Google Search Console is free, it comes from Google, and it tells you which searches you show up for, how many people click and which of your pages are indexed. Installing it is not the problem: the problem is that you open it once, see a dozen charts and never go back. Four things a month are enough, and this article is about which four, and which ones to ignore.
What Google Search Console is and how it differs from analytics
Analytics tells you what happens inside your site: how many people come in, where they go and where they leave. Search Console tells you what happens before: what people type into Google, how often you appear and how often they click. They are two halves of the same story and you look at them separately.
The practical difference: analytics shows you whoever already arrived; Search Console shows you whoever nearly arrived and did not. That is where almost everything you can fix lives.
First things first: check Google has your site
Before looking at numbers, it is worth knowing whether Google has indexed your pages, because if it has not there is nothing to analyse. The full case, with its usual causes, is in why your website does not appear on Google.
Inspecting one specific page
You paste the exact address at the top and it tells you whether the page is indexed, when Google last came by and whether anything is wrong. Google explains it in the URL inspection tool. It is the quickest check there is and the most reassuring one after publishing something.
The four numbers in the performance report
- Impressions: how many times you appeared in the results.
- Clicks: how many times somebody actually clicked.
- CTR: the percentage between those two.
- Average position: roughly where you tend to appear.
The first two are facts. The last two are averages, and an average lumps together things that have nothing to do with each other.
Which of the four misleads the most
Average position. Google warns that in the chart it is the average position of the top result from your site, so it mixes searches for your own name, where you come first, with the one you actually care about, where you come fourteenth. If it moves half a position, nothing has happened. Always read clicks and impressions before position.
The queries already bringing you people
This is the part worth the time. Sort by clicks and you see, in real words, how people look for you. There are almost always three or four ways of saying it you had not thought of, and those go straight into your page titles and your next articles. How to choose them is in how to choose keywords, but here there is nothing to choose: the customer is telling you.
One warning so you are not disappointed: many queries come grouped, or do not show at all, because Google holds back the ones very few people make. The totals at the top never match the sum of the table, and that is not your mistake.
The ones you are about to win
Filter by position between eight and twenty. These are searches where you already appear, but on page two or at the bottom of page one, where hardly anyone looks. Going from position twelve to six multiplies clicks without writing anything new: usually a better title, a longer paragraph or a link from another page of yours is enough.
Titles and what shows in the result are covered in title tag and meta description, which is the first thing to touch when a page has a low CTR with plenty of impressions.
The pages taking the traffic
Same report, by page this time. There is usually a surprise in there: an old article pulling more people than the service page, or a page you did not know existed. That tells you where to put the contact button and what is worth expanding.
The ones that show and nobody opens
Pages with plenty of impressions and almost no clicks. They appear, but nobody goes in, and it is nearly always a title that does not say what the person was looking for. It is the cheapest fix of all: change the title, wait a month and look at the same number again. If it has not moved, the problem is elsewhere and you go looking somewhere else.
When you have just changed a page
You can ask Google to come round again. Two things are worth knowing, and Google says both on its page about asking for a URL to be recrawled: there is a submission quota and asking repeatedly speeds nothing up. Crawls can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.
Nor does it guarantee indexing: submitting a request does not oblige Google to include the page.
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What to do when traffic drops
It happens, and the first rule is not to touch anything the same day. Google has a whole document on what to look at when search traffic falls, and it is one of the most useful things it has published.
The reasons Google lists, in order of likelihood
- Seasonality. In August almost everything drops, and in January too.
- An algorithm update, which hits the whole sector at once.
- A technical problem: the site down, blocked or slow for a few days.
- A migration done without redirecting the old addresses.
- A security or spam problem, which shows up flagged in the panel.
Google recommends one specific thing that hardly anyone does: switch the period to sixteen months and compare the drop with the same dates last year. Half the scares are settled right there.
What to ignore in Google Search Console
- The single day. Data takes a couple of days and one Tuesday means nothing. You read weeks or months.
- Searches for your own name. Those people already knew you; if you do not separate them, everything looks fine.
- Coverage charts with odd warnings about pages you did not know existed, usually filters and parameters of no consequence.
- Average position as the mark for the month. We have covered why.
How often to check Google Search Console
Once a month, calmly. Checking daily changes nothing and does change your mood: SEO moves in months, not days, as we explain in how long SEO takes to work.
The twenty-minute review
Compare the last three months with the three before, write down clicks and impressions, pull the five queries with most clicks, the five sitting between position eight and twenty, and the two pages that have dropped. That half page is your work for the month, and nothing else is needed.
Search Console and your Google listing are not the same thing
People mix them up constantly. Search Console is about your website; the business profile has its own statistics, with calls, directions requests and route views. Both matter and you read them together, and the listing side is in what to do in your first month with a Google listing.
What Google Search Console will not tell you
It does not tell you who phoned, or whether that visit ended in a sale, or what the competition is doing. It also misses everything that happens outside Google: word of mouth, social media or the sign on your door. To put all that together there is where your customers come from, which is the question that actually pays the bills.
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What all this does for your positioning in AI assistants
The real queries Search Console hands you are the same questions people now put to an artificial intelligence assistant. Writing them on your site word for word, with the answer underneath, is the basis of GEO and of any SEO work that is not smoke. You do not have to guess what people ask: it is written in the report.
If an agency runs it, ask for owner access
Being sent a screenshot report once a month is not good enough. Ownership of Search Console has to sit with your company, the same as the domain or the Google listing, and you ask for that in writing. We cover it in changing web agency, and what to ask for every month in how to tell if your agency is doing its job.
What it costs to have someone run it
Our prices are published. The presence plans are 400, 750 and 1,500 euros a month, plus VAT and with no lock-in, including articles on your site and on your Google listing, replies to every review and positioning in the AI assistants. If you do not have a website yet, Tu Landing is 100 € a month and Tu Web 200. Reading Search Console is not billed separately: it is part of doing the job.
From Sant Antoni de Calonge, with clients in Girona and Barcelona
If you have it installed and have never opened it, send us your website address and we will tell you which three things we would change this month, no strings attached. And if you do not have it, it takes ten minutes to set up and it only starts collecting data from then on, so the sooner the better.
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