Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool from Google. It shows how your site performs in Google Search: how many people saw it, which searches brought them, and which technical problems Google found. It is the most important SEO tool for every site owner.
Add your website
Go to search.google.com/search-console and sign in with a Google account. Click Add property . You can choose Domain (covers all subdomains and both http and https) or URL prefix (one exact address). Verify that you own the site. The Domain property needs a DNS record. For a URL prefix you can use an HTML file, a meta tag, Google Analytics, or Google Tag Manager. <meta name="google-site-verification" content="your-verification-code-here">After verification, data starts to come in. It may take a few days to see the full data. Main reports and what they tell you
Report What you learn Performance Total clicks, impressions, average CTR and average position, by query, page, country and device Pages (Indexing) Which pages are indexed, and why others are not (noindex, duplicate, not found and similar) URL Inspection The status of one URL: indexed or not, canonical, last crawl, and a live test. You can ask for indexing Sitemaps Submit sitemaps and see how many URLs were found. See XML Sitemap Core Web Vitals Which groups of pages are good or slow. See Page Speed Links Top linked pages, linking sites and anchor texts. See Backlinks Manual actions and Security issues Messages if Google finds a spam or a hacking problem Enhancements Reports for the structured data types that your site uses
Understand the Performance report
Impressions: how many times your page was shown in the results.Clicks: how many times people clicked.CTR: clicks divided by impressions.Average position: the average ranking position of your page for those searches.Easy things to do with the data
Find pages with many impressions and a low CTR. Improve their title and description. See Title Tag . Find searches where you are on position 8 to 20. A better page or more links can move them to the first page. Find new keywords you did not think about, and create content for them. Check the Pages report for “Crawled, currently not indexed” and “Not found (404)”, and fix what you can. After you publish an important page, use URL Inspection and request indexing. Search Console vs Google Analytics
Search Console Google Analytics What happens before the click, in the Google results What the visitors do after they come to the website Search queries, impressions, indexing Sessions, pages, behavior, conversions
Note:
Check Search Console at least once a week. It will warn you about problems before they become big. Next: Google Analytics.
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