Google Search Console is free, it comes straight from Google, and it shows how your website actually performs in search. Yet most business owners open it once, see a wall of charts and warnings, and never come back.
You don’t need to understand every screen. Five reports cover almost everything a growing business needs to know. This guide explains what each one tells you and what to do with it.
Key takeaways
- The Performance report shows which searches bring people to your site, and where you are close to winning more clicks.
- The Pages report tells you which pages Google can and can’t show in search. Not every “not indexed” page is a problem.
- Sitemaps, Core Web Vitals and Links take a few minutes a month to check, and catch problems before they cost you traffic.
Before you start: two things to know
First, Search Console data is not instant. Reports usually run about two days behind, so don’t panic if yesterday looks empty.
Second, Search Console and Google Analytics measure different things. Search Console shows what happens in Google search: impressions, clicks and positions. Analytics shows what people do on your website after they arrive. The numbers will never match exactly, and that is normal.
1. Performance: where your traffic comes from
This is the report you will use most. It shows four numbers for any date range:
- Total clicks: how many times someone clicked through to your site from Google.
- Total impressions: how many times your site appeared in someone’s results.
- Average CTR: clicks divided by impressions.
- Average position: your average ranking for the searches you appeared in.
Click the Queries tab to see the exact searches people used, and the Pages tab to see which pages they landed on.
What to do with it
Sort queries by impressions and look for terms with many impressions but a low CTR. Google is already showing you for these searches, but people aren’t clicking. Rewriting the page title and meta description to match what the searcher wants is often the quickest SEO win available.
Then look for queries where your average position is between roughly 8 and 20. You are on the edge of page one. Improving the content on the page that ranks, and linking to it from other pages on your site, can be enough to move it up.
Use Compare in the date filter (for example, the last three months against the previous three) to see which pages are growing and which are slipping.
2. Pages: what Google can show in search
The Pages report (under Indexing) splits your URLs into indexed and not indexed. Only indexed pages can appear in Google.
The “Why pages aren’t indexed” table looks alarming, but many reasons are expected:
- Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag: fine, if you meant to hide the page (for example a thank-you page).
- Page with redirect: fine, if the redirect is intentional.
- Alternate page with proper canonical tag: fine; Google is showing the main version instead.
The ones to investigate are important pages listed under “Crawled – currently not indexed”, “Discovered – currently not indexed” or “Not found (404)”. Click a reason to see the affected URLs. If a key service page appears there, it usually needs stronger, more original content and more internal links pointing to it.
The URL Inspection tool
Paste any address from your site into the search bar at the top of Search Console. It tells you whether that page is indexed and when Google last crawled it. After you publish or significantly update an important page, you can click Request indexing to ask Google to look at it again.
3. Sitemaps: help Google find your pages
A sitemap is a list of the pages you want Google to know about. Most SEO plugins create one automatically, often at an address like /sitemap_index.xml.
Submit it once under Sitemaps, then check that the status says Success. If the number of discovered pages is far lower than you expect, something is blocking Google from reading part of your site.
4. Core Web Vitals: real-world speed
This report groups your pages into Good, Needs improvement and Poor based on how fast and stable they are for real visitors, on mobile and desktop separately.
The data comes from real Chrome users, so a small or new site may see “Not enough data”. That’s normal. In that case, test key pages in Google’s PageSpeed Insights instead.
If a group of pages is marked Poor, click it to see which metric is failing. We cover what each metric means and which fixes are worth paying for in our guide to Core Web Vitals.
5. Links: who points to you
The Links report shows your top linking sites, your most linked pages, and your internal links (links between your own pages).
Two quick checks are worth doing:
- Are your most important service pages near the top of the internal links list? If not, link to them from your homepage, your blog posts and related pages.
- Do the external sites linking to you make sense for your business? A handful of relevant, trusted links is worth far more than many random ones.
A 15-minute monthly routine
You don’t need to live inside Search Console. Once a month is enough for most businesses:
- In Performance, compare the last 28 days with the previous period and note the biggest gains and drops.
- Pick two queries with high impressions and low CTR, and improve the titles of the pages that rank for them.
- In Pages, check that none of your key pages have dropped out of the index.
- Confirm your sitemap still shows Success.
- Glance at Core Web Vitals for any new Poor pages.
Done consistently, this small habit catches most problems early and points you to the improvements most likely to bring more customers from search.
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