite them, it is the fix with the best effort-to-result ratio in all of SEO.
The Indexing report
The "Page indexing" report splits your pages in two: indexed and not indexed. The second column is the more interesting one, because every excluded page comes with its reason: "Discovered, currently not indexed", "Crawled, currently not indexed", "Page with redirect", "Blocked by robots.txt", and so on.
The reflex: check that your important pages, the ones that sell, are in the indexed column. A service page missing from the index does not exist commercially. If a key page is excluded, the reason Google gives tells you what to fix, and our article on websites invisible on Google covers the most common causes.
Reading pitfalls
- The average position is an average. Position 8 can mean "always 8th" or "3rd on mobile, 15th on desktop". Filter by device before drawing conclusions.
- Not every page is meant to be indexed. Legal notice, confirmation pages, archives: their exclusion is normal. Only fix what has search value.
- The data runs 2 to 3 days behind. No point checking the effect of a change the next day. SEO is measured in weeks, not hours.