Google Search Console for Beginners

When people start learning SEO, they often ask me: “How do I know what Google actually thinks of my website? Which searches bring people in? Are my pages even in Google?” They try guessing, or they pay for tools before trying the one that comes straight from Google, for free.

That tool is Google Search Console. In this lesson, I will show you how to set it up and verify your site, and then walk you through the five reports that matter most for a beginner: Performance, Page indexing, URL Inspection, Sitemaps and Core Web Vitals. By the end, you will be able to open Search Console, find your top searches and pages, and spot problems before they cost you traffic.

Several earlier lessons pointed here, such as getting pages indexed and XML sitemaps. Now you get to see the tool in action.

What is Google Search Console, and what can it tell you?

Google Search Console is a free tool that shows how Google crawls, indexes and shows your site in its search results. Think of it as a report card from Google about your website, with notes on what to fix.

It is important to know what it does not do. Search Console is about what happens before someone reaches your site: the searches, the impressions and the clicks. What people do after they arrive, such as reading pages or filling in a form, belongs to Google Analytics, which is the next lesson.

The good news is you don’t have to check it every day. Google emails you about new issues it finds. Google suggests checking about once a month, or after you make changes to your content, to make sure things look stable.

How do you set up and verify Search Console?

Before Google shows you any data, you have to prove the site is yours. This is called verification. First, you choose a property type. A property is simply the website, or part of a website, you want to see data for.

	Domain property	URL-prefix property
What it covers	The whole domain: http and https, with and without www, and every subdomain	Only the exact address you type, such as https://www.example.com/
How to verify	Only through your domain name provider (a DNS record)	HTML file, HTML tag, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, DNS and a few others
Best for	Seeing your whole site in one place	When you can’t edit DNS, or you want to look at one section on its own

I suggest a Domain property if you can manage it, because it gives you the full picture in one place. If DNS sounds scary, a URL-prefix property is perfectly fine to start with.

Steps to add your site

1. Go to Search Console and sign in with your Google account.
2. Click “Add property” and choose Domain or URL prefix.
3. Type your domain or full URL.
4. Follow the verification instructions. For a Domain property, Google gives you a TXT record to add at your domain provider (the company where you bought the domain).
5. Click “Verify”. DNS changes can take a while to update, so if it fails, wait and try again.

Google starts collecting data as soon as the property is added, but it takes a few days before you see meaningful numbers. Be patient on day one. For extra detail, including adding team members safely, read my guide on setting up Search Console the right way.

How do you read the Performance report?

This is the report you will use most. It shows how your site performs in Google Search. By default, it covers the last three months. Here are the four main numbers, in plain words:

• Clicks: how many times people clicked through to your site from Google Search.
• Impressions: how many times your site appeared in search results.
• CTR (click-through rate): clicks divided by impressions. If you had 1,000 impressions and 30 clicks, your CTR is 3%.
• Average position: the average position of your highest result. Lower is better: position 1 is the top.

Below the chart, you can break the data down by Queries (the words people searched), Pages, Countries, Devices, Search appearance and Dates. You can also switch the search type between Web, Image, Video and News.

The newest data can be preliminary and may change over the next few hours, so don’t panic about today’s numbers. Clicks and impressions from Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode are also included here under the Web search type, as you saw in the lesson on AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Three useful questions to ask the report

• Which queries have high impressions but low CTR? These pages are seen but not clicked. Better title tags and meta descriptions may help.
• Which pages sit around positions 8 to 20? These are close to page one and are often the quickest wins.
• Did anything drop? Compare this period with the previous one to see which pages or queries lost clicks.

I explain each part of the report in more depth in how to read the Search Console Performance report. Once you are comfortable, my post on using regex in Search Console shows how to filter and group queries quickly.

Is Google indexing your pages? The Page indexing report

If a page isn’t indexed, it can’t appear in Google at all. The Page indexing report shows how many of your URLs Google has crawled and indexed, and gives reasons for the ones it hasn’t.

You will see two groups: Indexed and Not indexed. Here is the important thing: Google says “Not indexed” is not necessarily bad. Duplicates, redirected URLs and pages you blocked on purpose should stay out. What matters is that your important pages are indexed.

Common reasons you will see include:

• Blocked by robots.txt or Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag: you (or your plugin) told Google to stay out. Check it was on purpose.
• Not found (404) and Server error (5xx): the page is missing or the server failed.
• Alternate page with proper canonical tag: Google is using another version, as covered in the lesson on canonical tags. Usually fine.
• Crawled – currently not indexed and Discovered – currently not indexed: Google knows the page but hasn’t added it yet. Often a quality or priority issue.

When you fix an issue on every affected page, click Validate fix. Google will re-check the pages, which can take up to about two weeks. Every status is explained in my post on the Page indexing report, and the most common one has its own guide: how to fix Crawled – currently not indexed.

What do URL Inspection, Sitemaps and Core Web Vitals show?

URL Inspection: check one page

Paste any URL from your site into the search bar at the top of Search Console. The tool tells you whether Google has indexed that page, which canonical URL Google chose, and whether there are structured data issues. Keep in mind this shows Google’s last indexed version, which may be a little old.

Click Test live URL to see whether Google can fetch the page right now. If the page is new or updated, you can click Request indexing. Google says this does not guarantee indexing, and there is a daily limit, so use it for important pages only.

Sitemaps: tell Google where your pages are

Open the Sitemaps report, paste your sitemap address (often something like /sitemap.xml) into “Add a new sitemap” and click Submit. The status will show Success, Has errors or Couldn’t fetch. A sitemap is optional, but it helps Google discover pages and lets you monitor them. The lesson on XML sitemaps explains how to create one.

Core Web Vitals: real-world page experience

This report uses data from real Chrome users to grade your pages on three metrics you met in the lesson on page speed and Core Web Vitals: LCP (loading), INP (responsiveness) and CLS (visual stability). Pages are grouped by similar experience and shown separately for mobile and desktop.

Metric	Good	Needs improvement	Poor
LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)	2.5 s or less	Up to 4 s	Over 4 s
INP (Interaction to Next Paint)	200 ms or less	Up to 500 ms	Over 500 ms
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)	0.1 or less	Up to 0.25	Over 0.25

A page’s status is set by its worst metric. If your site is small or new, you may see “No data available”, simply because there isn’t enough real-user data yet.

Search Console has other useful tools too, such as Manual Actions, Security Issues and the Links report. My complete Search Console guide covers them all.

Try it: your first 20 minutes in Search Console

Once your property has a few days of data, do this short routine.

1. Open Performance and set the date to the last three months. Write down total clicks and impressions.
2. Click the Queries tab and sort by impressions. Note three queries with high impressions but low CTR.
3. Click the Pages tab. Find your top five pages by clicks. Are they the pages you expected?
4. Open Page indexing. Look at the “Not indexed” reasons. Check that none of your key pages appear under robots.txt or noindex.
5. Inspect your homepage and one important service or product page with URL Inspection. Confirm both say the URL is on Google.
6. Open Sitemaps. Submit your sitemap if it isn’t listed, and check the status.
7. Glance at Core Web Vitals for mobile. Note any Poor URL groups for later.

Keep these notes in a simple document with the date. Next month, repeat the routine and compare.

Questions beginners ask about Google Search Console

Is Google Search Console free?

Yes. Search Console is a free tool from Google. You only need a Google account and the ability to prove you own or manage the website.

Why don’t I see any data yet?

Google starts collecting data as soon as a property is added, but it takes a few days before meaningful numbers build up. The Core Web Vitals report may also say “No data available” if your site doesn’t have enough real-user data in Chrome’s user experience report.

Should every page on my site be indexed?

No. Google itself says “Not indexed” is not necessarily bad. Duplicate pages, thank-you pages, filtered URLs and pages you blocked on purpose don’t need to be in the index. What matters is that your important pages are indexed.

Does “Request indexing” make Google index my page?

No. It asks Google to crawl the page, but Google says submitting a request does not guarantee indexing. There is also a daily limit. For many new or changed pages, a sitemap is the better route.

Why don’t Search Console clicks match my Google Analytics visits?

They are measured differently. Search Console counts clicks from Google Search; Analytics counts sessions on your site, and is affected by tracking setup, consent and time zones. Compare the trends, not the exact numbers.

What Search Console gives you as an SEO

To sum up: Google Search Console is your free, direct line to how Google sees your site. Verify your site (a Domain property if you can), then use Performance to see searches and clicks, Page indexing and URL Inspection to make sure your key pages are in Google, Sitemaps to help discovery, and Core Web Vitals to watch real-world page experience. Check it monthly and after big changes.

Search Console tells you how people find you. In the next lesson, Google Analytics 4 for SEO, you will learn what those visitors do once they arrive. If you would rather have someone set this up and read the data for you, our SEO team is happy to help.

Sources for this lesson on Google Search Console

1. Get started with Search Console — Google Search Central
2. Verify your site ownership — Search Console Help
3. Performance report (Search results) — Search Console Help
4. Page indexing report — Search Console Help
5. URL Inspection tool — Search Console Help
6. Core Web Vitals report — Search Console Help