What is Google Search Console and how do you use it?

Search Console does not describe the visitor arriving at your site, it describes what happens while your site appears in Google. It has data even before anyone has clicked: how many times you appeared, what position you held, who clicked.

It is free, takes ten minutes to set up, and is the first tool anyone with a website should open. It matters if you run ads too, because without knowing what is happening on the organic side you cannot see what your ad budget is really buying.

The difference between Search Console and Analytics

This is the most commonly confused point. The two measure different moments: Search Console the world before the click, Analytics the world after it.

It is normal for the click and session counts in the two tools not to match. If someone clicks and gives up before the page loads, Search Console counts the click and Analytics does not count the session.

Setup: adding and verifying a property

Adding a site to Search Console is called creating a property. There are two kinds, and because the choice cannot be changed later it matters to pick the right one at the start.

• Domain property: collects all subdomains and both the http and https versions in one place, verified with a DNS record

• URL prefix property: covers only the address you enter, and can also be verified with an HTML file or a tag

1. Sign in to search.google.com/search-console with your Google account

2. Choose Add property and select the domain property, which is the right one for most sites

3. Create the TXT record Google gives you in your domain provider's DNS panel

4. Press Verify, DNS propagation can take a few hours

5. Once verified, submit your sitemap from the Sitemaps section

When verification fails the reason is usually that the DNS record has not propagated yet. Deleting and recreating the record makes it take longer, waiting a few hours and trying again is faster.

The first four reports to look at

Search Console is a broad tool, but four screens are enough to check regularly.

• Performance: the queries you appear in, clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position

• Page indexing: which pages are in Google and why the others are left out

• Sitemaps: whether the sitemap you submitted is being read

• Experience and usability: warnings on the page speed and mobile friendliness side

Reading the Performance report correctly

There are four metrics and three of them are misread. An impression means you appeared on the results page, it does not require the user to have seen that result. Average position is the average of your position across every query where you had impressions, not the fixed rank of a single page.

The valuable part is the breakdown. Switch to the queries tab and look only at rows with high impressions and a low click-through rate. That is usually where the page title does not meet the searcher's expectation, and it is cheap to fix. For the advertising side of the same question, see the conversion tracking article.

Three common mistakes

• Submitting a sitemap and forgetting it. When the map goes stale, new pages are noticed late

• Ignoring errors in the indexing report. If the "Discovered, currently not indexed" row is growing, Google does not consider your site worth crawling

• Treating the data as live. Search Console data lags by one to three days, so do not look for yesterday's change today

How often to check

Once a week is enough. What matters is not the daily fluctuation in rankings but the trend: are impressions rising, is the number of indexed pages falling, has a new type of error appeared.

Increase the frequency in weeks when you publish or make structural changes on your site, because if something has broken this is where it shows up fastest.

Sources

• About Search Console — Search Console Help

• How to use Search Console — Google Search Central