Most small businesses have some analytics tool on their website and therefore know roughly how many people visited. What they do not know is how many people saw the site in the search results and decided against it. That second number is usually the more interesting one — and it lives in Google Search Console.
Search Console is free, it comes from Google itself, and you need no SEO training to read it. You need two things: a setup done properly once, and a sense of which of its many views actually leads to a decision. The rest can stay unread.
Search Console and analytics measure two different halves
The difference comes down to a single moment: the click. Search Console reports everything before it — what someone searched for, whether your page was shown, in which spot, and whether it was clicked. An analytics tool starts at the exact moment a visit lands on your site: which pages were viewed, for how long, whether the form was submitted.
That is why an analytics tool can never tell you that your page appeared in the results a thousand times and nobody clicked. It does not see those people — they never arrived. And yet that is precisely the information a small website can act on fastest.
- Before the click, Search Console: the search query, impressions, clicks, average position.
- After the click, analytics: pages viewed, time on site, forms submitted, traffic sources.
- You only get both in one view if you connect the accounts. That is a later step and not needed at the start.
A second difference is easy to overlook: Search Console knows Google and nothing else. Whatever happens on other search engines is not in there. Bing runs its own free equivalent, Bing Webmaster Tools, built on the same principle. For the German market Google is the priority; the rest can wait.
Setup: one property, one verification, one sitemap
Setup consists of three decisions and roughly twenty minutes of work, fifteen of which are waiting. The only part where you can genuinely go wrong is DNS verification — there is an explicit warning about that below.
Domain property or URL prefix — the one point where you have to choose
Google asks which kind of property you want when you create it. A domain property covers the whole domain: with and without www, encrypted and unencrypted, including every subdomain such as shop.yourcompany.de. It can only be verified through a DNS record. A URL-prefix property covers exactly one spelling — https://www.yourcompany.de is then a different property from https://yourcompany.de — but offers several verification routes, such as a file on the server, a meta tag in the source, or an existing Google account for analytics or tag management.
The practical recommendation is clear: if you can reach your domain’s DNS settings, take the domain property. Otherwise your data can end up spread across four properties, and later you will compare numbers that do not belong together. There is still a good reason for an additional URL-prefix property: if you want to look at a self-contained area separately — a shop under /shop/ or an English section under /en/ — set that up as its own property as well. An addition, not a replacement.
Verifying through DNS
Google shows you a string that goes into your domain’s DNS zone as a TXT record — that is, wherever the domain is managed, usually your host or domain provider. You add a record; you do not change an existing one. Verification may still fail on the first attempt afterwards: DNS changes take a while to become known everywhere. Waiting and clicking verify again later is the normal course of events, not a sign of a mistake.
Submitting the sitemap
A sitemap is a machine-readable list of every page you want to appear in the search results. Almost every system generates one automatically; it usually sits at /sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml, and the address is normally listed in your domain’s robots.txt as well. In Search Console you enter that address once. One thing to be clear about: a sitemap is a table of contents, not an application. It helps Google find your pages — it obliges Google to nothing.
The sequence, in eight steps
If you are doing it yourself, work through this order. It is sorted so that nothing has to be done twice.
- Sign in with a business Google account, not your private one. The account survives staff changes and can be handed over cleanly later.
- Create a new property in Search Console and choose the domain variant, provided you can reach the DNS settings. Otherwise the URL-prefix variant, using exactly the spelling your website answers on.
- Copy the TXT value shown.
- Add it at your domain or hosting provider as a new TXT record on the main domain. Existing records stay untouched, in particular anything beginning with MX.
- Click verify. If it fails, wait a few hours and try again rather than editing the record.
- Find your sitemap address and submit it in the sitemaps section.
- Under users and permissions, add the people who need access — each with their own Google account, nobody with your password.
- Do nothing for two to three weeks. Before that there is not enough data to read anything from, and every early interpretation is a guess.
Four reports, four questions
The interface shows considerably more than four sections, and Google rearranges them regularly. So do not memorise the menu items, memorise the questions. What a report is currently called you can find again in two minutes; which question you wanted answered, you cannot.
| Report | The question it answers | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Performance | Which searches does my website appear for, and is it being clicked? | Pick out queries with many impressions and almost no clicks, and rewrite the title of the page concerned. |
| Indexing / Pages | Are my pages in Google’s index at all? | Check that the important pages are there. If one is missing, look at internal links and the sitemap first. |
| URL inspection | What does Google know about this one specific page? | After publishing or substantially changing a page, request indexing once — once, not daily. |
| Sitemaps | Does Google know my table of contents, and can it be read? | Submit once, then only look if an error is reported there. |
| Messages and security | Is there a problem Google is actively telling me about? | Handle manual actions and security issues immediately. Ignore notices about pages you excluded on purpose. |
Performance: what you are already being found for
The performance report is the only place where you see real searches that your website actually came into contact with. No keyword tool is estimating here, no agency is presenting a list — this is what people typed. For most owners it is the one view genuinely worth the time.
Four numbers sit there: impressions, clicks, click-through rate and average position. What matters is rarely a single number but a pattern — a query where your page appears often and is almost never clicked.
A worked example you can do yourself: one of your pages was shown 900 times last month, clicked three times, average position 6. That is not a ranking problem. Position 6 means Google considers your page relevant enough to show. What failed to convince people is what they saw: the blue title and the two lines underneath. A title that picks up the question being asked is the cheapest improvement available at that point — and it costs half an hour, not a project.
- Queries that surprise you: they show what Google thinks your page is about. If that differs from what you sell, the text on the page is unclear, not the algorithm.
- Queries with many impressions and almost no clicks: nearly always a title and description question, not a position problem.
- Queries you have no matching page for at all: that is the most honest list of topics for your next article you will ever get.
One limitation worth knowing before you start adding things up: the list of queries is not complete. Google omits very rare searches for privacy reasons, because they could make individuals identifiable. The sum of all listed queries is therefore smaller than the total shown at the top of the report. That is not a fault and cannot be switched off.
Indexing: are your pages in Google at all?
A page that is not in the index cannot rank for anything. As far as search is concerned it simply does not exist. The indexing report answers exactly that question, and after a relaunch it is the first one to open — before any rankings, before any visitor numbers.
The report splits your addresses into indexed and not indexed, and gives a reason for each group in the second set. The reasons matter more than the total. A page excluded on purpose appears here just like one that is missing by accident.
The reason that causes the most questions is “Discovered – currently not indexed”. It means Google knows the address, usually from your sitemap or through a link, but has not fetched the page yet. That is a statement about a queue, not a verdict on your content. Shortly after a site launches it is entirely normal. If an important page stays stuck there, the most common cause is mundane: hardly any internal link points to it, and Google sees nothing arguing for a prompt fetch.
A different thing entirely is “Crawled – currently not indexed”. Here Google was on the page and decided against including it. That is feedback about the content: thin text, a page that already exists in near-identical form twice, or a subpage with no purpose of its own. More links do not help with that; more substance does.
Much of what sits in the not-indexed list is perfectly fine and needs no reaction: redirects, pages marked noindex, archive and tag pages, alternate versions pointing at an original. What is not fine is finding your services page, your contact page or your homepage in there. If that happens, check three things in this order: is the page in the sitemap, does at least one link from an indexed page lead to it, and is it accidentally set to noindex.
URL inspection: looking at a single page
There is a separate lookup for one specific page: you enter the full address and are told whether it is in the index, when it was last fetched, which version Google treats as the authoritative one, and whether the mobile view could be retrieved. It is the fastest answer to “why can I not find this page?” that is not made of guesswork.
The one action that follows from it: after a new page or a substantial change, request indexing once. That is a hint to Google, not an instruction, and no deadline is attached to it. Repeating it daily achieves nothing; it speeds nothing up and does not replace an internal link.
The second, underrated use is the live test. It fetches the page right now and shows what comes back. That settles the single most common confusion there is: you changed the title, you can see the change in your browser, but Google still shows the old one. The live test tells you whether the change is technically retrievable — and if it is, the answer is patience, not repair.
Messages: what needs action and what is noise
Search Console sends emails. Some of them are serious, most are bookkeeping. If you do not know the difference you will either react to everything or to nothing, and neither is good.
Look at immediately
- A manual action. That is a decision made by people at Google against your website, and the one case where everything else can wait.
- A reported security issue, such as malicious code or a sign of a break-in. Here the same day counts, not the same week.
- A sudden, marked drop in indexed pages. It is almost always technical: a block set by accident, a migration, a server problem.
- Server errors that are piling up, or a sitemap that can no longer be read.
Note and carry on
- Notices about pages you deliberately excluded — thank-you pages, archives, filtered views.
- Small week-to-week fluctuations in clicks or position. There is no cause there worth looking for.
- Recommendations about features that play no role in your business.
- Notices about old addresses you redirected long ago. A redirect is the correct answer; it drops out of the report once Google has seen it often enough.
What the numbers do not tell you
First: the data appears with a delay measured in days. Comparing yesterday with today makes no sense, because yesterday is not complete yet. Compare periods of equal length — four weeks against the four weeks before.
Second, and this is the most important point: average position is a mean across every impression. Across different queries, different devices, different places and different people. “Position 6” can mean you sit third in Offenbach and eleventh elsewhere. It does not mean any human being ever saw you in sixth place. A move from 6.4 to 5.9 is therefore not an event; it is a rounding exercise with a decimal.
Third, the view backwards is limited: Search Console keeps the last sixteen months. If you need year-on-year comparisons, export a table once a quarter and file it. That takes five minutes and is the only precaution this tool asks of you.
And the honest expectation at the end: if your website is four weeks old, the performance report will tell you very little, and that is not a defect. No tool — including this one — tells you when a page will be indexed or which position it will land on. Anyone promising you a position is promising something they do not control. What Search Console does is better than a promise: it shows you what actually happened.
One sentence to draw the boundary: Search Console reports on the ordinary search results. What happens in the map view and through your local listing is evaluated separately, in your Google Business Profile.
Frequently asked questions about Google Search Console
Yes, entirely. You need a Google account and proof that the domain is yours. There is no paid edition and no feature behind a paywall. Use a business account rather than a private one — it saves you an awkward handover later.
Search Console describes what happens before the click: which query, how often shown, whether it was clicked. Analytics describes what happens after the click: which pages were visited and whether an enquiry came out of it. They answer different questions and do not replace one another. If you only want to set up one of them, start with Search Console — it is simpler and less complicated in data protection terms.
That cannot be predicted honestly, and nobody should give you a deadline for it. Google decides whether and when a page is fetched and included. What you can influence is a short list: that the page is in the sitemap, that at least one internal link from an already indexed page leads to it, that it is not accidentally set to noindex, and that it genuinely has content of its own.
The domain property, if you can reach your domain’s DNS settings. It covers every spelling and subdomain at once, so your data comes together in one place. The URL-prefix property is the fallback when DNS is not possible — and a useful addition when you want to evaluate a self-contained area such as a shop or a language version separately.
Yes, but for a different reason than you might expect. Even with no SEO intentions it is your alarm system: it tells you if your website has been hacked, if pages drop out of the index, or if Google can no longer fetch your pages. If you never intend to open it, set it up anyway and leave the email notifications on. Twenty minutes once, then only in an emergency.
Yes, and it should not be done any other way. Under users and permissions you invite another Google account and assign it a role; full access is rarely necessary. You can revoke the permission at any time without losing the property or the data. On our projects we set Search Console up so that the account belongs to you from the start.
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