Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that shows you how your website is doing in Google search. It tells you what people typed before they found you, which pages they landed on, and whether Google is having trouble reading your site.
It is the most useful free thing available to a business owner who wants to understand their own website. In my experience most people have either never heard of it, or had it set up years ago by a web designer and never logged in.
If you only ever learn one marketing tool, learn this one.
It is not Google Analytics
These get confused constantly, so let’s separate them.
Search Console is about what happens before someone arrives. What they searched, where you appeared, whether they clicked.
Analytics is about what happens after they arrive. Which pages they looked at, how long they stayed, whether they filled in your form.
You want both eventually. Start with Search Console, because it answers the question most business owners actually have, which is “how do people find me, and are they finding me at all?”
Setting it up
About twenty minutes, and you can do it yourself.
Go to Google Search Console and sign in with a Google account. Use one you control. Not a shared office login, and not your web designer’s, because that account effectively owns the data.
Google then asks you to prove the site is yours. The easiest route for most people is to pick the domain option and add a line of text to your domain settings, which whoever manages your domain can do in a couple of minutes. If that sounds like a faff, there’s an alternative where you upload a small file to your website or paste a tag into it, which most website platforms make straightforward.
Then you wait. Search Console starts collecting from the day you verify and does not backfill, so the data builds up over the following weeks. That’s a good reason to set it up today even if you won’t look at it until January.
The four things worth looking at
There’s a lot in there. Ignore most of it. These four earn their keep.
1. The queries report. This is the gold. It lists the actual phrases people typed into Google before they saw your site. Not estimates, not keyword tool guesses. What real people searched.
It is routinely surprising. I have shown business owners this report and watched them discover that half their traffic comes from a service they barely mention on the website, or that people are searching for a town they don’t cover, or that nobody at all searches the phrase they built their homepage around.
2. Clicks against impressions. An impression means you appeared in results. A click means someone chose you. A page with thousands of impressions and almost no clicks is appearing and being passed over, which usually means your title and description aren’t persuading anyone. That’s a cheap fix with a quick payoff.
3. The pages report. Which of your pages actually bring people in. Often not the ones you’d assume, and a useful corrective if you’re about to spend money redesigning something nobody visits.
4. The indexing report. This tells you how many of your pages Google has included and, more usefully, which it has left out and why. If you have forty pages and Google has indexed nine, you have found a real problem and the report will tell you what kind.
What to do with it in ten minutes a month
You don’t need a routine. You need four questions.
- Are total clicks up or down against the same period last year? Not last month, because seasonality will mislead you.
- Are there searches bringing you impressions that you have no proper page for? Each one is a page worth writing.
- Is anything getting lots of impressions and almost no clicks? Rewrite its title.
- Has the number of indexed pages dropped? That’s worth asking someone about.
That’s it. Ten minutes, once a month, and you’ll know more about your own website than most business owners paying an agency.
Why I tell clients to set this up themselves
Two reasons, and the second is the important one.
The first is that it’s free and it takes twenty minutes.
The second is that it is your independent record. When you pay an agency, the report you receive is written by the people being judged by it. Search Console is Google’s own data about your own site, and nobody can dress it up. If an agency tells you traffic is up and Search Console says clicks are flat, you have a conversation to have.
I give every client access to their own Search Console and I’d be wary of anyone who didn’t. If an agency sets it up under their account and won’t add you, ask why. The answer should be that they’ll fix it this afternoon.
What it will not tell you
So you’re not disappointed.
It won’t show every search phrase. Google withholds rare ones to protect privacy, so your totals never quite add up.
It won’t tell you about enquiries. It stops at the click.
It won’t report clicks from AI Overviews separately, which is a real gap right now given how much of the top of the page those take up. Google has said it isn’t providing that data.
And the position figure is an average across a lot of different searches and locations, so treat it as a trend rather than a fact.
What this is part of
Reading what people searched, fixing the titles that aren’t earning clicks, finding the pages Google has skipped: that’s SEO, search engine optimisation. Search Console is where you see whether any of it is working.
It’s also the honest answer to “how do I know if my marketing is doing anything?” The data was always free. Most people just weren’t shown where to look.
Do this today
Set it up, submit your sitemap while you’re in there, and come back in a fortnight when there’s data to read.
If you’d rather someone read it with you, send me your business name and postcode and I’ll run you a free audit. If you grant me access I’ll go through your own Search Console data and tell you what it says, which searches you’re missing, and what I’d fix first. If the answer is that things look healthy, you’ll get that too.
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