Google Search Console: set it up and read the numbers

Google Search Console shows how Google sees your website: which searches you appear for, how often people click, which pages are in Google's index and what's stopping the rest. It's free, the figures come from Google itself, and most small business websites have never had it set up. This guide covers set-up and the 3 reports worth checking every month.

Set it up in your own account

Sign in at search.google.com/search-console with a Google account the business controls, ideally not a personal one that leaves with an employee. You'll be asked to choose a property type.

• Domain property (recommended). Covers every version of your site: with and without www, http and https, and any subdomains. It can only be verified by adding a TXT record to your domain's DNS, which you do where you bought the domain. Google says this can take a day or two to take effect, and the record needs to stay in place afterwards.
• URL-prefix property. Covers only the exact address you enter. It can be verified more ways: uploading a file, adding a meta tag to the homepage, or through Google Analytics or Tag Manager. Useful if you can't get at your DNS.

Once it's verified, add your web designer or SEO agency under Settings, Users and permissions. That way they can work in it, and you can remove them at any time without losing your data.

Submit a sitemap

A sitemap is a file listing the pages you want in search. Most website builders create one automatically, usually at yoursite.co.uk/sitemap.xml. Add that address in the Sitemaps report.

Google says small sites of around 500 pages or fewer, with good internal links, may not need one, and that a sitemap doesn't guarantee every page will be crawled and indexed. Submitting it still helps, because the report then tells you how many listed pages Google has read and flags any it couldn't.

The Performance report

This is the report you'll use most. It shows 4 numbers:

• Clicks: how many times someone clicked through to your site from Google search results.
• Impressions: how many times your site appeared in results someone saw.
• CTR (click-through rate): clicks divided by impressions.
• Average position: the average position of your highest result. Position 1 is the top.

Below the chart you can break the figures down by search query, page, country, device and date. The default view shows the last 3 months, and you can widen it to compare with earlier periods. Google says that when your pages appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, those appearances and clicks are counted here, within the Web search type.

How to read it without being misled:

• Compare like with like. Many businesses are seasonal. Compare this month with the same month last year, as well as with last month.
• Separate your name from everything else. Filter out queries containing your business name. Searches for your name show people who already know you; the rest show whether new customers find you.
• Look for high impressions and few clicks. A page that shows often but rarely gets clicked may need a clearer title or description, or may be showing for searches it doesn't answer.
• Treat average position with care. It's an average across every search and location. A move from 14 to 9 usually means more searches where you show, rather than a single ranking change.

The Page indexing report

This report splits your pages into indexed and not indexed, with a reason for each group. Google says you shouldn't expect every URL to be indexed, and that the goal is the main version of every important page. The reasons you'll see most often:

• Crawled, currently not indexed. Google read the page and chose not to add it, for now. It may add it later. If an important page sits here for weeks, it often needs to be more useful or more clearly different from your other pages.
• Discovered, currently not indexed. Google knows the page exists but hasn't read it yet.
• Duplicate without user-selected canonical. Google found near-identical pages and picked another one as the main version. Google says this is working as intended; it only matters if it picked the wrong page.
• Excluded by noindex tag. The page tells Google not to index it. Fine for thank-you pages; a problem if it's on a service page by mistake, which often happens after a website relaunch.
• Not found (404). The page no longer exists. If it moved, set up a permanent (301) redirect to the new address.

To check a single page, paste its address into the URL Inspection bar at the top. It shows whether the page is indexed and lets you request indexing after a change. Google limits how many requests you can make each day and says a request doesn't guarantee the page will be indexed.

The Core Web Vitals report

This report uses real visitors' experience of your pages, grouped as good, needs improvement or poor, for phones and computers separately. Google's thresholds for good are main content showing within 2.5 seconds, responding to taps within 200 milliseconds and layout shift below 0.1.

Smaller sites often see "No data available", because the figures need enough visitors. In that case, test individual pages with Google's free PageSpeed Insights tool instead.

A 15-minute monthly check

1. Open the Performance report, set the last 28 days, and compare with the same period last year. Note clicks and impressions.
2. Filter out your business name and note the same figures again.
3. Sort pages by impressions and look for any important page with very few clicks.
4. Open Page indexing and check whether the count of not-indexed pages has jumped, and whether any service or location pages are in it.
5. Check the overview page for messages about manual actions or security issues. These are rare, and serious when they appear.
6. Write the figures down in the same place each month. The trend is what matters.

Do the same for Bing

Bing Webmaster Tools offers similar reports for Bing, which also supplies results to other services. Bing lets you import sites you've verified in Search Console, so set-up takes a couple of minutes once Google is done.

Next steps

Set up Search Console today and note your starting figures. In a month you'll have something to compare against. If you'd like help reading it, ask for a free SEO check. Our monthly SEO reports come from your own Search Console, so the numbers are always ones you can check.