How to Use Google Search Console
Not a tour of the buttons, because those move. This is what each part of the tool answers, what to check and how often, plus the handful of settings and features worth understanding before you ignore the rest.
Most People Set It Up And Never Return
The commonest state we find a property in is verified, accumulating data faithfully and unopened since the day it was connected. Nothing about the tool is at fault. The value is entirely in looking, which makes this a page about building a habit rather than learning an interface.
Why it gets abandoned. Nothing prompts you.
There is no invoice, no deadline and no customer waiting. A report nobody has to read is a report nobody reads, particularly one that opens on numbers rather than on a problem.
What that costs. Late discovery.
Every problem this tool reports gets more expensive with time. A page dropping out of the index, a section quietly declining or a security notice sitting unread are all considerably cheaper to deal with in week one.
Why we do not teach the screens. They keep moving.
Sections get renamed, merged and retired. Anybody who learned this tool as a sequence of clicks has to relearn it every couple of years, whereas somebody who understands what each part answers can find it whatever it is called this month.
What the abandoned properties have in common. Nobody owns the job.
It belongs to whoever set it up, who is usually not the person who would act on what it says. Reporting attached to nobody in particular quietly stops being reporting at all.
What this page gives you instead. A rhythm and a map.
What the sections are for, what to look at and how often, plus the features that are genuinely worth knowing about. Block three is the part to keep.
What The Sections Are For
Four questions. Every part of the tool belongs to one of them. Hold it that way and the naming stops mattering.
What did we appear for. The performance reporting.
Which searches brought your pages up, how often, plus whether anybody clicked. This is the part businesses want and the part they read least carefully. The performance report guide covers it, since the totals on their own are close to useless.
What has Google stored. The indexing reporting.
Which pages exist as far as search is concerned and why the rest do not. The page indexing guide covers that, including why a large excluded count is usually normal.
What is broken. Errors, penalties and security.
Three separate categories that get conflated. Most reported items are not urgent and one category genuinely is. Telling them apart is what our errors guide is for.
How did the site behave. The technical reporting.
How real visitors experienced the pages rather than how a test scored them. That distinction confuses nearly everybody and it has its own guide.
Why the naming keeps changing. Reports get merged and retired.
One report in this tool has been called three different things and another was withdrawn entirely, which is why so much published guidance describes screens nobody can open. Each of our report guides states what exists today and carries a review date.
Plus one diagnostic that sits outside all four. Single page inspection.
Everything above is an aggregate. Inspecting one address tells you what Google holds for that page specifically, which is the fastest way to settle an argument about whether a change took effect.
A Working Rhythm
This is what turns the tool into a practice rather than a tab. Three tiers. The whole thing takes under an hour a month for a normal business site.
Weekly, five minutes. Anything urgent.
Look for a manual action, a security notice or a sudden collapse in one of the headline figures. That is all. You are checking for a fire rather than reading the reports.
Monthly, half an hour. The real look.
Performance compared against the same period last year, indexing compared against last month, then any error category that has grown. Export the figures while you are there.
Monthly, the bit people skip. Look for decline.
Sort by the biggest falls rather than the biggest totals. Reports get opened hoping for good news, which is precisely why quiet decline goes unnoticed for months.
Only when something has happened. The technical reporting.
After a redesign, a platform change, a migration or a sudden drop. Speed and indexing reporting checked idly produces anxiety rather than action.
What to write down. Context.
A line each month recording what changed on the site. New pages, a redesign, a price change or a competitor arriving. Numbers without context explain nothing eighteen months later.
What not to do daily. Any of it.
The data arrives on a delay and moves a few percent for no reason at all. A business checking every morning is reading noise and will eventually act on it, which is worse than not looking.
Why this beats a deep audit. Timing.
A monthly half hour catches things while they are small. An occasional thorough audit finds the same problems considerably later and charges more for the privilege.
Exporting Your Data
The tool holds a limited history and older data falls away permanently. If you want to know how this January compared with last January, the only way is to have kept your own record, because the tool will not have it.
Why the window matters. Comparison is everything.
Nearly every useful question in search reporting is a comparison. A figure with nothing to compare against tells you almost nothing. Seasonality means the comparison you usually want is a year back rather than a month.
What to export. Less than you think.
The queries, the pages and the headline figures, once a month. Nobody needs everything and a file nobody can read is the same as no file.
Where to keep it. Somewhere dull.
A spreadsheet in the business's own storage, named by month, with the context note alongside it. It is not glamorous and it is the single most valuable habit in this guide.
What it enables later. Real diagnosis.
When something drops in two years, your own history is the only thing that establishes whether it is unusual. Without it you are guessing about your own business.
What it cannot do. Work backwards.
Exports cannot be taken for a period that has already fallen out of the window. This is the one task on this page with a deadline attached to it.
Email Alerts
The tool will email somebody when it notices certain problems. Switch this on, make sure it reaches a person rather than an unattended inbox, then understand what it is and is not.
What it tells you about. Notable problems.
New errors appearing, security issues, manual actions and significant changes in indexing. The categories that genuinely warrant an interruption.
The caveat. They arrive after the fact.
This is a notification rather than a warning. By the time the email lands, whatever it describes has already happened and has usually been happening for a while, given how the reporting lags.
Which is why they do not replace looking. Silence is not safety.
Plenty of the things worth knowing produce no alert at all, including gradual decline, which is the commonest problem we are asked to investigate.
Where they should go. A person with authority.
An address somebody reads, ideally with the agency copied rather than the reverse. Alerts sent only to a supplier are alerts the business never sees.
What to do with the ones you cannot act on. File them.
Some alerts describe things only a developer can address. Forwarding them with a date attached is a legitimate response. Letting them accumulate unread is how a small technical problem becomes an expensive one.
What to do when one arrives. Read it properly.
Most alerts describe something calibrated as urgent by a machine rather than by your business. Our errors guide covers which categories deserve the afternoon.
Who Should Have Access
The business should own the property. Agencies, developers and consultants should be added as users. That single arrangement decides whether your search data is yours when a relationship ends. It is very frequently the wrong way round.
How it goes wrong. The agency verifies it.
A supplier sets the property up on its own account during onboarding. Nothing sinister is intended. Two years later the arrangement ends and the history, the exports and the ownership go with them.
Why that matters more than it sounds. The history is irreplaceable.
You cannot recreate the past. A business that loses a property loses the record it would need to judge whether anything has improved since, which is the awkward part.
The correct arrangement. Owner is the business.
Verified on an account the business controls, ideally not a personal address belonging to one member of staff either. Suppliers added and removed as needed, which takes moments.
What to ask a supplier. One question.
Ask which account owns the property and to be made an owner if you are not one. A reasonable supplier does it that afternoon. The reaction to being asked is informative in itself.
Where this connects. Our position on ownership.
The same commitment runs through our material on hiring an agency: the client owns the accounts, the data and the work. Anything else makes leaving expensive by design.
The Removals Tool
There is a facility for hiding a page from results urgently. It exists for a narrow and legitimate purpose, which is something that should not be publicly visible right now. It is not a way to deal with a page you dislike.
What it is for. Emergencies.
A page published in error. A document containing information that should not be public. A draft that escaped. Content that has to come down while you sort out the underlying problem.
What it actually does. Hides, temporarily.
It suppresses the page from results for a period. The page still exists, it is still reachable and the hide expires, which is the part people miss.
What it is not. A deletion.
Nothing is removed from your site and nothing is permanently removed from Google. A business using this to bury an unflattering page has bought itself a few weeks.
The permanent answer. Change the page.
Take it down, put a proper instruction on it or fix what is wrong with it. Our technical material covers the ways of doing that properly and the difference between them.
The order to work in. Hide, then fix.
Use the temporary hide to buy time when something is genuinely sensitive, then deal with the cause before it expires. Anybody treating the hide as the solution will be surprised in a month.
International Targeting
There is reporting and settings covering which countries and languages a site is aimed at. If you are a UK business serving UK customers from one site, this is not where your attention belongs.
Who it is for. Sites with real versions.
A business running separate language versions has to tell search engines which is which. The same applies to separate sites for different countries. That is a genuine requirement with a genuine mechanism.
Who it is not for. Nearly everybody else.
A single English language site serving one country needs nothing here. Fiddling with it in the hope of appearing more British is a category error.
Where the actual work lives. On the site.
The instructions connecting language versions to each other are implemented in the pages rather than in this tool, which mostly reports on whether they are being read correctly.
What it can flag. Contradictions.
Where the instructions on the site disagree with each other, this is one of the few places anybody finds out. That is genuinely useful to the small number of businesses it applies to.
Where to read about it properly. The technical material.
Our technical guidance owns the language and region markup, including the ways it commonly gets implemented wrongly. This tool is only the place you find out.
There Is No Competitor View
This tool reports on properties you have verified control of. That is the entire scope. There is no competitor section, no market comparison and no benchmark. There never has been, whatever you have read.
Why people expect one. Everything else has one.
Paid platforms lead with competitor comparison because it sells, so a free tool from Google is assumed to have something similar buried in it. It does not.
What people actually want. Two different things.
Usually which searches competitors are winning. Sometimes how their own performance compares with a typical business in the sector. This tool answers neither.
What it can tell you instead. Where you are being passed over.
Searches where you appear and nobody clicks show you which results are beating you. Looking at what actually ranks for those is a manual job and it is more informative than any dashboard.
Where the estimates come from. Modelling, though we name no tools.
The competitor figures you have seen elsewhere are modelled from sampled results rather than measured. Useful for direction and not comparable with the numbers here.
What to do with that. Use each for its job.
Direct reporting for your own site, estimates for a view of the market. Never put the two in the same column expecting them to reconcile.
It Tells You What Happened, Not What To Do
Every report in this tool is a diagnosis. It will tell you that a page is not indexed, that clicks fell or that something is slow. It will not tell you why in any useful detail, nor what to change. That second job is separate and it is where the value is.
Why that distinction matters. It sets expectations.
Businesses arrive expecting instructions and find measurements. The disappointment is understandable and the tool is not underperforming. It was never built to advise.
What the gap contains. Judgement.
Deciding which findings matter, what they imply about the site and which single change to make first. None of that is in the data and all of it is the actual work.
The commonest failure. Reporting instead of acting.
A business reading its reports diligently for a year while changing nothing has achieved nothing. Plenty of monthly reporting exists to demonstrate activity rather than to cause it.
The second commonest. Acting on noise.
Reacting to a small movement, changing several things at once and losing the ability to tell what worked. Our measuring performance material covers establishing that a change is real first.
Where this series turns into work. One page.
Using the data to improve content is the bridge from reading to changing. Everything else sits on the Google Search Console guide.
A report
nobody acts
on is just
a tab.
The tool is free, the data is reliable and the only thing that produces a result is somebody looking at it on a rhythm and then changing something. That is the whole job. It is also considerably less glamorous than most of what gets sold alongside it.
What our monthly work on it involves:
If your property is owned by a former supplier, that is the first thing worth fixing.
Every guide.
One tool.
Getting set up and verified, using the reports properly, the performance and indexing data, finding what is broken, finding what is being passed over and turning any of it into work worth doing.
