Google Search Console is a free tool that shows how your site appears in Google Search and whether Google can find and index your pages. To use it, verify ownership of your site, submit a sitemap, then check three reports regularly: Performance (what people searched and clicked), Page indexing (what Google could and could not index) and Security issues. Fifteen minutes a month is enough to start.
Step 1: Verify your site
Search Console offers two property types (Verify your site ownership):
| Property type | Covers | How to verify |
|---|---|---|
| Domain | All protocols and subdomains | DNS record (TXT or CNAME) at your domain provider |
| URL-prefix | Only the exact prefix you enter | HTML file, HTML tag, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager or DNS |
A Domain property gives the fullest picture, but needs access to your DNS. Google advises keeping the DNS record in place after verification, or you may lose verification, and adding more than one method so verification survives if one breaks. If you cannot verify, ask a current owner to grant you access. Keep ownership in the business’s name, not tied to an ex-contractor.
Step 2: Submit your sitemap
A sitemap lists the URLs you want Google to find. Google’s guidance: post it on your site, preferably at the root, confirm Googlebot can access it with a live URL inspection, then paste the URL in the Sitemaps report. Statuses are Success, Has errors and Couldn’t fetch, and crawling the URLs inside can take time even when the sitemap itself is fetched immediately (Sitemaps report). Most website platforms generate a sitemap automatically.
Step 3: Read the Performance report
The Performance report shows clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, split by query, page, country, device, search appearance and date. The default view covers the past three months (Performance report).
What to look for:
- Queries: the words people used before seeing your site. Are they relevant to what you sell?
- Pages: which pages bring search visitors, and which important pages bring almost none.
- High impressions, low click-through rate: the page appears but the title or snippet does not earn clicks. Rewrite them.
- Countries and devices: do they match the people you want?
Use date comparison to see change, and be cautious about daily fluctuations. Google’s SEO guidance recommends waiting a few weeks before judging whether an update worked (Google SEO Starter Guide).
Step 4: Check the Page indexing report
This report shows which URLs Google has crawled and indexed, and the reasons for those that are not indexed, such as robots.txt blocks, noindex tags, duplicates, redirects, soft 404s and server errors. Google stresses that “not indexed” is not always a problem: check whether each reason is intended, and focus on important pages like the home page and key landing pages (Page indexing report).
A practical workflow:
- Open the report and filter by your sitemap to see submitted pages.
- Review the reasons list. Anything on a priority page is urgent.
- Use the URL Inspection tool on individual URLs to see their status.
- Fix the cause on your site, then click Validate fix. Validation can take up to about two weeks, and an issue stays open until 90 days after its last instance is gone.
Step 5: Watch security and manual issues
Open the Security issues report to see hacked content, malware or deceptive pages. If something appears, fix it throughout the site, then request a review (Security issues report). The website security basics article covers prevention.
A simple monthly routine
- Performance: compare the last 28 days to the previous period. Note the top pages and any sudden falls.
- Page indexing: confirm priority pages are indexed and no new errors have appeared.
- Sitemaps: confirm status is Success.
- Security: confirm there are no issues.
- Write down one action and do it.
Common beginner mistakes
- Reading average position as a precise ranking.
- Panicking about every non-indexed URL, including intended ones such as admin or filter pages.
- Not verifying before a redesign. Before a launch, set up monitoring first; see how to plan a redesign without losing SEO value.
- Treating Search Console as a lead report. It stops at the click, so pair it with analytics, as covered in SEO reporting for business owners.
For online shops with many filter URLs, e-commerce SEO for category and product pages explains what to expect in the indexing report.
Where Radiance Impact fits
Radiance Impact’s Growth team works on search visibility and SEO, including setting up and interpreting Search Console. See /growth or contact us.
Sources
- Verify your site ownership, Google Search Console Help
- Sitemaps report, Google Search Console Help
- Performance report (Search), Google Search Console Help
- Page indexing report, Google Search Console Help
- Security issues report, Google Search Console Help
- Google SEO Starter Guide, Google Search Central
