Google Search Console: Set Up And Overview

Key Takeaways

In this video, I'll walk you through how to set up Google Search Console and how to use it for SEO. Google Search Console is the most important tool that you can have for your SEO and it's completely free. The main reason why it's so important is because it's the only tool where you can get your query performance. So, queries are pretty much the same thing as keywords. Other third party tools like Hrefs or Semrush are not as accurate as Search Console. So, Search Console will show you your actual impressions and clicks and your click-through rate and your average position of where you're ranking on the search results for every query. You can also apply all kinds of filters so you can see which pages are performing, which countries you're getting your clicks from, which devices you're getting clicks from, and more. Having Search Console set up for your website is literally like having the cheat codes to see what's going on. Now, it is only for Google search data. So, it's not going to show you clicks or anything coming from Bing or Duck.Go or other search engines like that. It won't show you the clicks that you're getting from LOMs like ChatgBT. It's purely for your organic performance on Google search. So, it won't show you your ads or anything like that either. So, if you want to see clicks on Bing, you need to install Bing web master tools. If you want to see your referral traffic coming from ChatGBT, you'll need Google Analytics 4. And then ad performance will be in Google Ads and Google Analytics as well. So if you don't have Search Console set up, it's really easy to do. You just need to go to search.google.com. And if you don't see any websites in here, you'll have the option to add a website. Once you click add a property, you're going to have the option to add a domain or a URL prefix. A URL prefix is for tracking a specific part of a website, such as a subdomain. For example, if you wanted to track a subdomain like app.website.com separately from your main website, you'd use a URL prefix, but most of the time you're going to go with the domain setup. And you should always set up your domain first if you don't have that already. All you need to do is type in the domain of your website and hit continue. And to verify the domain, you just need to add a DNS record. It'll usually detect what you're using for your DNS provider. So, it found that I'm using Cloudflare. So, all I need to do is hit start verification. Then it'll take me to this window where I can add the DNS record to my domain. I just got to hit authorize and then it will say ownership verified. Sometimes you might have to do this manually, but all you have to do is copy and paste the DNS record into your domain. So, now I have my new website added to Google Search Console. It'll take some time for the data to populate, but this is actually a brand new website, so it's not even going to have data. If you're importing an existing website, you should get some historical data from your pages. You just have to wait a bit for it all to populate. Next up, you want to add your site map to Google Search Console. So, you should already have a site map set up. If you're running a WordPress website and you have an SEO plug-in like Yoast or RankMath, it's going to create your sitemap automatically. To find your site map, you just go to your domain and you type in sitemap.xml or sometimes it's sitemap_index.xml and that is where your sitemap will live. I don't actually have one set up yet, but this is where my sitemap is going to live. So, I'm going to add my sitemap to Google search console, and it's going to say sitemap submitted successfully. If your sitemap has an error, it'll say something like it couldn't fetch the sitemap. And then, if you've submitted the correct sitemap, it'll show you how many pages it's discovered, and the status should be success. Your site map is really important because it helps Google and other search engines discover all of the pages that are on your website. So when you add new pages to your website, your site map is actually going to be the main way that Google discovers those new pages and then it'll bookmark those to be crawled and indexed. Google will also frequently rec crawl the existing pages in your sitemap to check for updates. That's why site maps typically have a last updated date in them. That way when Google crawls your site map, it'll know if it's behind on any of the latest changes that you've made to your pages. So, if Google has a 2023 version of your page and you updated it in 2025, they will schedule your page to be recrolled and indexed again, which is also really important for SEO because if you've optimized some pages to improve their traffic and rankings, you need Google to know that changes have been made to your page in order for Google to recalculate all of the content on your page and rerank your page for different queries or keywords. Site mapaps are easily overlooked, but they're one of the most important aspects of SEO. You can also force Google to rec crawl pages if you use the URL inspection tool. You just give it any URL of a page that you've updated. And then there's an option here called page changed request indexing. And you can do this up to 10 times per day. So this basically pings Google and says, "Hey, we've made some changes to this page. Please rec crawl it." So, if you've recently optimized a page and you're hoping to gain some additional rankings and traffic, if you submit your URL for indexing, that can happen faster. So, once you submit it, it'll say that it's been added to the crawl queue. And submitting it multiple times will not change anything. So, you can just hit dismiss and then it'll update and say indexing has been requested. So, that's a quick and easy way to get Google to crawl your URL. It works for new and existing pages, and it'll help them find the latest changes that you've made to your page, but you can only do it for 10 URLs per day. So, if you've made lots of changes to your website, you're going to have to wait for the full recall. If you go into the settings in the bottom left here, you'll see an option under crawling called crawl stats, and you can actually open this and see how often Google is crawling your website. The more Google is crawling your website, the better. And you can even filter down to specific types of pages. And you can even filter down to specific file types. For example, the HTML file type will show you all of your pages. And under your crawl stats, you can also see by purpose. So you can see that for my website, 97% of the crawls have been to refresh, which is just checking the website to see what URLs have changed or if any URLs have been removed. And then discovery is Google trying to find new pages on your website. So you can see what new pages Google is crawling. It'll also crawl images and other file types, but you can check in here to see when Google last crawled and discovered a page. It'll also rec crawl old URLs in its index to see if those pages are still there. So here's an example of a new page that it found recently through discovery. Once you've got your site maps and crawling configured, the next thing you want to look at is your core web vitals. Your core web vitals will give you a snapshot of the page speed of your website for both desktop and mobile. So it'll show you if you have good fast URLs, which will be green. URLs that need improvement will be orange. And then URLs that are doing really bad and loading slowly will be red. You want to be looking at the URLs that are getting flagged. It's not going to show you every single page on your website, but the issues that are occurring on the slow pages are usually things that you can fix sitewide. For example, it's telling me that some of my URLs have an LCP longer than 4 seconds on mobile. And if I click on those, it'll show me which pages are actually having those issues. So, this is an e-commerce site and it looks like some of the category pages are loading really slowly. So, then I can figure out why those pages are loading so slowly and what I can do to improve them. Once you find a slow page, you can go to page speed insights, which is a tool by Google that shows you exactly what's wrong with specific pages and how to fix them. So, you can just give it your slow URL and run an analysis. And then it'll tell you all of the stats for that page and how to improve them. So, once it's diagnosed the performance issues, you can actually see more stats and it'll give you specific things that you can do to improve your page. For example, it's saying I could save about 3 seconds here if I fixed render blocking requests. And all of these recommendations link to helpful guides for things that you can do to fix that specific issue. It's even got a guide on what you can do for WordPress websites specifically. So, you want to make sure that you're tackling any of your core web vitals issues because if your website is loading slowly and it's getting poor core web vital scores, not only is that going to negatively impact your rankings and traffic, but you're also going to see a lower conversion rate on your website. If pages are loading slowly, users are much more likely to bounce, which means they'll just leave your website and go to a faster website, which is going to result in fewer leads or sales or signups. Next, you also want to just quickly check your HTTPS settings. Every URL on your website should be hitting the green on HTTPS URLs. You don't want any non-HTTPS URLs. Those pages are actually insecure, which means it's easier for hackers to steal information from those types of pages. HTTPS means the connection between your website and the user is encrypted, and it's much harder for hackers to access the information. If your pages are not secure, they're actually going to have a much harder time ranking. Next up, for schema markup, you should see some examples of the schema on your website, and you can click into them and troubleshoot any issues that you might be having. This is really helpful for e-commerce stores, but it'll also work for any type of website. So, it'll show you which pages have valid schema markup and which pages have issues. So, you can click in and see exactly which pages are having schema markup issues. For example, it's saying some of these pages should specify either offers, review, or aggregate ratings. And then if you click on them, it'll show you the actual code on your website where the schema was found and what the issues were with it. To troubleshoot schema markup issues on your website, you can go to the rich results test, which is a tool by Google, and it'll show you exactly what issues your schema markup has, and it'll show you if you're passing all of the schema markup rules or if it's found any errors. And if it does find errors, it'll make it much easier to fix. So in my example for this page, it found a product snippet and it detected a critical issue on the product snippet. And it shows me all the schema that it did find. But the issue here is that it doesn't have a field for offers, review, or aggregate rating. And if I click on the little question mark here, it'll take me to a guide on how to properly implement this type of schema on my website. And finally, you want to be checking out the performance section of the overview. This is where all of your query and click data is going to live. So, you want to be keeping track of how your pages are performing. You can click on individual pages and that will show you the specific queries that are ranking. You can turn on the average position, which will show you what the keyword ranks for on average. And you can even filter it down to specific countries. For example, I can filter to the United States and see how many impressions and clicks I'm getting from the US. The performance stats are really useful, but if you have a really big website that gets thousands and thousands of clicks, your actual performance in Search Console will not be super accurate, and you might have more accurate data if you export all of your Search Console stats through their API. For small businesses, the Search Console insights are more than enough. You only need to worry about using the API if you're getting millions of impressions or over a 100,000 clicks. There's lots of filters you can use. So, you can filter by page or by query or by country. And then you can change your date range. You can go back to 16 months in total. So, you'll always have your last 16 months of data. And you can even do comparisons. So, for example, you can compare the last 3 months to the previous period. And the comparisons are really helpful because it'll show you the specific queries or keywords where you're gaining and losing impressions or clicks or rankings. And that's not even everything you can do in search console. There's a couple more features to explore, but those are the big ones for SEO specifically. So again, you want to make sure that you've added your site maps so Google can easily crawl and index your pages. You can check on your crawling stats in your settings and you can inspect individual URLs and even submit them to be crawled. You want to be keeping tabs on your core web vitals and working towards getting all of your URLs green and good, meaning they're loading quickly and keeping all of your website visitors happy. Double check your schema markup for issues and then monitor your performance to see your clicks, rankings, and traffic from Google search. And then in the future, if you need to share your Google Search Console data with someone, for example, let's say you're adding an SEO or a marketer to your team, you just go down into settings here and you click on users and permissions. And then you can just add any user via their email. That way, they'll be able to see all of your Search Console stats as well. Search Console is the most useful tool that an SEO can have. So, if you don't have it already, you want to go ahead and get search console set up right