Read your own Search Console in ten minutes
Google’s free report tells you exactly how people find your site. Three screens are worth your time and the rest is noise — what a drop means, what to fix first, and when to ask for help.
Google gives every site owner a free report on how its pages are found, and most owners have never opened it. The ones who have usually started at the top of the first screen, which is where the platform puts the numbers that feel good and mean the least. Here is the order we use when we open a client’s account for the first time. It takes about ten minutes.
Which three reports matter?
Search Console has a long left-hand menu and most of it is for developers. For an owner, three screens carry nearly everything worth knowing.
| Report | The question it answers | What to look at |
|---|---|---|
| Performance | What do people type, and where do they land? | Queries and pages, sorted by impressions, over the last few months |
| Pages | What can Google see, and what has it dropped? | The list of pages marked not indexed, and the reasons given |
| Core Web Vitals | Is the site fast and stable enough on a phone? | Which pages are marked poor, and whether that list is growing |
Performance is the one you will spend most of your ten minutes in. Switch it to show pages rather than queries, sort by impressions, and read the top of the list. That is what your site is actually known for, which is often not what you thought it was known for. Then switch to queries and read the words people typed. Those are the words your pages should be using.
The Pages report looks technical and is not. It is a list of every address Google has met on your site and a verdict on each: indexed, or not, with a reason. Read the reasons rather than the counts. A page marked not found was deleted or moved; a page marked redirected has been replaced; a page marked crawled but not indexed was read and judged not worth keeping, which is a note about quality rather than an error. Core Web Vitals is simpler still. It groups your pages into good, needs improvement and poor, as measured on real visitors’ phones, and the only thing worth tracking is whether the poor group is growing.
What does a drop usually mean?
A drop in clicks is the reason most people open the report, and the instinct is to assume Google changed its mind about you. Occasionally that is true. Far more often the cause is something somebody did to the site, and the date of the drop points straight at it.
- A page was removed, renamed or redirected. Check the Pages report for anything newly marked not found. This is the most common cause and the easiest to miss.
- The site was rebuilt or the template changed. New themes drop headings, strip descriptions and change page addresses without anyone meaning to.
- A tracking change. If the property was reconfigured or the domain moved, you may be comparing two different things.
- The season. Compare the same weeks last year before you compare the last four weeks with the four before them.
- A competitor published something better for the query. Search the term yourself, in a private window, and look at who is above you.
- A Google update. Real, and the last thing to blame, because there is nothing to do about it except make the pages better.
Work down the list in that order. If you reach the bottom without finding the cause, the drop is probably a ranking change and the fix is editorial rather than technical.
Which pages do you fix first?
Not the home page, and not the page you like most. The pages worth an afternoon are the ones where a small change moves a real number.
- Pages with many impressions and few clicks. People see the result and do not choose it. The title and description are the fix, and it is an hour’s work.
- Pages sitting just off the first page of results. They are close. A better heading, a clearer answer and a link from a stronger page can carry them over.
- Pages that lost clicks recently. Open the page, then open the archived version, and look for what changed.
- Pages Google refuses to index, when they are pages you care about. The reason is usually stated plainly in the Pages report and usually fixable.
Leave alone the pages that already rank first for their query. Edits there are more likely to cost you than to help, and the time is better spent one rung down.
Keep a dated note of every change you make. When the number moves a few weeks later you will want to know which edit moved it, and the report will not tell you.
What should you ignore?
Average position across the whole site. It blends a page that ranks first for its own name with a page that ranks somewhere far down for a term you never targeted, and the result means nothing. Look at position per query, for queries you actually want.
Total impressions. They rise when Google shows your page for more searches, which includes searches you have no business appearing in. Clicks are the number; impressions are the context.
The long tail of enhancement warnings. Breadcrumbs, sitelinks, structured data notices. They are worth a developer’s hour at some point, and they are almost never the reason a page is not being found.
When should you call someone?
Most of what the report shows you can act on yourself, and the pages we fix first for clients are the same pages the list above would have sent you to. Some situations are not do-it-yourself.
- A manual action notice. Google has flagged the site for something it considers a violation, and the fix needs to be exact.
- A site move or a rebuild coming up. The damage from a bad migration is done on the day, and it is far cheaper to prevent than to repair.
- The Pages report shows a large share of the site marked not indexed and you do not know why.
- The Core Web Vitals report has gone from mostly good to mostly poor and nothing on the page changed. Something underneath it did.
- You have fixed the obvious things and the number has not moved for a season.
Whoever you call, open the report with them on the first call and ask them to read it back to you in plain words. If they cannot say what the top queries are and which pages carry them, they have not looked.
The ten-minute version
- Performance, pages tab, sorted by impressions. Read the top. That is what you are known for.
- Performance, queries tab. Read the words. Those are the words your pages should use.
- Compare the last few months with the same months last year, not with the months before.
- Pages report. Anything newly not indexed that you care about is your first fix.
- Core Web Vitals. If the poor list is growing, the site is getting heavier.
- Pick one page with high impressions and low clicks. Rewrite its title and description today.
Do that once a month and you will know more about how your site is found than most of the people selling you search services. The report is free. The ten minutes is the only cost.