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27 October 2026Updated 3 November 2026

A Beginner’s Guide to Google Search Console

“Search Console? I think the last web person set that up.” Plenty of owners say something like that, and then nobody logs in for three years. Google Search Console is free, and it’s the one place where Google tells you directly how your site is doing in its results. Which searches you turn up for. Which pages it’s left out, and why. Whether it’s spotted a hack before your customers do. You don’t need it to appear in Google at all, but running a business website without it is a bit like driving a van with tape over the dashboard.

In brief

Set up a Domain property if you can. It catches every version of your site in one place.
The Performance report shows what people actually typed before they found you, which is gold.
Not every page needs to be in Google. Every page that earns you money does.
Check who has access. Old agencies and former staff often still do.

Getting set up, and who should own it

Google calls each website you track a ‘property’, and there are two kinds. A Domain property covers everything under your domain name, so www and non-www, http and https, and subdomains like a booking system on book.yourbusiness.co.uk. A URL-prefix property only covers addresses starting with exactly what you typed. We’d suggest the Domain property for most businesses, because nothing slips through the gaps. If your site still loads on plain http as well as https, sort that out too. Our guide to SSL certificates and HTTPS for business websites covers the redirects.

The catch is verification. A Domain property can only be verified with a DNS record, added wherever your domain name is managed. Sounds technical. It’s usually a short copy-and-paste job for your developer or domain provider. URL-prefix properties offer more routes, such as a small HTML file or a tag on your home page. Whichever you use, leave it in place afterwards. Remove it and Search Console can’t confirm you’re still the owner, and after a grace period your access lapses.

And make sure the business owns the property, through a Google account the business controls. One sitting on a freelancer’s personal Gmail is a headache saved up for the day you part company.

The Performance report is where the useful stuff lives

Impressions count how often your site appeared in Google’s results, and clicks count how often someone actually came through. Divide one by the other and you get CTR. Then there’s average position, which tracks your highest-placed result, so an average of 8 means you’re typically appearing below the first few results.

The real value is in the Queries tab, a list of the words people typed before your site showed up. A letting agent might find they’re getting impressions for ‘HMO licence help’ without ever having written about it. A garden centre might watch ‘christmas trees near me’ climb every November.

Look for pages with lots of impressions and hardly any clicks. Google already thinks they’re relevant. People just aren’t choosing them. Quite often the title and description in the results are vague, which is the problem covered in our article on how Google treats title tags and meta descriptions.

Why the numbers never quite add up

Some searches are hidden from the query list to protect people’s privacy. Google calls them anonymised queries, and they still count in the chart totals, so the table usually comes up short. Data tends to appear within two or three days, and the newest figures can still shift a little.

There’s also a filter that separates searches including your business name from those that don’t. Handy, because searches without your name are often where new customers find you. Sites with a low number of impressions won’t get it, and Google admits it sometimes sorts a query into the wrong pile.

Traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode is counted in here as well, inside the ‘Web’ search type with everything else. There’s more on that in our piece on what AI Overviews mean for your traffic.

Page indexing, or which pages Google has filed away

This report shows how many of your pages Google has indexed, with a reason for each one it hasn’t. Don’t panic at a big not-indexed number. Google says you shouldn’t expect every URL to be indexed, only the canonical ones, meaning the main version of a page when near-copies exist. Tag pages and filtered shop listings often sit in that pile.

So what should you look for? Your important pages, like a solicitor’s conveyancing page or a café’s menu. If one of those says ‘URL marked noindex’, something on the site is telling Google to stay away. Other statuses tell you Google has found a page but not crawled it yet, or crawled it and chosen to leave it out for now. If that’s a page that matters, ask whether it says enough.

URL Inspection and sitemaps

Paste any address from your site into the bar at the top and URL Inspection shows what Google has on file for that page. That’s the copy from its last visit, which may be older than what’s live. The live test checks the page as it stands now. You can also ask Google to index a new or updated page from here. It’s a request, mind. There’s no guarantee, it usually takes a day or so but can take much longer, and there’s a daily limit.

For lots of new pages, a sitemap is the better route. That’s a file listing the pages you want found, and in the Sitemaps report you simply tell Google where it lives. You want a status of ‘Success’. ‘Couldn’t fetch’ means Google couldn’t reach the file at all, so check the address is right, it opens in a browser and robots.txt isn’t blocking it. Even a clean sitemap carries no promise that every URL in it gets crawled or indexed.

The reports you hope stay empty

Manual actions and Security issues should both say there’s nothing to see. A manual action means a human reviewer at Google has decided pages on your site break its spam policies, and some or all of the site can drop out of results. Fix every affected page before asking for a review. Partial fixes won’t earn a partial return.

Security issues covers hacked content, malware and pages that trick visitors into doing something dangerous. If Google finds any, your listing can carry a warning, or visitors can hit a full-page warning in their browser. Search Console emails owners when something important happens, so make sure those emails reach an inbox someone reads.

Core Web Vitals sits nearby. It’s built from real visitors’ experience, and pages without enough of that data are left out, so plenty of smaller sites see very little there. Our guide to what LCP, INP and CLS actually measure explains the scores when they do appear.

Who’s got the keys?

Under Settings you’ll find Users and permissions. Owners control everything, including who else gets in. Full users see all the data and can do some things, such as submit a sitemap. Restricted users mostly just look. You might find an agency from two rebuilds ago, or someone who left years back. Google’s advice on an owner you don’t recognise at all is that a hacker may have added them, so take that one seriously.

There’s a quirk with verified owners. Take one off the list but leave their verification file or tag on the site, and they can verify straight back in. Their tokens have to go as well.

While you’re there, link Search Console to Google Analytics. You’ll need to be a verified owner in Search Console and an Editor in Analytics. The link adds reports for organic search queries and landing pages, so you can see which pages search brings people to and what they did next. Pair it with GA4 key events for your enquiry forms and phone taps and you’ll see which of those pages turn search visits into enquiries.

Making it a monthly habit

Once a month, compare the last three months of Performance data with the three before, skim Page indexing for your key pages and glance at the two reports you hope stay empty. Twenty minutes or so. A wedding venue or any other seasonal business will learn more from comparing against the same months last year.

It earns its keep around big changes, and our article on moving to a new website without losing your rankings covers the checks to run either side of launch.

Getting a hand with it

Search Console is far better at spotting trouble than telling you what to do about it. Our plain-English guide to how SEO works for a business website shows where it fits with keywords, content and local search. Reports throwing up problems you can’t make sense of? That’s what our technical SEO fixes are for, as part of the ongoing SEO support we offer business websites. Talk to us and we’ll tell you what yours is saying.

Keep reading

Sources

Scott Woodfield

Founder of TWA. Scott has spent 17 years in web design and digital marketing, nine of them inside agencies and eight running his own practice. He plans, designs and builds the sites himself, from single landing pages to full ecommerce builds, and he's the person you speak to when you call.

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