Google Search Console in Plain English for Business Owners

Google Search Console is Google's free report on how your website does in search. It shows which searches brought up your pages, how many people clicked, and which pages Google has left out of its results. You set it up once, through the company that manages your domain, and after that four reports opened once a month cover most of what an owner needs to know.

Nothing in it changes your rankings. It shows you what Google already sees, which is the part many owners only ever hear about secondhand from whoever runs their website.

Setting it up: choose Domain, not URL prefix

When you add a site, Search Console asks you to pick a property type. Pick Domain. Google's help pages currently describe a Domain property as covering every version of your address (with or without www, http or https, plus any subdomains) in one view. A URL-prefix property covers only the exact address you type, so a site that answers at both the www and plain addresses can end up with its data split across two properties.

The trade-off is verification. Google says a Domain property can only be verified through your domain name provider, which means adding one DNS record. It sounds technical. It's mostly copy and paste:

1. Sign in to Google Search Console with a Google account that belongs to the business, not to an employee or your web designer. The account that verifies becomes a verified owner, and that should be you.
2. Choose Add property, pick Domain, and type your domain with no https or www in front, like yourbakery.com.
3. Google shows a TXT record: a line of text that starts with google-site-verification. Copy it.
4. In another tab, log in wherever your domain's DNS is managed. That's usually the registrar where you bought the domain. If someone moved your DNS to a service such as Cloudflare, the records live there instead, and changes made at the registrar won't do anything.
5. Add a new record of type TXT. Leave the host or name field as @ or blank (registrars differ), paste the text into the value field, and save.
6. Go back to Search Console and click Verify.

If it fails, don't start over. Google's help page on verifying site ownership currently says a manually added record can take two or three days to show up, and that you should leave the record in place afterward to stay verified. Check the current version of that page if anything on your screen looks different from these steps.

Once you're in, open Sitemaps in the left menu and submit your sitemap address. Your website platform may already create one for you; its help pages will give the exact address. (If you're still choosing a platform, the Squarespace, Wix and WordPress comparison covers what each one lets you control.) Then leave it alone for a few weeks before you read anything into the numbers.

The four reports worth a monthly look

The left-hand menu is long, and most of it is meant for developers. Google renames sections now and then, so the labels below may drift, but these are the four an owner should open.

Performance: what people searched before they found you

This is the main report. Across the top are four totals: clicks, impressions, average click-through rate and average position. Below them is a table with tabs. Queries lists the searches your site appeared for. Pages lists which of your pages appeared.

Set the date range to the last three months and use the Compare option to line it up against the three months before. If your work is seasonal, compare against the same months last year once you have a year of data. Then read the Queries list for three things: your business name, your main services with a place attached ("roof repair midlothian," "cake shop church hill"), and anything that surprises you. A query you never thought about, with plenty of impressions and almost no clicks, is often a page you haven't written yet.

Pages: what Google left out

Under Indexing, the Pages report splits your site into indexed and not indexed, with a reason for each group. Don't panic at the not-indexed count. Redirected addresses, duplicate versions of the same page and old tag pages belong there.

What matters is whether a page you care about (a service page, the contact page, a location page) has landed on the wrong side. The reasons are written in Google's terms, so here are the common ones in plain English:

• Not found (404): the page is gone, or a link points to an address that never existed.
• URL marked 'noindex': something on the page tells Google to keep it out of results. In many site builders that's a "hide from search engines" setting, sometimes left switched on from when the site was being built.
• Page with redirect: the address forwards somewhere else. Normal after a redesign.
• The two "currently not indexed" reasons: Google knows the page exists and has chosen not to include it for now. Google doesn't give a reason. Pages that say very little, or say nearly the same thing as another page on your site, are the first to check.

Links: who points at your site

The Links report lists sites that link to you and which of your pages they link to. If you pay anyone to build links, open it once a month: the sites in their reports should start appearing here over time. Treat it as a sample, not a full count. Google doesn't promise to list every link, and new ones can take a while to show up.

Security and Manual Actions: the one that can't wait

Most months this section says no issues were detected, and that's the whole visit. If it ever shows a manual action (a reviewer at Google has decided something on your site breaks its rules) or a security issue such as hacked pages, deal with it that week. Make sure the email address on the account is one somebody actually reads, because that's where Search Console sends its alerts.

What impressions and average position actually measure

These two numbers cause most of the confusion.

An impression is counted when a link to your site appears on a results page someone loaded. Google's help page on impressions, position and clicks says that, for a normal results page, the person doesn't have to scroll down to your link for it to count. So 3,000 impressions doesn't mean 3,000 people noticed you. It means your page was somewhere on 3,000 results pages.

Average position is the highest spot your link held on each of those results pages, averaged across the searches where it appeared. Position 1 is the top. Two things follow from that. First, a position is only recorded when you showed up at all, so a page can have a good-looking average and very few impressions. Second, local results change with where the searcher is. Google says local results are based mainly on relevance, distance and prominence, so a person in the Fan and another in Midlothian can see different results for the same words. The average blends all of them into one figure that may not match anybody's screen. Why a competitor shows up in the map pack and you don't walks through how those three factors play out for one invented business.

Here's a worked example with made-up numbers. Say you run a small bakery in Church Hill. Over three months, the Queries tab shows "birthday cake richmond" with 2,400 impressions, 18 clicks and an average position of 11.4. It also shows "cake shop church hill" with 140 impressions, 41 clicks and an average position of 2.1.

The first line looks bigger, but an average around 11 means you usually sit well below the first screen of results, where few people click. The second line is small and healthy: people searching close to your neighborhood find you near the top and tap through. The work for this bakery is the citywide cake page, not the neighborhood one.

Spotting a page Google dropped

The first sign usually shows up in Performance. Open the Pages tab, sort by clicks, and compare two periods. A page that had steady clicks and now shows none, or has vanished from the list, needs a look.

Paste that page's address into the search bar at the top of Search Console. That's the URL Inspection tool, and it tells you whether the page is on Google and, if not, why. Causes to check first: the page moved during a redesign without a redirect, a noindex setting got switched on, or two pages were merged and one was deleted.

Fix the cause, then use Request indexing in the same tool. If the problem appears as a reason in the Pages report, you can also click Validate fix there. Google's page indexing help currently says validation typically takes up to about two weeks, and asks you not to click it again while it runs.

Before you assume the worst, look at impressions. If a page's impressions held steady while its clicks fell, the page is still in the results and something else on the results page changed: more ads, a map pack, an AI summary above the links, or a competitor with a better title. That's a different problem with a different fix.

Keep the account in your name

Search Console belongs to whoever verified it, which makes it one more line for the ownership row on a worksheet for comparing SEO proposals. If an agency or designer set it up under their own account, ask them to add you as an owner, or verify it yourself with the DNS steps above. Then give them access as a user under Settings. Everyone who needs the numbers can see them, and nobody can shut you out of your own data later. If you'd rather have someone else watch these reports, our SEO service for Richmond-area businesses explains how we work and what a month includes.

Set it up this week and leave it for a month. If the Queries list raises more questions than it answers, send your site through the free SEO snapshot, mention which numbers puzzled you, and we'll email back what we see.