Reading Search Console: what the numbers tell you

Google Search Console is the only tool that shows you how Google actually sees your website. Not estimated, not extrapolated — the real data.

It is free, and still nobody looks at it in most businesses. Usually for a simple reason: it shows a lot of numbers, and it is not obvious which of them lead to a decision.

This article goes through what is actually useful.

Setting it up

Three steps:

1. Create a property — as a domain property. There are two kinds. The domain property covers all variants: with and without www., http and https, all subdomains. The other kind covers exactly one address variant and therefore leaves gaps. Take the domain property.

2. Confirm ownership through a DNS record. With many providers this happens automatically; otherwise it is a TXT record you enter at your domain provider.

3. Submit the sitemap. It usually lives at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml or is named in the robots.txt.

A note on patience: after setting it up, it takes up to two days until data appears. And Search Console only shows data from the moment it was set up — it does not know your past. That is a reason to set it up before you need it.

(Udemy, Google Search Console für SEO, April 2026)

The performance report: four numbers

Impressions — how often your page was shown in the search results.

Clicks — how often somebody clicked on it.

CTR — the share of clicks in impressions.

Average position — where you stood on average.

On position, one thing straight away that saves you from wrong conclusions: position 1 is no longer what it used to be. Above the organic results there are ads, AI answers, map sections, question blocks. Position 1 can mean you only become visible after scrolling twice.

So: Look at clicks, not at position. A page in position 4 with 200 clicks is worth more than one in position 1 with 20.

The most useful report of all

There is one analysis that almost always produces work straight away: pages with many impressions and few clicks.

These pages already rank. Google shows them. But nobody clicks.

That means: the hard part is done. What is missing is the reason to click — and that sits in the page title and the description shown in the search result.

How to find them: open the performance report, switch to the “Pages” tab, sort by impressions, and look for conspicuously low values in the CTR column. A value below 0.2 percent with a notable number of impressions is a clear candidate.

What you do then:

• Rework the page title. 60 to 70 characters so it is not cut off, and with a reason to click.
• Rework the description. It is not a ranking factor, but it decides the click.
• Add to the content when the queries show that people are looking for something that is not on the page.

The last point leads to the second useful view.

Reading the queries

In the “Queries” tab you see which terms people used to land on your page. That is the most honest feedback you can get — your customers' actual words.

Two things worth paying attention to:

First: search intent. Does the term match what the page offers? Somebody searching for “what does a website cost” wants a price, not a description of services. If the queries show that people arrive with a different expectation from what your page fulfils, that explains a low click rate — and sometimes a lack of enquiries despite visitors.

Search intents can be roughly divided: wanting to know something, wanting to do something, looking for a particular website, looking for something nearby. One page can only serve one of them well.

Second: brand against non-brand. Filter the queries once by your company name and once without it. Queries with the company name are people who already know you. Queries without it are new people.

If almost all the traffic comes through the company name, the website works well as a business card and poorly as a channel for new customers. That is an important insight, because it decides where work belongs.

The comparison periods are useful as well: last 28 days against the 28 before. That way you see movement instead of just a state.

And a practical limit: Search Console keeps data for only 16 months. Anyone wanting comparisons over longer periods has to export. A monthly export takes five minutes and is worth a lot in two years.

(Udemy, Google Search Console für SEO, April 2026)

The indexing report

The second area that leads to decisions: which of your pages are in the index, and which are not — and why not.

The report sorts the pages that are not indexed by reason. The categories worth looking at:

“Excluded by noindex tag.” Check whether that is intended. For important pages it usually is not.

“Soft 404.” The page answers “everything fine” but looks empty to Google. Most common cause: error pages that redirect everything to the home page, and pages with very thin content.

“Page with redirect.” Fine, as long as it is intended.

“Alternate page with proper canonical tag.” Usually fine — the page is a variant of another one.

“Crawled – currently not indexed.” The most interesting case. Google fetched the page and decided not to include it. That is usually a quality judgement: too thin, too similar to another page, no value of its own.

The right reaction is not to request indexing again, but to improve the page — or to delete it and merge its content into another one.

URL inspection in the bar at the top answers the same question for a single address, with a reason. It also has a live test that shows how Google sees the page right now — with a screenshot and a list of the resources that could not be loaded. That is the quickest way to find out whether a blocked CSS or JavaScript file prevents the page from rendering.

The other areas, briefly

Core Web Vitals. The loading-time values from real user data, grouped by page type. The advantage over a single measurement: you see which group of pages has a problem, not just one example page.

HTTPS. Shows addresses that can still be reached unencrypted. Each of them belongs on the encrypted version through a permanent redirect.

Structured data. Shows which markup Google recognised and where the errors are. Important to know: red errors prevent rich results from showing, yellow warnings are recommendations and not a must. And: Google decides itself whether a rich result is shown — correct markup is a precondition, not a guarantee.

Links. Shows internal and external linking. The internal part is the more useful one: it shows which pages have how many internal links. At the very bottom are the undersupplied ones.

On external linking, one thing to keep in mind: the data is incomplete and unweighted. And spam links — many links from one single foreign domain to a single page — can as a rule simply be ignored. Google copes with them.

Security and manual actions. Two reports that are usually empty. When they are not, that takes priority over everything else. With a sudden drop in traffic they are the first place to look: either an attack or a manual penalty by Google.

Crawl stats. Under the settings. Shows how often Google fetches your pages, how long your server takes to answer and which status codes come back. A sudden drop in fetches points to a server problem.

(Udemy, Google Search Console für SEO, April 2026)

How often to look

Weekly, five minutes: the overview page. Was there a noticeable drop? New errors?

Monthly, half an hour: the performance report with a comparison period. Which pages gained, which lost? Are there pages with many impressions and few clicks? Check the indexing report for new problems. Export the data.

Quarterly: go through the queries. Do intent and content match? What are people looking for that you do not have?

And a tool hardly anybody uses: annotations. You can enter events — relaunch, new page, bigger change. When traffic drops three months later, you know what happened the week before. Without that note you are guessing.

Two wrong conclusions that come up often

The site: operator is not an indexing report. Typing site:yourdomain.com into the search gives a rough estimate, not the truth. For the question of what is indexed there is the indexing report — that one is exact.

Not every page without traffic is a problem. Some pages are not supposed to bring traffic. Imprint, privacy policy, thank-you pages. The question is not “why does this page have no clicks”, but “should this page have clicks”. Pages that neither bring traffic nor serve another purpose should be merged or deleted.

What to do

1. Set it up if you do not have it. As a domain property.

2. Submit the sitemap.

3. Check your five most important pages in URL inspection. Are they in the index?

4. Look for the pages with many impressions and few clicks. That is the quickest return Search Console delivers.

5. Read through the queries once, completely. Do not analyse — read. There is almost always something in there you did not expect.

6. Put a monthly date in your calendar. Five minutes a week, half an hour a month. A normal business website does not need more.

What I tell clients about this: Search Console answers two questions you can otherwise only guess at — does Google find my pages, and what are the people who land on my site looking for. Everything else in it is a bonus.

Sources

• Udemy, Google Search Console — wie du sie für SEO nutzt (April 2026) — the three setup steps with the recommendation of the domain property for covering all subdomains, DNS confirmation and sitemap submission, the link to Analytics and the delay of up to 48 hours, the four figures of the performance report with the note that position does not match ranking position because of the special search result formats and that clicks matter more than position, the filter and comparison options, data retention of 16 months and the recommendation of regular exports, separating brand and non-brand queries, checking search intent with the four intent types, identifying pages with many impressions and a low click rate as optimisation candidates including a threshold, the recommendations on page title (60–70 characters) and description and on adding common questions to the content, the indexing reports with their categories including soft 404 and the warning not to send error pages to the home page wholesale, the URL inspection tool with live test, screenshot and resource check, the note not to use the site: operator for indexing analysis, the Core Web Vitals thresholds, the HTTPS report with the recommendation of permanent redirects, the classification of structured data with the difference between errors and warnings and the note that Google decides on display itself, internal linking by the pyramid principle and the recommendation of meaningful link texts, the classification of the backlink data as incomplete and the recognition pattern for spam links, the reports on security issues and manual actions as the first place to look after a sudden loss of traffic, the crawl report with number of fetches, server response time and status codes, the recommendation of weekly checks, using annotations to document important events, and the principle of deleting or merging pages without traffic and without added value.
• Atlas, services/analytics/google-pagespeed.md — the thresholds for LCP, INP and CLS, which are also shown in the Search Console experience report, and the origin of these values in real user data.
• Own audit practice — the note that Search Console knows no data from before it was set up, the recommended rhythm of a weekly short check, a monthly analysis and a quarterly review of the queries, the distinction between pages that are supposed to bring traffic and those that are not, and the order of steps for getting started.