Google Search Console for business owners: the five reports that matter

Setting it up

Go to Search Console, add your site as a “Domain” property, and verify it with a TXT record at your domain’s DNS. That covers every version of your address at once (with and without www, http and https). If your web designer set it up years ago under their own account, ask them to add you as an owner; you should never be locked out of your own data.

The five reports

1. PerformanceEvery search where your site appeared, with impressions (how many times you were shown), clicks, click-through rate and average position. Sort by impressions to see what Google already associates you with. A search with lots of impressions and few clicks usually means the page title isn’t convincing, or you rank just off page one.
2. Pages (indexing)Which of your pages Google has indexed and which it hasn’t, with a reason. “Crawled, currently not indexed” on an important page means Google didn’t think it was worth including yet. “Page with redirect” is usually fine; it’s the old address of a page that moved.
3. URL InspectionPaste any address from your site to see whether it’s indexed, when Google last crawled it, and to request indexing after you change something important. Google limits how many requests you can make a day, so save it for pages that matter.
4. SitemapsSubmit your sitemap address (usually /sitemap.xml) once. Google reads it for new and changed pages after that.
5. Security issues and manual actionsShould both say no issues detected. If either doesn’t, it’s urgent: your site may be hacked, or a person at Google has penalized it.

Ten minutes a month

If you export the Performance report each month, you’ll have your own record of what changed, which is how we measure SEO work for our own clients and for ourselves.

• Performance, last three months: are impressions and clicks going up? Which new searches appeared?
• Pages: any important page not indexed?
• Security issues and manual actions: still clear?