The free tool most sites ignore

Search Console is free, comes from the search engine rather than from the visitor's browser, needs no consent banner, and is ignored by most small sites in favour of tools that know less. It answers questions analytics cannot.

What only it can tell you

• What people searched for before arriving. Analytics has not shown this for years; this is the only free source.
• What you appear for but nobody clicks. A page ranking and not being chosen is a title and description problem, and it is invisible everywhere else.
• Where you rank, averaged, per query and per page.
• Whether pages are indexed at all, and the reason when they are not.
• Whether a manual penalty exists, which is a question people speculate about endlessly and can check in one click.
• Your Core Web Vitals as measured on real visitors rather than in a test.

The report worth reading weekly

Performance, with impressions and position shown alongside clicks. Three patterns in it are each a specific instruction.

1. 01High impressions, low clicks, decent position. You are being shown and not chosen. Rewrite the title and description to match what the searcher wants, which is the cheapest improvement available on a site.
2. 02Good position, few impressions. Nobody is searching for this. The page may still be useful; it is not a traffic page and should not be treated as one.
3. 03Impressions rising and position falling. Usually means you are appearing for broader terms. Worth checking what those are, because they sometimes reveal a subject you should write about directly.

The queries you already nearly rank for

The most actionable thing in the tool. Filter to positions roughly between eight and twenty: these are queries where you appear on the edge of being found, and where improving an existing page is far easier than ranking a new one.

For each, open the page that ranks and ask whether it actually answers that query or merely mentions it. Usually it mentions it, and the fix is a section that answers it properly. That is a morning's work with a better return than a month of new articles.

Setting it up without getting it wrong

1. 01Verify the domain rather than a single address, so all variants are covered in one property.
2. 02Submit the sitemap, then check it was read and how many URLs were accepted.
3. 03Look at the indexing report and read the reasons for anything excluded. Some are deliberate and some are faults.
4. 04Check for a manual action once, and stop worrying about penalties.

Reading the indexing report without panicking

The indexing report lists excluded pages with reasons, and most people either ignore it or read it as a list of faults. Most of the reasons are correct behaviour.

• Excluded by a noindex tag, or blocked by robots: you asked for this. Check you meant to, then stop worrying.
• Alternative page with a proper canonical tag: also correct. Duplicate addresses pointing at one version is the system working.
• Crawled, currently not indexed: the page was seen and not considered worth including. This is the one worth attention, and the answer is almost always that the page is thin or duplicates another.
• Discovered, currently not indexed: found and not yet visited, common on new or large sites. Usually resolves, and internal links to the page help.
• Page with redirect: expected if you moved something.
• Not found, meaning 404: worth investigating only if something used to be there and should still be.

So the practical reading is to skip straight to crawled not indexed, and compare the count of valid pages with the number of articles you believe you have published. A large gap between those two is the finding; the rest of the report is mostly confirmation that your own instructions are being followed.