Google Search Console: A Practical Guide to Understanding How Google Sees You

Google Search Console is free and it's the only direct source of data on how Google sees your site: which pages it has stored, which searches you appear for, how many clicks you get and which errors it found. If you have a website and don't use it, you're optimizing blind.

Step 1: verify your site

Go to search.google.com/search-console and choose the property type:

• Domain: covers every version (http, https, www, subdomains). It's verified with a TXT record in your DNS. This is the recommended option.
• URL prefix: covers one exact address and offers more verification methods (HTML file, meta tag, Google Analytics).

Step 2: submit your sitemap

In “Sitemaps”, enter the path to your site map (for example sitemap.xml) and submit it. It tells Google which pages exist. Make sure it only includes real addresses that return a 200 status and that you want to appear in search; anchors like /#section are not separate pages.

Step 3: read the Performance report

It shows four metrics: clicks, impressions (the number of times you appeared), CTR (the percentage of impressions that ended in a click) and average position. You can filter by query, page, country and device. The data lags by a day or two and is kept for 16 months.

What to look for

• Queries with many impressions and a position between 8 and 20: they're close to the first page. Improve that page and link to it from others.
• Pages with a good position and a low CTR: rewrite the title and meta description so they make people want to click.
• Unexpected queries: they show you how the market describes you and what new content you could create.

Step 4: check page indexing

The “Pages” (indexing) report splits your URLs into indexed and not indexed, with the reason. The most common ones:

• Discovered, currently not indexed: Google knows the URL but hasn't crawled it yet. Improve internal links and quality.
• Crawled, currently not indexed: Google read it and decided not to store it; this usually points to thin content or content very similar to another page.
• Excluded by noindex tag: check that it isn't a configuration mistake.
• Alternate page with proper canonical tag: normal if the canonical points to the right version.
• Not found (404): fix the link or redirect it.

Step 5: the URL Inspection tool

Paste an address and you'll see whether it's on Google, how it was crawled and which version Google saw. If you've published or changed an important page, use “Request indexing”. It doesn't magically speed up rankings, but it does flag the change.

Step 6: Core Web Vitals and structured data

The page experience and Core Web Vitals report uses real Chrome user data and groups URLs into “good”, “needs improvement” and “poor”. Under “Enhancements” you'll see whether your structured data markup (for example Organization, articles or FAQ snippets) has errors.

Step 7: manual actions and security

If Google detects spam or a hacked site, it reports it here. Turn on email notifications so you find out in time.

A 15-minute weekly routine

1. Compare clicks and impressions for the last 28 days against the previous period.
2. Note the 5 queries with the most impressions and their position.
3. See whether any new indexing errors have appeared.
4. Inspect any new page you've published.
5. Decide on one concrete improvement for this week.