Google Search Console is the only source of honest data about how Google sees your site. It's free, and most businesses set it up and never open it again.
1. Pages (indexing)
Check monthly. How many pages are indexed versus not, and why. If you have 80 pages and 12 are indexed, nothing else on this list matters yet.
Read the exclusion reasons. Discovered — currently not indexed usually means thin or duplicate content. Crawled — currently not indexed means Google looked and wasn't impressed.
2. Performance
Check monthly. Set the range to 3 months and sort queries by impressions. You're looking for two things: queries where you get impressions but no clicks (a title problem, easy fix), and queries you didn't know you ranked for (a content opportunity).
3. Sitemaps
Check after every batch of new pages. Status should say Success, and discovered URLs should match what you published. A domain property needs the full URL, not a relative path — this trips up almost everyone.
4. Core Web Vitals
Check quarterly. This is field data from real visitors, which is the only speed data worth believing. Lab scores flatter.
If lab tools say 95 and Search Console says poor, believe Search Console. Your customers aren't using your laptop.
Google Search Console settings people get wrong
- Using a URL-prefix property when a domain property would cover http, https, www and subdomains in one place.
- Never submitting the sitemap. Astonishingly common, and it's the main reason new sites stay uncrawled.
- Requesting indexing for everything. There's a daily quota. Use it on commercial pages first.
Two habits that make the data useful
Search Console is most valuable as a comparison, not a snapshot. A number on its own tells you almost nothing; the same number against the previous period tells you what changed.
First, always switch on the comparison toggle in Performance and compare the last 28 days against the previous 28. Second, use the date range of three months for query research and sixteen months when you are trying to work out whether something is seasonal or genuinely broken.
The title-tag opportunity
The single fastest win in the whole tool. Filter Performance to queries with over a hundred impressions, sort by CTR ascending, and look at the top twenty. Those are queries where Google already puts you in front of people and they choose someone else.
Usually one of three things is wrong. The title does not contain the words they searched, so the result does not look relevant. The title is too long and gets truncated mid-phrase. Or the description reads like it was written for a different page. All three are twenty-minute fixes on a page that already ranks, which makes this the highest return per hour available in SEO.
Reading the URL Inspection tool properly
When a page will not index, inspect it and read two things. "Crawled as" tells you whether Googlebot saw the mobile or desktop version — if your content only appears on desktop, that is your answer. "View crawled page" shows the HTML Google actually received, which is the honest version of your page. If your content is injected by JavaScript and the crawled HTML is an empty shell, no amount of writing will help until that is fixed.
Then use "Test live URL" after making a change, and only request indexing once. Repeated requests do not speed anything up and the daily quota is small.
Questions people ask
Domain property or URL prefix?
Domain, almost always — it covers every subdomain and both protocols in one place. It needs DNS verification, which is a five-minute job wherever your nameservers live.
Why do Search Console and my analytics disagree?
They measure different events at different points, and Search Console samples. Use each for what it is good at rather than trying to reconcile them.
How often should I open Search Console?
Monthly for most sites, plus after any launch, migration or sudden change in traffic. Checking daily turns normal variance into decisions.
How current is the data?
The Page indexing report typically runs several days to a week behind, so a page you published or fixed this week may still show an old status. URL Inspection with a live test is the way to check one page right now.
What Search Console will not tell you
- Anything about competitors. It is your data only.
- Complete query data. Long-tail and rare queries are withheld for privacy, so the totals in Performance will never match the totals elsewhere. This is expected, not a bug.
- Revenue. It stops at the click. Pair it with your own analytics to see what the click did next.
- Real-time anything. Data lags two to three days. Do not diagnose yesterday.