Fundamentals

Google Search Console: the five reports that answer real questions

Ilyes Massoudi15 September 20267 min read

The short answer

Google Search Console, formerly Webmaster Tools, is the free tool in which Google itself tells you how it sees your site: which queries you appeared for, how many clicks you received, which pages are indexed and which are excluded and why. Five reports are enough for a business owner: Performance for queries and countries, URL Inspection for any page that does not appear, Pages for indexing problems, Page Experience for mobile speed, and Links to see who points at you. Connecting takes minutes, and data accumulates from the day you connect, not before, so connect today even if you will not open it for a month.

Why this tool before any paid one

Every paid SEO tool estimates what Google does with your site. Search Console tells you. The difference between an estimate and a report is the difference between “I think you appear for this query” and “you appeared for this query 340 times last month in position 7 and 12 people clicked”.

It is free, needs no code installed on your pages, and is unaffected by ad blockers. The only condition is to connect it today, because data accumulates only from the moment of connection. A site that connects after a year starts with an empty record.

Connecting your site to Google in minutes

Open Search Console with a Google account the business owns, not an employee’s or an agency’s.
Add your site as a “Domain” property rather than a “URL prefix”, so it covers www and non-www, http and https together.
Verify ownership by adding a TXT record in your domain settings at the registrar. If a developer manages the domain, send them the record.
Submit the sitemap from the Sitemaps section. Its address is usually /sitemap.xml or /sitemap-index.xml.
Add the agency or developer as a user if needed, and stay the owner.

Data starts appearing after two or three days, and the reports below are what you open.

Report one: Performance, which queries you appear for and from where

This report deserves more of your time than all the rest. It shows four numbers: clicks, impressions (how often your site appeared), click-through rate, and average position. Beneath them, tables by query, page, country and device.

Three readings are enough each month:

Filter by country. A Gulf site often appears for countries it does not sell in. Look at the numbers for your country only.
Sort queries by impressions and look for those with high impressions, few clicks, and a position between 5 and 20. Those are your nearest opportunities: a page written specifically for that query moves it to page one.
Compare the period with the previous period, not with last week. A week fluctuates; three months show the trend.

Report two: URL Inspection, for any page that does not appear

Paste any URL into the search bar at the top. Within seconds it tells you whether the page is indexed, when Google last crawled it, which version it chose as canonical, and whether anything blocks indexing. It also has a “Request indexing” button for new pages.

This report resolves most “my site does not show” cases in a minute; the details are in the nine causes article.

Report three: Pages, every indexing problem

It divides your site’s pages into indexed and not indexed, and gives each unindexed page a reason: excluded by noindex, blocked by robots.txt, duplicate with Google choosing another, “Crawled, currently not indexed”, or 404.

Do not worry about unindexed pages as such; thank-you pages, filters and archives are supposed to stay out. Worry when a page you sell from appears in the list, or when the “Crawled, currently not indexed” count is large, because that is Google’s judgement on quality.

Report four: Page Experience and Core Web Vitals

It shows real-user data on the speed of your pages on mobile and desktop, classed as good, needs improvement, or poor. Look at mobile only, the source of most Gulf traffic. If poor pages appear, the cause is usually the Arabic font or the images; details in the speed article.

Report five: Links, who points at you

It shows the sites linking to you, your most linked pages, and the anchor texts. Two practical uses: knowing which links you actually have before anyone sells you a “link campaign”, and spotting suspicious bulk links that may be the residue of earlier harmful work.

What you can safely ignore

The Enhancements and structured-data reports serve the developer more than you, and notifications about “issues” in markup you do not use deserve no worry. The Manual Actions and Security Issues reports rarely contain anything, but open them once a month, because if they do contain something it matters more than everything above.

A monthly routine in twenty minutes

Minutes	Report	Question
8	Performance, filtered by your country	Which queries rise and fall? Where are the position 5 to 20 opportunities?
4	Pages	Has an important page appeared among the unindexed?
3	Page Experience	Have pages turned poor?
3	Links	Any new or suspicious links?
2	Manual Actions and Security	Empty?

What the audit does with this data

In the Digital Presence Audit I ask for read access to Search Console if it exists, and put the numbers behind every conclusion in the report itself. If it does not exist I work without it and explain what we lose, and the first recommendation in the report is then to connect it today.

Common questions

What is the difference between Search Console and Google Analytics?

Search Console shows what happens before the click: which query you appeared for, in what position, how often, and how many clicks. Analytics shows what happens after the click: what the visitor did on your site and whether they enquired. You need both, but if you must start with one, start with Search Console; it is free, needs no code on every page, and its data is unaffected by ad blockers.

Why do the numbers differ between the Performance report and keyword tools?

Because keyword tools estimate total demand, while Search Console counts only your actual appearances. A query a tool shows at volume 10 may give you 300 impressions a month in Search Console, because the tool rounds small volumes and merges different forms. In small Gulf markets, Search Console is more accurate than any tool.

Should I give my SEO company full access to Search Console?

Give read or full access as needed, but you alone remain the owner. A company that creates the property under its own name and adds you as a user builds a dependency, and when the relationship ends you lose your data history. Ownership always belongs to the business.