Search Console in plain English: the reports worth reading

Five Search Console reports are worth a monthly look: Performance, Page indexing, Core Web Vitals, Sitemaps, and the URL Inspection tool. The rest can wait until one of those five shows a problem. Search Console is free, it is Google telling you what Google sees, and everything below is quoted from Google's own help pages so you can hold it against the screen.

First, prove you own the site

Nothing shows until the site is verified. "Ownership verification means proving to Search Console that you own a specific website" (Source: Google Search Console Help). Google lists several methods; the ones a trade site will meet are an HTML file upload, an HTML tag, the Google Analytics tracking code, Google Tag Manager, or a record at your domain name provider (Source: Google Search Console Help). The domain provider method creates a Domain property, which "includes all subdomains (m, www, and so on) and multiple protocols (http, https, ftp)" and is verified by a DNS record only (Source: Google Search Console Help). It is the one we use. Whoever builds your site should verify it in an account in your name and add themselves as a user, never the other way round.

The five reports

1. Performance. This is the report that answers "is anyone finding me." Four numbers, defined by Google (Source: Google Search Console Help):

• Clicks: "The number of times a user clicked your site from Google Search results."
• Impressions: "How many times your site appeared in Search results."
• CTR: "The click count divided by the impression count."
• Average position: "The average position of the topmost result from your site."

"The default view of the report shows click and impression data for your site in Google Search results for the past three months" (Source: Google Search Console Help).

What to look for: open the Queries tab and read the actual words people typed. For a trade business the useful ones contain a town and a job, "water heater Troy," "roof repair Clifton Park." If the page they landed on is your home page and you have a page about that exact job, that is a page Google has not connected yet, and a fix for a build, not for a report. Nobody controls position, and no report changes it; this one only tells you where you stand.

2. Page indexing. "See which pages Google can find and index on your site, and learn about any indexing problems encountered" (Source: Google Search Console Help). Every address Google knows about is either indexed ("These URLs were successfully indexed") or not, "either because of an indexing error, or because of a legitimate reason" (Source: Google Search Console Help).

Three reasons you will actually meet, in Google's words:

• "Not found (404)": the page returned a 404 error when requested. Usually an old address from a previous site. The fix is a redirect to the page that replaced it.
• "Crawled - currently not indexed": Google read the page and chose not to list it. Often a thin page or a near-duplicate.
• "Discovered - currently not indexed": Google found the address but has not read it yet. For a new site this is normal and it clears on its own.

What to look for: your services, contact and about pages should all be in the indexed list. Anything that should be private, a thank-you page, a client status page, should not.

3. Core Web Vitals. "The Core Web Vitals report shows how your pages perform, based on real world usage data (sometimes called field data)" (Source: Google Search Console Help). The data comes from the Chrome User Experience Report, which "gathers anonymized metrics about performance times from actual users visiting your URL" (Source: Google Search Console Help).

This is the one report that is not a lab test. Our speed figures, and the figures on pagespeed.web.dev's top line, are Google's lab test on a simulated slow phone. This report is real visitors. The two can disagree, and for a small local site the usual thing you see here is nothing at all: "If you see a 'No data available' screen, it means either that your property is new in Search Console, or that there is not enough data available in the CrUX report to provide meaningful information for the chosen device type" (Source: Google Search Console Help). That is not a failure. It means too few Chrome users visited to form a sample, which is why the lab test exists.

4. Sitemaps. "Use the Sitemaps report to tell Google about any new sitemaps for your property, to see your sitemap submission history, and to see any errors that Google encountered when parsing your submitted sitemaps" (Source: Google Search Console Help). Each submitted sitemap shows a status of Success, Couldn't fetch, or a count of errors, plus the number of pages discovered in it (Source: Google Search Console Help).

What to look for: one sitemap, status Success, discovered pages equal to the number of pages your site actually has. A site with twelve pages and a sitemap that lists two is telling Google about two.

5. URL Inspection. "The URL Inspection tool provides information about Google's indexed version of a specific page, and also allows you to test whether a URL might be indexable" (Source: Google Search Console Help). Read the warning on the result: "This is not a live test. The results shown are from most recently indexed version of a page, not the live version on the web" (Source: Google Search Console Help). There is a separate Test Live URL button for the page as it is right now.

What to look for: after a fix or a new page, inspect the address, run the live test, and request indexing. It is the one place you can nudge Google to look, and the only thing it promises is a look.

A monthly routine

1. Performance: read the queries for the month. Note any job-plus-town phrase landing on the wrong page.
2. Page indexing: count the indexed pages against the pages you have. Read every "Not found (404)."
3. Core Web Vitals: check for data. If there is some, read it; if not, move on.
4. Sitemaps: one sitemap, Success, the right page count.
5. URL Inspection: inspect anything you changed this month.

Fifteen minutes, once a month. That is the whole discipline, and it is the reason our Care Plan Plus sends a monthly report drawn from these same reports.

If none of this is set up yet

Our Search and AI Foundations service is $650, done in five business days, and it includes Search Console verified in your name, the sitemap submitted and indexing confirmed, with a before-and-after report on every item. What it is not is a ranking promise; nobody controls where you appear, and this post is the proof, since every report above only describes what Google decided. See what Foundations covers at /services#aeo.