Calgary, AB

Google Search Console, for people who don't do this for a living.

It is free, it is Google's own record of how your site performs in search, and it is the only source that is not an estimate. Most owners have never opened it, and four of its screens are worth ten minutes a month.

By · Last reviewed

Check my site→
On this page6 sections

Why does this matter more than any SEO tool?

Because every third-party tool estimates your traffic and positions. Search Console reports them, from Google, about your site, for free.

The numbers in a typical agency report come from tools that model search volume and infer position from sampled data. They are useful for research and they are not your data. Search Console is measured: these are the searches where your pages appeared, the number of times they appeared, and the number of times somebody clicked.

That distinction is the reason our client reporting comes out of Search Console rather than a rank tracker. It is also why it is the first account we ask for, and the first thing worth setting up if you do nothing else on this page.

How do you set it up?

Add your site as a property and verify ownership, usually with a DNS record or through your site platform. Then wait — it collects data from the day you verify, not retroactively.

Verification proves you control the domain. The most durable method is a DNS TXT record with your domain registrar, because it survives a website rebuild; platform-specific methods are quicker and break when the site is replaced. Choose the domain property rather than a URL-prefix property if the option is offered, so subdomains and both http and https are covered by one record.

The important thing to know before you start: there is no historical backfill. Data begins accruing when you verify. That alone is a reason to set it up today even if you have no intention of looking at it for a month.

Which screens are actually worth reading?

Performance, Pages, Sitemaps and the URL Inspection tool. Everything else can wait until something is wrong.

The interface is built for people who do this full time and most of it is noise for an owner. These four answer the questions you actually have.

Performance
What people searched, how often you appeared, and how often they clicked. Set the date range to the last three months and compare it to the previous period — a single month in isolation tells you almost nothing.
Performance → Pages
Which pages earn the clicks. Usually a surprise, and usually the fastest way to find the one page worth improving next.
Indexing → Pages
What Google has indexed and what it has excluded, with reasons. Worth checking after any site change, and the place a stray noindex shows up.
URL Inspection
Paste any page of yours and it tells you whether it is indexed, when it was last crawled, and what Google saw. The single most useful button in the product.

Check my site

The same checks this page describes, run against your own site. About 30 seconds.

Check my site→

What do impressions and clicks actually mean?

An impression means your page appeared in a result somebody saw. A click means they chose you. The ratio between them is the honest measure of whether your titles are doing their job.

Rising impressions with flat clicks is the most common pattern after a batch of technical fixes, and it is genuinely good news that looks like nothing. It means Google is now showing you for more searches; the next job is making the result worth clicking, which is titles and descriptions.

Falling impressions with steady clicks is usually the opposite of a problem too — it often means you have stopped appearing for searches that were never going to convert.

Average position is the number to trust least. It is averaged across every query and device that produced an impression, so it moves when your mix of searches changes even if nothing about your ranking did.

What should you check after making changes?

Inspect the specific URL you changed, request indexing once, and then leave it alone for several weeks.

URL Inspection has a Request Indexing button that asks Google to look again. Using it once per changed page is sensible. Using it repeatedly does nothing and is the most common form of impatience in this work.

Then genuinely wait. Google needs weeks to recrawl and re-evaluate, and checking daily will show you noise that means nothing. A flat month straight after a batch of fixes is the normal shape of this.

What does it not tell you?

Anything about Google Maps, anything about your competitors, and the specific search behind roughly half your clicks.

Search Console covers your website in search results. It says nothing about your Business Profile's performance in Maps — that has its own performance section inside the profile, and for a lot of local businesses it is the larger half of the picture.

It also withholds low-volume queries to protect user privacy, so the query list will never fully add up to your click total. That is expected, not a bug in your setup, and it is a good reason to treat the query list as a sample rather than a ledger.

Common questions

Is Search Console free?
Completely, with no paid tier. If someone is charging you for access to your own Search Console data, they are charging you to log into a free Google product on your behalf.
Does it show data from before I set it up?
No. Collection starts at verification, which is the main argument for doing it now rather than when you next need it. There is no way to backfill.
Why doesn't the query list add up to my total clicks?
Google withholds queries that are too rare to report without identifying individual searchers. The totals are complete; the query breakdown is a sample of them. Everyone's does this.
Should I give my SEO access to it?
Yes, and add them as a user rather than sharing your Google password. You can remove them in one click when the engagement ends, and it means their reporting comes from your measured data instead of a third-party estimate.

Related

Find out if something's broken before you spend anything.

The free check takes about 30 seconds and asks for nothing — not even your email. From $499 a month if you want it fixed.

Check my site→