Google Search Console is a free tool Google gives to site owners. It shows how many times your site appeared in Google searches, how many people clicked, which searches found you and whether Google sees a problem on your site.
In short, it answers “how is my site doing on Google?” with Google’s own data rather than a guess.
Why it matters
- You cannot improve what you do not measure. This is where you see whether a change you made worked.
- You catch problems early. If a page drops out of Google or breaks on phones, Search Console warns you.
- You learn your customers’ words. Seeing the words people use to find you tells you what to write on your site.
How to set it up
- Go to search.google.com/search-console and sign in with your Google account.
- Choose Add property. You get two options:
- Domain: Tracks every version of your domain together (with and without www, http and https). You add a TXT record to your domain’s DNS settings. This is the recommended route.
- URL prefix: Tracks only the exact address you enter. You verify it by adding a file or a tag to the site.
- When verification is done, open Sitemaps and submit your sitemap address (on most sites
sitemap.xmlorsitemap-index.xml).
The first data usually appears within a few days.
Which figures to look at
The Performance report has four figures:
- Total impressions: How many times your site appeared in search results. It counts even if nobody clicked.
- Total clicks: How many times people clicked through to your site.
- Average CTR (click-through rate): What share of impressions turned into clicks.
- Average position: Where you appeared in the results, on average.
For a business owner the two most important figures are impressions and clicks. Rising impressions mean Google shows you in more searches; rising clicks mean that visibility is turning into visitors.
In the same report, the Queries tab lists the searches that found you. If a search like “carpet cleaning prices near me” keeps appearing but your site has no prices, you know what to do next.
Other useful sections
- Pages: Which pages are on Google, and why some were not added.
- URL Inspection: Checks a single page’s status on Google; the Request indexing button for a new page is here.
- Core Web Vitals: How fast your site loads for real visitors.
- Manual actions: If Google has taken action against your site for spam, it says so here. Normally it should be empty.
A few things to know
- The data usually runs two to three days behind.
- Search Console keeps up to 16 months of history. If you want older data, download the reports regularly.
- Average position is the average across all searches; it does not show your rank for any single search.
How we use it
For customers on the Visibility and Growth plans, we connect their sites to Search Console ourselves. Impressions, clicks and the searches that found you reach your own panel every Monday and Thursday, and we send a summary to your WhatsApp every week. Our 6-month visibility guarantee is based on this data too: we compare the impressions and clicks of the first month with the sixth.
If your site does not show up on Google at all, start with the checks in this article.