Google Search Console for business owners: what to look at
Search Console shows how your site appears in Google search: which searches show it, how often people click, at what position, and whether Google can index your pages. Start with the Performance report and the Pages report.
What Search Console is
A free Google tool for site owners. Unlike Analytics, which measures what happens after someone arrives, Search Console shows what happens in Google search before the click. You verify that you own the site, and Google starts sharing data with you. New data appears with a delay of a couple of days.
The four numbers in the Performance report
- Impressions: how many times your site appeared in search results.
- Clicks: how many times someone clicked through to your site.
- Click rate (CTR): clicks divided by impressions.
- Average position: where your site tended to appear; 1 is the top.
Searches: are people finding you for what you sell?
Open the Queries tab. Separate searches for your business name from everything else. If almost all clicks come from people who already know your name, new customers are not finding you through search yet.
Close to page one
Look for searches where your average position is roughly 8 to 20 with a reasonable number of impressions. These pages are close: improving the content and the title often brings more clicks than starting a new page from scratch.
Shown high but rarely clicked
A search where you appear near the top but few people click usually means the title and description in the results do not match what people want. Rewrite them to answer the search directly.
Pages that are not indexed
The Pages report lists pages Google found but did not index, with a reason. Check that your important pages are indexed and that nothing important is blocked or marked "noindex" by mistake.
Submit a sitemap
A sitemap lists the pages you want Google to know about. Submitting it in Search Console helps new pages get found faster.
How Ask Naly uses Search Console
Connect Google and Naly reads your queries and pages automatically. She separates brand from non-brand searches, lists searches close to page one and pages that are shown but not clicked, and tracks the change week by week next to your other channels.