Search Console is the only source showing what people actually searched before reaching your site, and it is free. Four reports cover nearly everything a small business needs: Performance for what you appear for, Page indexing for whether pages exist in search at all, the experience report for speed, and Links for what points where.
Performance
The report worth opening first and the one that answers the most.
It shows the queries you appeared for, the pages that appeared, how often, how many people clicked, and your average position. The default view is the last three months, which is usually the right window.
Three things to look for.
- Queries with impressions and almost no clicks. You are being shown and not chosen, which is usually a title and description problem rather than a ranking one, and it is the cheapest improvement available.
- Queries you did not expect. People find you for phrasings you would never have guessed, and those are the words to use on the page. This is the source no keyword tool can replace.
- Pages with impressions for something they do not properly answer. A page nearly ranking for a question it half covers is the strongest candidate for expansion.
Filtering to remove your own business name is worth doing here, for the reasons set out in branded versus non-branded search.
Page indexing
Whether your pages exist in search at all, which is a different question from where they rank and a more fundamental one.
It lists pages that are indexed and pages that are not, with a reason for each exclusion. Most reasons are benign: redirects, duplicates the engine chose differently on, and pages you deliberately excluded.
What to look for is a page you care about sitting in the not-indexed list. A service page excluded because it is blocked, or marked as a duplicate of another page, is invisible regardless of how good it is. This report is where that gets caught, and it is the check to run before spending any time on rankings.
The inspection tool alongside it will check a single address on demand and tell you why it is or is not indexed, which takes about thirty seconds.
Page experience
Speed and stability, measured from real visits rather than from a test.
This is the field data view of your site: how it actually performed for people who used it, grouped into pages behaving similarly. It is more useful than a one-off speed test because it reflects your real audience on their real devices, which is the distinction drawn in lab data versus field data.
Small sites frequently have insufficient traffic for this report to populate, which is not a fault. Where it does populate, the useful action is to look at which group of pages is worst and why, rather than at the summary figure.
Links
What points at your site from elsewhere, and what points where within it.
The external half is informative rather than actionable for most small businesses. The internal half is genuinely useful, because it shows which of your pages receive the most internal links and which receive almost none.
Pages at the bottom of that list are the ones nothing on your site treats as important, which is frequently why they do not rank. It is the fastest way to find the linking gaps described in internal linking.
What it will not tell you
Worth stating so the reports are not over-read.
Position figures are averages across many searches, locations, and devices, so an average position of eight does not mean you sit eighth for anyone in particular. Query data is sampled and filtered, so rare searches are omitted. And it reports on one search engine, so it is a large part of the picture rather than all of it.
A monthly routine
- Open Performance and compare the last three months against the previous three.
- Sort queries by impressions and look for the ones with few clicks.
- Check Page indexing for anything newly excluded.
- Note any page whose impressions dropped sharply, which is worth investigating rather than assuming.
Fifteen minutes, once a month. It is free, it is the only view of what people searched before they arrived, and the majority of small business sites have it installed and never opened.
Frequently asked questions
What is Google Search Console used for?
It shows what people searched before reaching your site, which pages are indexed, how the site performed for real visitors, and what links to what. It is free and it is the only source for the query data.
Which Search Console report should I look at first?
Performance. Sort queries by impressions and look for ones with high impressions and few clicks, since those are pages being shown and not chosen, which is usually a title problem rather than a ranking one.
How do I know if a page is indexed?
Use the URL inspection tool, which checks a single address on demand and reports whether it is indexed and why not. The Page indexing report lists exclusions across the whole site with reasons.
Why does my average position not match what I see?
It is an average across many searches, locations, and devices. An average position of eight does not mean you appear eighth for any particular person in any particular place.
Why is my page experience report empty?
Small sites frequently lack enough traffic for that report to populate. It is not a fault, and it means relying on lab testing configured to resemble your audience instead.
How often should I check Search Console?
Fifteen minutes monthly is enough: compare Performance against the previous period, look for impressions without clicks, and check whether anything has newly dropped out of the index.
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.
Never opened Search Console?
We set it up, read it monthly, and bring you the two or three things in it that are worth acting on rather than a report you have to interpret.
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