Search Console Basics: See How Google Sees You
Google Analytics tells you what visitors do on your site. Google Search Console tells you something equally valuable: how Google itself sees your site. Which searches show your pages, how often people click, whether Google can access everything, and what problems it found. It is free, it is official, and every website owner should have it. By the end of this article, yours will be set up and you will know how to read it.
Setting it up
Go to search.google.com/search-console and sign in with your Google account. Add your site as a property. You will be asked to verify ownership, which usually means adding a small DNS record at your domain registrar or uploading a verification file to your site. If your domain’s DNS is managed in your InterProWebHost hosting account, the DNS record method takes only a few minutes. Once verified, Google starts collecting data, though the most useful reports need a few weeks of history before they mean much.
The Performance report: your search report card
This is the report you will open most. It shows the actual search queries people typed that displayed your site, how many times your pages appeared (impressions), how many times people clicked, and your average position. Sort by impressions to find queries where you appear but rarely get clicked: those pages need better titles and descriptions. Look for queries you did not expect: they reveal demand you could serve with new content. This report is the closest thing to reading your customers’ minds.
Pages: what Google has indexed
The Pages section under Indexing shows which of your pages Google has in its index and flags ones it could not include, with reasons. Some exclusions are fine, like admin pages. But if important pages are missing, the reasons tell you what to fix: it might be a noindex tag left over from development, a page blocked in robots.txt, or a crawl error. After a site launch or redesign, check here to confirm Google can see everything it should. Our launch checklist covers this step too.
Core Web Vitals and mobile usability
Search Console grades your pages on loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability, grouped as Core Web Vitals, plus a dedicated mobile usability report. These feed directly into rankings. If pages are flagged as poor, the specific issues listed point at the fixes, which usually come back to the fundamentals in Make Your Website Faster: 5 Fixes Anyone Can Do. You do not need perfect scores on every page. Fix the poor ones, starting with your most-visited pages.
Links: who points at you
The Links report shows which outside sites link to yours and which of your pages get linked most. Links remain one of Google’s trust signals, so this is worth a glance each month. If a reputable site linked to you, that is worth knowing, and perhaps worth thanking them for. If you spot spammy links you had nothing to do with, do not panic: Google is generally good at ignoring them, and you should not pay anyone who offers to “clean” them for you.
What to check monthly
Once a month, spend fifteen minutes here: glance at Performance for new queries and slipping positions, confirm no important pages dropped out of the index, and check that no new mobile or speed issues appeared. That is the whole routine. Combined with the visitor behavior in Google Analytics 4, you now see both halves of the picture: how people find you, and what they do when they arrive.
Still stuck? Open a support ticket and tell us your domain name and whether Search Console is verified yet. We will help you get it working.