Google Search Console: the five reports worth reading every month

Search Console is the one SEO tool that is free, accurate and comes from the source, and the one most site owners have never opened. It is Google telling you what it sees: which searches show your site, which pages it cannot index, whether it found malware, whether your site is slow. You do not need all of it. Five reports, twenty minutes a month.

If the site is not set up in Search Console yet, that is step one. Add the domain, verify it through your DNS provider so it covers every version of the address, and submit the sitemap. Then the reports start filling.

1. Performance

What searches show your site, how often, how often people click, and where you rank. Look at three things monthly:

• Queries with many impressions and few clicks. Google is showing you; people are choosing someone else. The title and description for that page need work.
• Queries you rank for at positions eight to twenty. Close to the first page. A better page or a few links moves them.
• The trend. Clicks over the last three months against the three before. A drop that starts on a date tells you something changed on that date.

2. Pages, under Indexing

Which pages Google has indexed and which it has not, with the reason for each. After a redesign this is the first place to look. “Not found” errors mean old addresses without redirects. “Excluded by noindex tag” means a page is blocking itself, often by mistake. “Discovered, currently not indexed” on your important pages means Google does not think they are worth it yet, which is a content problem.

3. Core Web Vitals, under Experience

Whether real visitors find your pages fast and stable, measured from their phones. Pages marked poor are losing rankings and visitors. The report groups them by cause, which points at the fix: usually images, server speed or layout shift.

4. Security issues and Manual actions

Two short reports that should both say “no issues”. If either does not, stop everything else. Security issues means Google found malware or phishing and is warning visitors. Manual actions means a person at Google applied a penalty. Both name the problem, and both have a review button once you have fixed it.

Also check Users and permissions in the settings while you are here. An owner you do not recognise is a sign of a specific hack.

5. Links

Who links to you, and which pages on your site have the most internal links. Two uses: notice when a good link arrives so you can build the relationship, and notice when important pages have few internal links, which is easy to fix and often overlooked.

The twenty-minute routine

Performance: three months against three months, note any drop. Pages: any new errors. Core Web Vitals: anything moved to poor. Security and manual actions: both clean. Links: anything new. Write down what needs doing, and do the small ones now.

That is the whole routine, and it is part of every monthly report we send on a care plan. The month someone skips it is usually the month the redesign went live with indexing turned off. The report would have said so within a week.