Google Search Console for Business Owners: 5 Key Reports

Add your site as a property in Search Console and verify that you own it. A domain property — verified through a DNS record at your domain provider — covers every version of your site at once: with and without www, http and https, and any subdomains. If you can't edit DNS, a URL-prefix property verified with an HTML file or tag works too, but it only covers that exact address.

Data starts collecting from the day you verify, so set it up before you need it. If you're planning a redesign, set it up now; you'll want a 'before' picture to compare against.

The Performance report shows the searches your site appeared for, how many times it was shown (impressions), how many people clicked, the click-through rate and your average position. You can filter by page, country and device.

The most useful view for a business owner is the Queries tab sorted by impressions. It shows what people actually type when they find you — often different from what you assumed. A query with many impressions and few clicks usually means you rank on page two, or your title doesn't make people want to click. Both are fixable.

Filter by a single page to see every search it appears for. That tells you what the page is really about in Google's eyes, and whether it matches what you want it to rank for.

The Page indexing report lists which of your pages are indexed and which aren't, grouped by reason. Not every non-indexed page is a problem — redirects, duplicates you've marked with canonicals and deliberately blocked pages belong there.

Pay attention to your important pages. 'Crawled – currently not indexed' and 'Discovered – currently not indexed' on service or product pages usually mean Google doesn't yet think the page is valuable enough, or hasn't got round to it. Better content, stronger internal links from your main pages and time usually fix it. 'Not found (404)' on pages that used to exist often means a redesign changed URLs without redirects.

Paste any URL from your site into the inspection bar at the top. It shows whether the page is indexed, which canonical Google chose, whether it's mobile-friendly and when it was last crawled. The live test fetches the page now, which is useful after you've fixed something.

Once a page is fixed or newly published, you can request indexing. It doesn't guarantee anything and shouldn't be used for every page, but it's a sensible step for a new service page or an important update.

Submit your sitemap — usually at /sitemap.xml — in the Sitemaps report. Search Console then shows whether it was read successfully and how many URLs it found. If the number of discovered URLs is far lower than the pages you have, something is wrong with the sitemap; if it's far higher, you may be listing pages that shouldn't be there.

The Core Web Vitals report groups your pages into good, needs improvement and poor, separately for mobile and desktop, based on real visits from Chrome users. It measures loading (Largest Contentful Paint), responsiveness (Interaction to Next Paint) and visual stability (Cumulative Layout Shift).

Low-traffic sites may see no data here, because there aren't enough real visits to report. In that case, PageSpeed Insights gives a lab measurement for any single page.

This is the checklist I'd give any business owner. It catches most problems early without turning into a second job.

A drop in the Performance report is worrying, but work through it calmly before changing anything. First, check the date range and compare like with like — festival weeks, holidays and seasons change search behaviour. Then see whether the drop is across the whole site or on a few pages, and whether impressions fell (you're shown less) or only clicks (you're shown but chosen less).

A drop on specific pages often points to something on those pages: a changed title, removed content, a broken redirect or an accidental noindex. A site-wide drop right after a redesign usually points to URLs or technical settings. Check Page indexing and the Manual actions report too. If nothing on your side changed, it may be a Google update or new competition — the fix then is better content, not panic edits.

Linking Search Console to Google Analytics lets you see search queries and landing pages next to what visitors did after arriving — whether they enquired, bought or left. That's the step that turns 'we got more clicks' into 'these searches bring customers'.