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Google Search Console

Updated: 3 min read SEOFuxx editorial team

Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that shows how your website performs in Google Search. It provides clicks, impressions and queries from search, reports indexing and crawling problems, and lets you submit sitemaps and inspect individual pages. The data comes directly from Google, which is why it counts as the most important data source for SEO.

Verify ownership

Before you see data you have to prove that the website belongs to you. For that you create a property. There are two types:

TypeScopeVerification
Domainall protocols (http/https) and subdomains of a domainonly through the DNS record at the domain provider (TXT or CNAME)
URL prefixexactly the given address including protocolHTML file, HTML tag, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager or DNS

Anyone who verifies a URL prefix via DNS verifies the matching Domain property at the same time. Several owners can verify the same property. A verified owner has the highest permissions.

<!-- verification with the HTML tag, in the head of the home page -->
<meta name="google-site-verification" content="your-code">

The Performance report

The Performance report for Google Search shows four values:

  • Clicks: how often users came to your website from search
  • Impressions: how often your website appeared in the results
  • Click-through rate (CTR): clicks divided by impressions
  • Average position: in the chart the topmost placement of your entire website, in the table that of the respective row

You can filter by search type (Web, Image, Video, News), date range, query, page, country and device. By default the report shows the last three months. The newest data is preliminary and can still change within a few hours. The data goes back about 16 months, older data is lost. If you need longer histories, you should export regularly. Clicks and impressions from AI Overviews count under the search type "Web".

Other reports and tools

  • URL Inspection: shows how Google sees a single page, whether it is indexed, and lets you request a new fetch.
  • Page indexing: lists which pages are indexed and why others are not, for example because of noindex or because they were only discovered.
  • Sitemaps: here you submit your sitemap and see how many addresses Google found.
  • Crawl stats: in the settings, with fetches per day, response times and errors (see crawl budget).
  • Links: linking websites and most common link texts (see backlinks).
  • Manual actions: reports when Google has imposed a manual action.
  • Core Web Vitals: rates load time, responsiveness and stability of your pages (see Core Web Vitals).
  • Enhancements: checks structured data and rich result eligibility.

How to work with it

  1. Create the property and verify ownership.
  2. Submit the sitemap and watch the report for errors.
  3. In the Performance report, sort by queries for which you have many impressions but few clicks. It is worth reworking title and description there.
  4. In the page indexing report, check whether important pages are missing.
  5. After changes, use URL Inspection and request a new fetch.

Common mistakes

  • Opening the wrong property: A URL prefix property shows only the exact spelling entered (for example only with www). With a Domain property you see everything.
  • Removing the verification: Anyone who later deletes the DNS line, the file or the tag loses access.
  • Overrating the average position: It averages over many queries, devices and countries. It is meaningful only for a single query or page.
  • Hoping for real time: The data lags behind and is preliminary on the newest day.
  • Not backing up data: What is older than about 16 months is gone.

Sources

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