Learn the new Search Console now, because the old reports are closing. Check three reports monthly: Performance for what people searched, Coverage for which pages Google has, and Mobile Usability for phone problems.

Two versions, one of them closing

Search Console, Google's free service showing how your site appears in its results, has existed in two versions side by side since last year.

The new version came out of beta in September. The old one is still a link away in the menu, and plenty of owners and designers go straight to it out of habit.

That habit has a limited life. Google is moving the reports across one at a time and closing the old versions as it goes, and several are due to close towards the end of March.

So this is a good month to learn the new layout properly.

What moved where

The second is the change that matters most. The old crawl errors list showed problems; the Coverage report accounts for every page Google knows about, including the ones it has chosen to leave out.

Three reports, once a month

Three reports in the new version answer the questions that matter to a small business: what people searched before they found you, whether Google has the pages you want found, and whether those pages work on a phone.

Those are Performance, Coverage and Mobile Usability. Twenty minutes on the first working day of the month covers all three, and the rest can wait until something prompts a look.

Performance: what people searched

The Performance report lists the searches in which your pages appeared, going back sixteen months.

Four figures sit at the top: clicks, impressions (the number of times a page of yours was shown in results), click-through rate, and your average position across all of those appearances.

The Queries tab is the useful part. It lists the words people actually typed, which are often not the words a business uses to describe itself.

The Pages tab shows where those searches landed. A query with plenty of impressions and almost no clicks usually points to a page whose title in the results does not match what the searcher wanted.

Compare each month with the same month last year, not with the month before.

Coverage: which pages Google has

The Coverage report sorts every address Google has found on your site into four groups: errors, valid with warnings, valid, and excluded.

Errors are pages Google was told about, usually through your sitemap, that it could not index: missing pages, server failures, pages marked not to be indexed.

Excluded looks alarming and mostly is not. Redirects, duplicates and pages deliberately kept out of search belong there.

The check is simple. The valid count should be roughly the number of real pages on your site, and every page you want found should be among them.

Mobile Usability: whether pages work on a phone

This report lists pages Google found hard to use on a phone, grouped by the problem it found.

The usual entries are text too small to read, links and buttons too close together to tap, and content wider than the screen.

Google has been moving sites to mobile-first indexing since last year, judging each by its phone version, so a page listed here has a problem with visitors and with search at once.

An empty report is the goal. A new entry usually means something changed recently: a plugin update, a new page template, or a wide table pasted into a page.

A worked example

A landscaping supply yard on the edge of a suburb sells soil, gravel and bark mulch by the yard, mostly for delivery.

Its owner opened the new Search Console for the first time in January, after years of glancing at the old crawl errors list and finding nothing urgent there.

Performance showed the site appearing often in searches for mulch and soil delivery, with very few clicks. The page reaching those searches was titled Products, followed by the company name.

Coverage listed six errors: pages still named in the sitemap, though they had been deleted when the price list was reorganised last spring.

Mobile Usability flagged the delivery calculator, whose buttons sat too close together for a thumb.

Each fix was small. The page title now says what is sold and where it is delivered, the sitemap was regenerated, and the calculator buttons were given room.

Sixteen months, then gone

The Performance report keeps sixteen months of data, which is far more than the old version's ninety days and still not forever.

Each month, the oldest month drops off the end. Anything you want to compare against next year has to be copied out before it goes.

The export button at the top of the report sends the current view to a spreadsheet. Each January, export the past year's queries and pages and file them with the rest of the year-end figures.

Whose account it lives in

Search Console belongs to whoever verified the site, and on many small business sites that was the designer who built it.

The messages it sends, about new errors or pages that have stopped working, go to that person. If they have moved on, nobody reads them.

Ask whoever verified the site to add the business's own Google account as an owner. It takes a minute, and the warnings then reach somebody with a reason to act on them.

The counter-case

Not every site needs this every month.

A site of eight pages that rarely changes will show the same Coverage and Mobile Usability results month after month, and a quarterly look is enough.

A business with very little search traffic will see Performance totals that wander for no reason, which makes the list of queries more useful than the figures above it.

And these reports only describe Google's side of the story. Asking customers how they found you still belongs alongside them.

For most sites, though, three reports on the first working day of the month catch problems while they are still small.

Once a month

  1. Open the new version, not the old.
  2. Compare Performance with the same month last year.
  3. Read the top twenty queries for surprises.
  4. Check Coverage for new errors.
  5. Match the valid count against your real pages.
  6. Clear anything listed under Mobile Usability.
  7. Export the year every January.

Step three is the one that repays the other six. The queries describe what people want from you in their own words, and no total at the top of the report does that.

Why those yearly figures need copying somewhere permanent is covered in writing down last year's numbers first.

Frequently asked questions

Is the old Search Console still available?

For now, through a link in the new version. Google is moving the reports across one at a time and closing the old versions, with several due to close towards the end of March.

Which reports should I check every month?

Performance, Coverage and Mobile Usability. Together they show what people searched, whether Google has the pages you want found, and whether those pages work on a phone.

What does the Performance report show?

The searches in which your pages appeared over the last sixteen months, with clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, broken down by query and by page.

Should excluded pages in Coverage worry me?

Mostly not. Redirects, duplicates and pages deliberately kept out of search belong there. Errors matter more, and every page you want found should be in the valid group.

What does Mobile Usability usually flag?

Text too small to read, links and buttons too close together to tap, and content wider than the screen. A new entry usually follows a recent change to the site.

How long does Search Console keep data?

Sixteen months in the Performance report. The oldest month drops off each month, so export the past year's queries and pages every January if you want them later.

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.

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