Google Search Console: Setting It Up and Reading What Matters
The short version
- Search Console is free and the only place Google tells you what it thinks of your site.
- Verify with a Domain property if you can. It covers every subdomain and both protocols.
- Four reports carry most of the value: Performance, Pages, URL Inspection, Crawl stats.
- Data starts from the day you verify. There is no backfill, so set it up now.
Every other SEO tool guesses at what Google is doing with your site. Search Console tells you, because it is Google. It is free, it takes ten minutes to set up, and most site owners either never open it or open it and bounce off the wall of reports without finding the four that matter.
1. Choosing a property type
Two options, and the choice matters more than it looks.
A Domain property covers everything on the domain: http and https, www and non-www, and every subdomain. One property, complete picture. It requires DNS verification, which means adding a TXT record at your registrar.
A URL-prefix property covers exactly one protocol and hostname. https://example.com and https://www.example.com are separate properties with separate data. It accepts several verification methods, so it is easier to set up.
Choose Domain if you can manage DNS. Splitting your data across four URL-prefix properties, then wondering why each shows a fraction of your traffic, is a common and avoidable annoyance.
2. Verifying
For a Domain property, Google gives you a TXT record to add at your DNS host. Add it, then click verify. Propagation is usually minutes, occasionally an hour. Leave the record in place permanently, because removing it later un-verifies the property.
For a URL-prefix property you have four routes:
- HTML file upload. Drop the supplied file in your web root. Simple and reliable. Do not delete it afterwards.
- HTML tag. A meta tag in your
<head>. Fine if your theme has a header-scripts field. - Google Analytics. Works if the tracking code is already on the site and you use the same Google account.
- Google Tag Manager. Same idea via the container snippet.
All four are equivalent once verified. Pick whichever you can do in five minutes.
3. Submitting your sitemap
Open Sitemaps in the left menu, enter the path, submit. Usually sitemap.xml, though WordPress core serves wp-sitemap.xml and most SEO plugins serve sitemap_index.xml.
Come back a day later. You want status Success and a discovered-URL count roughly matching your real page count. Wildly off in either direction means something is wrong with the file, which the sitemap guide covers.
Add the sitemap line to robots.txt as well, so crawlers that never see your Search Console account can still find it.
4. The Performance report
This is where the real information is. It shows the queries people searched, how often you appeared, and how often they clicked.
Turn on all four metrics at the top: clicks, impressions, average CTR, average position. Three are on by default and average position is the one usually missing.
Two things worth doing regularly, neither of which takes long.
Find pages that almost rank. Filter to positions 5 to 20. These are queries where you are on page one or two but not high enough to earn clicks. Improving an existing page that ranks eleventh is far easier than creating something new and hoping.
Find high impressions with low CTR. If a page is seen 5,000 times and clicked 40, the ranking is fine and the result is unappealing. That is a title and description problem, and it is one of the few fixes that can pay off within days.
Compare periods rather than reading absolute numbers. Seasonality makes single-month figures misleading.
5. The Pages report
Formerly Coverage, and the report that answers "why is my page not in Google". It splits every known URL into indexed and not indexed, with a reason for each exclusion.
The reasons you will actually see:
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Discovered - currently not indexed | Google knows the URL, has not crawled it yet. Often a quality or budget signal. |
| Crawled - currently not indexed | It read the page and chose not to index. A content judgement. |
| Duplicate without user-selected canonical | Looks like a duplicate and you did not say which version wins. |
| Duplicate, Google chose different canonical | You declared one, your other signals contradicted it. |
| Excluded by noindex tag | Working as instructed. Only a problem if unintended. |
| Blocked by robots.txt | Crawler was refused. Check that was deliberate. |
| Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt | The classic mix-up. See below. |
| Soft 404 | A missing or empty page returning 200. |
Two of those deserve attention. Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt means you blocked the crawl but the URL got listed anyway, which is exactly what noindex vs disallow is about. And Crawled - currently not indexed is not a technical fault at all: Google read your page and was not impressed. No amount of configuration fixes that one.
6. URL Inspection
The search bar at the top. Paste any URL on your property and it tells you what Google knows about that exact address.
Read three things. Whether the URL is on Google. Whether crawling is allowed and whether indexing is allowed, reported separately, which is the distinction most people conflate. And the Google-selected canonical, which is worth comparing against the one you declared.
Test live URL fetches the page fresh. This is the single most useful debugging button in the product, because it shows you the rendered HTML and a screenshot of what Googlebot actually got. If your page depends on JavaScript, or a security rule treats bots differently, this is where you find out.
Request indexing pushes a recrawl. Use it after fixing something. It is rate limited, and firing it at hundreds of URLs does nothing useful.
7. Crawl stats
Buried under Settings, and worth finding. It shows crawl requests over time, average response time, and a breakdown by response code and file type.
Average response time is the number to watch. Googlebot throttles itself against slow servers, so this is effectively a ceiling on how much of your site gets crawled. The response-code breakdown is the other one: a large share of 404s, 301s or 5xx means crawl effort spent on nothing. HTTP status codes covers what each means.
8. What you can safely ignore at first
Search Console has grown a lot of reports. Most are situational.
Core Web Vitals needs real traffic before it has data, and reports field measurements rather than lab scores. Worth checking once you have volume. Enhancements only appear if you use the relevant structured data. Links is interesting but rarely actionable. Manual actions and Security issues should both read "no issues detected", and if they ever do not, that jumps to the top of your list ahead of everything on this page.
9. A sensible routine
Monthly is enough for most sites. Check Performance against the previous period for anything that moved sharply. Skim Pages for a rising count of not-indexed URLs. Confirm the sitemap still reads Success. Glance at Manual actions.
Then act on one thing rather than ten. The page sitting at position eleven, or the page with impressions and no clicks, is usually the highest-value hour you can spend.
For a full pass over the site itself, the technical SEO audit works through the checks in order.