Google Search Console for founders: the only 4 things worth looking at

Google Search Console is free, it comes straight from Google, and it tells you how people find your site in search. It's also full of reports, charts and warnings that make it look far more complicated than it needs to be.

If you run a small business and SEO is one of twenty jobs on your list, you don't need most of it. You need four things. Think of this as Google Search Console for beginners who have a business to run: what the four things are, how to read them, and what to do with what you find.

If you haven't set up Search Console yet, start at search.google.com/search-console, add your site, and verify it. The "Domain" property type covers every version of your site at once (with and without "www", and http and https), which saves confusion later.

1. The Performance report: are people finding you?

This is the report you'll use most. Open Performance, then Search results.

At the top you'll see four numbers:

• Total clicks: how many times someone clicked through to your site from Google.
• Total impressions: how many times a link to your site appeared in someone's results.
• Average CTR: clicks divided by impressions.
• Average position: roughly where you appear in the results. Lower is better. Position 1 is the top.

Google's help page on these metrics has the exact definitions. The one to be careful with is average position. It's an average across every search where you appeared, so a single number can hide a lot of movement.

What to look for: the trend, not the day-to-day wiggles. Set the date range to the last 3 months and look at the shape of the clicks line. Is it going up, flat or down? That's your headline.

What to ignore for now: the exact CTR percentage, and any single day's spike or dip. Search data is noisy, and weekends and holidays often look quieter.

2. Queries versus pages: what people search, and where they land

Below the chart are tabs. The two that matter most are Queries and Pages.

• Queries shows the words people typed into Google before seeing your site.
• Pages shows which of your pages appeared.

They answer different questions. Queries tell you what people want. Pages tell you which parts of your site are doing the work.

The useful trick is combining them. Click any query in the table and Search Console filters the whole report to that query. Switch to the Pages tab and you'll see which page ranks for it. Do it the other way round, clicking a page and switching to Queries, and you'll see every search that page shows up for.

What to look for:

• Queries with lots of impressions and few clicks. People are seeing you and choosing someone else. There's a whole guide on impressions but no clicks and how to fix them.
• Queries that describe exactly what you sell. These are the ones worth protecting and improving.
• Pages you expected to see that aren't there at all. That's a hint for the next section.

A note on missing searches: Google leaves some queries out of the table to protect people's privacy, as explained in its guide to performance data. So your query list won't add up to your total clicks. That's normal.

3. Indexing: can Google actually show your pages?

A page can only appear in search if Google has indexed it, meaning it has crawled the page and decided to keep it. Open Indexing, then Pages.

You'll see two numbers: Indexed and Not indexed, plus a list of reasons pages weren't indexed.

Don't panic at the "not indexed" count. Every site has pages that shouldn't be in search, such as login pages, duplicate versions of URLs, and old pages that redirect somewhere else. What matters is whether pages you care about are on that list.

What to look for:

• Click each reason and scan the example URLs. Are any of them important pages, like a product page or your pricing page?
• Watch for Excluded by 'noindex' tag on pages you want found. This often happens by accident after a website change.
• Crawled, currently not indexed means Google looked at the page and chose not to include it for now. Usually the fix is making the page more useful or more clearly different from your other pages.

To check a single page, paste its address into the URL Inspection bar at the top of Search Console. It tells you whether that page is indexed and, if not, why.

This is also the first place to look when a search term suddenly stops showing up. There's a full checklist for that in why a keyword disappeared from Search Console.

4. Sitemaps: tell Google what exists

A sitemap is a file that lists the pages on your site. Most website builders and platforms create one automatically, often at an address like yoursite.com/sitemap.xml.

Open Indexing, then Sitemaps. If nothing is listed, add your sitemap's address and submit it.

What to look for:

• Status: Success. Good.
• Couldn't fetch or errors. Check the address is right by opening it in your browser.
• Discovered pages. Roughly matches the number of pages you expect? If your site has 40 pages and the sitemap lists 3, something is wrong with how it's generated.

You only need to submit a sitemap once. After that, Google checks it on its own.

A worked example: a first 20-minute session

Say you run a small dog grooming business in Leeds and you've just set up Search Console. Here's a sensible first session.

1. Performance, last 3 months. Clicks are slowly rising. Good.
2. Queries tab. The top query by impressions is "dog grooming prices leeds", with 900 impressions, 12 clicks and an average position of 6.8.
3. Click that query, then the Pages tab. The page ranking is your homepage, which doesn't list prices.
4. Indexing, Pages. You spot your "Prices" page under Excluded by 'noindex' tag. Your website builder had it set to hidden.
5. Fix: make the prices page visible to search, check it in URL Inspection, and click Request indexing. Add a link to it from your homepage.
6. Sitemaps. Your sitemap was never submitted. You add it.

Twenty minutes, and you've found the reason a high-intent search was sending people to the wrong page.

What you can safely ignore at the start

• Links, Core Web Vitals and Enhancements. Useful later, but rarely the reason a small site isn't getting traffic.
• Every email Search Console sends you. Read them, but most are informational. The ones about manual actions or security issues are the exceptions, and they're rare.
• Daily changes. Look at months, not days.

How often to check

Once a month is enough for most small businesses. Open the Performance report, compare the last 28 days with the period before, scan the Queries tab for anything that jumped or dropped, and glance at Indexing for new problems.

If even that monthly check keeps slipping down your list, Sense Console connects to your Search Console data, compares the two periods for you, and ranks the search opportunities worth acting on first.