What it is, and what it is not
Search Console is Google’s own report on your site. It is not analytics: it knows nothing about what visitors do once they arrive, and it only covers Google search, not social media or direct visits. What it does know, it knows exactly, because it is the search engine reporting on itself.
That makes it the one tool where the traffic figure is not an estimate. Analytics records only visitors who accept the cookie banner; on a retail site we run ourselves, a month with 337 clicks from Google Shopping showed 54 sessions in analytics. Search Console recorded every click.
Setting it up
- Go to search.google.com/search-console and sign in with a Google account the business controls, not an employee’s personal one.
- Add a property. Choose “Domain” and enter your domain without www; it covers every version of the site at once.
- Verify by adding the DNS record Google gives you at your domain registrar. It takes a few minutes to a few hours to confirm.
- Submit your sitemap under Sitemaps (usually /sitemap.xml).
- Add anyone who works on the site as a user under Settings, rather than sharing the login.
Data starts accumulating from the day you verify, and Google back-fills some. Sixteen months is the maximum it keeps, so export anything you want to compare beyond that.
The four reports worth reading
| Report | The question it answers | What ours said |
|---|---|---|
| Pages (under Indexing) | Which pages does Google have, and why not the others? | 14 indexed, 7 not: 3 redirects, 3 “crawled – currently not indexed”, 1 blocked by robots.txt (our own robots file was blocking the script folder) |
| Performance | Which searches show us, how often, where, and how many click? | 29 queries and 126 impressions in 16 months, all brand misspellings except two: “cybrial manchester reviews” and “can i trust them” |
| Core Web Vitals (under Experience) | Is the site fast and stable for real visitors on phones? | Not enough traffic for real-user data; the lab figures are on the Core Web Vitals guide |
| Links | Who links to us, and to which pages? | Few, and mostly junk domains; the off-page work starts from zero |
Source: Google Search Console exports for cybrial.com, 28 August 2026, and the API pull of 1 September 2026.
Every problem the other guides on this site describe first showed up in one of those four. The robots block was in Pages. The brand-only traffic was in Performance. The reputation gap was in Links.
Reading Performance properly
- Set the date range to a full calendar month and compare it with the same month before. Never the default 3 months against nothing, never 7 days.
- Queries tab: what people typed. Sort by impressions. How many are your own name? That share is your brand dependence.
- Pages tab: which pages earn the impressions. Pages with high impressions and low clicks have a title problem.
- Filter position 11 to 20: the phrases you are on page two for. These are the cheapest improvements on the site.
- Tick Average position and watch the trend across full months, not the daily line.
URL Inspection, for one page at a time
Paste any page address into the search bar at the top. Google tells you whether it is indexed, when it last crawled it, which canonical it chose, and whether it could render it. “Request indexing” asks Google to look again after a fix; it is not a shortcut to ranking and requesting repeatedly does nothing.
The ten minutes a month
- Pages: has the not-indexed count gone up? Read the reasons.
- Performance, full month against previous: impressions, clicks, queries, average position. Note the direction of each.
- Queries: any new phrases at positions 11–20 worth a better page?
- Core Web Vitals: anything gone red on mobile?
- Security and Manual Actions: should say “no issues”. If it does not, stop everything else.
