Google Search Console guide for business owners

What Search Console is

Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that shows how your site performs in Google Search. It tells you which searches show your pages, how often people click, which pages are indexed and whether Google has found problems.

It doesn't show everything. It won't tell you exact rankings for every search or what competitors are doing. But it's the closest thing you have to Google's own view of your site.

Own your account

The most important advice in this guide: your business should own its Search Console property. If an agency or web designer set it up, ask to be made an owner. Then add them as a user. If you part ways, you keep the history.

Setting it up

1. Sign in with a Google account the business controls. 2. Add a property. A Domain property covers every version of your site (http, https, www and non-www, subdomains) and is verified through your domain's DNS settings. A URL prefix property covers one exact version and offers more verification options. 3. Verify ownership by following the instructions. 4. Submit your XML sitemap under Sitemaps.

Data starts collecting from the point you add the property, so set it up as early as possible.

The reports worth checking

Performance

The Performance report is where you'll spend most time. It shows:

• Clicks from Google Search.
• Impressions, meaning how often your pages appeared in results someone saw.
• CTR, the percentage of impressions that became clicks.
• Average position.

You can view these by query, page, country, device and date. Useful habits:

• Compare the last three months with the same three months last year.
• Filter by page to see which searches bring visitors to each service page.
• Sort queries by impressions to find searches you appear for but rarely get clicks on.

Page indexing

The Page indexing report shows how many pages are indexed and why others aren't. Some exclusions are normal, such as redirects, duplicates with a proper canonical, or pages you deliberately noindexed. Watch for important pages appearing in the excluded list.

URL Inspection

Paste any URL from your site to see whether it's indexed, when Google last crawled it, which canonical Google chose, and whether there were problems. After updating a page, you can request indexing. That puts it in the queue, but doesn't guarantee when or whether it'll be indexed.

Sitemaps

Shows whether Google could read your sitemap and how many URLs it found.

Core Web Vitals

Groups your pages by real-world speed and stability. Small sites sometimes show "not enough data". That's normal.

Manual actions and Security issues

Both should say no issues. If either shows a problem, it needs attention straight away.

Links

Shows your top linked pages, top linking sites and top internal links. Useful for spotting which pages others value.

Reading the data sensibly

• Data is sampled and delayed. Recent days may change as data fills in.
• Average position is an average. One page might appear first for a few searches and fortieth for many others.
• Some queries are hidden for privacy, so query totals won't match page totals.
• Compare like with like. Seasonal businesses should compare year on year.

Five things to do in your first month

1. Set up the property and submit your sitemap. 2. Check your main pages are indexed using URL Inspection. 3. Look at the top 20 queries and pages to see where your visibility comes from. 4. Find a page with lots of impressions and low CTR, and improve its title. 5. Add your web developer or SEO provider as a user, not an owner.

A worked example

A furniture restorer in York set up Search Console for the first time. Within a fortnight, the Performance report showed her site appeared for "chair re-caning York", a service mentioned only in one line on her services page. It had plenty of impressions but very few clicks.

She created a dedicated page for chair re-caning, with photos of before-and-after work, typical turnaround and price guidance. She linked to it from the services page and the home page. Over the following months, the new page started to take most of the impressions for those searches, and clicks rose.

The opportunity was there all along. Search Console simply made it visible.

Search Console and analytics together

Search Console shows what happens before the click. Analytics shows what happens after. Linking the two in Google Analytics 4 lets you see search queries alongside on-site behaviour. Our GA4 guide explains how.

Questions