What should a business owner check in Google Search Console?
Google Search Console is Google's free report on how your website does in its search results. Most of it is for whoever runs your site. An owner needs to own the account and check a handful of numbers once a month.
You don't need to be an SEO specialist to keep an eye on your website. Ten minutes a month with the right numbers is enough, as long as the account belongs to your company.
Search Console is Google's free report on your site.
Google describes Search Console as a free service that helps you monitor, maintain and troubleshoot your site's presence in Google Search. You don't need it to appear in Google. You need it to see what Google sees: which searches show your pages, how often people click and which pages Google has or hasn't indexed.
Make sure your company owns the account.
Search Console has owners and users. Owners control the account and decide who else gets in. Full users can see all the data and take some actions. Restricted users can view most of the data.
Set the owner up on an email address your company controls. Add your agency or web developer as a full user. If you change agencies, the account and its history stay with you. Google's own guide to hiring an SEO goes further: if an SEO offers an audit, give them read access only at that stage.
Four numbers sit at the top of the Performance report.
The Performance report is where you'll spend most of your time. Google defines its four main numbers like this:
| Number | What Google says it counts | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Clicks | Times someone clicked through to your site from Google Search results | Visits Google sent you |
| Impressions | Times your site appeared in search results | How often buyers saw you |
| CTR (click-through rate) | Clicks divided by impressions | Whether people pick you when they see you |
| Average position | The average position of your topmost result | A rough guide, blended across every search |
Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode are counted here too. Google says sites that appear in them are included in the Performance report under the Web search type. An AI Overview takes up a single position, and every link in it is given that same position.
Split out the searches that use your company name.
People who search for your company name already know you. A buyer who was referred to you and looks you up shows up there. Those clicks are good to have, and SEO didn't create them.
In the Performance report, add a query filter for searches that don't contain your company name. Clicks and impressions from those searches come from buyers who found you through your work. That's the number SEO should grow.
The table doesn't show every search.
Google leaves some searches out of the table to protect privacy. It calls them anonymized queries: searches that aren't made by more than a few dozen people over two to three months. They count in the chart totals, but they never appear as rows in the table. They also drop out of the totals as soon as you add a query filter, so the figure you get by filtering out your company name runs low. Compare it with the same filtered figure from earlier months.
That matters for a specialist firm, because searches for specialist work are often rare. The table will show only some of the searches behind your clicks, and the totals will be higher than the rows add up to.
Don't judge your rankings by searching Google yourself either. Google says results change with the search history, location and other details of the person searching, so what you see isn't what your buyers see.
Check that your important pages are indexed.
The Page indexing report shows which pages Google has in its index and why others aren't there. Google says you shouldn't expect every URL on your site to be indexed, only the main version of each page, and that new content can take a few days to be indexed.
So don't chase 100%. Check that the pages that matter are there: your home page, each service page, your main project pages and your contact page. If one is missing, the report gives a reason, and the URL Inspection tool at the top of Search Console tells you more about a single page.
A monthly check takes ten minutes.
- Open the Performance report and compare the last three months with the three before.
- Filter out searches containing your company name and note clicks and impressions.
- Open the Pages tab and see which service and project pages are getting impressions.
- Open the Queries tab and look for searches about your work where you get impressions but few clicks.
- Open the Page indexing report and check your important pages are there.
- Compare what you see with the inquiries the website brought in that month.
Impressions for your service pages usually rise before clicks do, so the Pages tab is where you'll see SEO working first. We explain the usual order in how long SEO takes for a B2B firm.
Search Console stops at the click.
Search Console doesn't show what people did on your site or whether they called or sent a form. It doesn't cover searches on Bing or in ChatGPT either.
For inquiries you need analytics. In Google Analytics you can set up a form submission or a click on your phone number as a key event, and Google publishes a guide to using Search Console and Analytics together. For AI tools, see can ChatGPT find your business and our AI visibility page.
Your agency's report should start from these numbers.
A good monthly report includes the numbers above and explains what changed. We cover what else belongs in it in what a useful SEO report shows.
On our SEO Growth Program, these numbers sit on a live results page you can open any time, and we go through them with you on a monthly call. It starts from $1,499 a month. If you'd like to talk through what your own numbers show, book a call.