Google Search Console setup and reading your data

Google Search Console is free, it pulls data directly from Google, and it tells you things about your website that no other tool can. Yet I still encounter Indian business owners who have never opened it, or who set it up years ago and have not looked at it since. This guide fixes that.

Setting up Search Console

Go to search.google.com/search-console and sign in with a Google account. Click "Add property" and enter your website's URL. Google offers two verification methods: domain-level and URL-prefix.

Domain-level verification requires adding a DNS TXT record through your domain registrar (GoDaddy, Namecheap, BigRock, or whoever you use). This covers all subdomains and protocols. It is the better option if you have access to your DNS settings.

URL-prefix verification lets you verify a specific URL like https://www.yourdomain.com. You can do this by uploading an HTML file to your server, adding a meta tag to your homepage, or connecting through Google Analytics if that is already set up. The Google Analytics method is the quickest if Analytics is already installed.

Once verified, wait 24 to 48 hours for data to start appearing. Google takes a few days to populate historical data going back up to 16 months.

Reading the performance report

The Performance report is where most of the useful data lives. Open it and you will see four metrics at the top: Total clicks, Total impressions, Average CTR, and Average position.

Clicks are people who actually visited your site from Google. Impressions are how many times your pages appeared in search results, whether or not someone clicked. CTR (click-through rate) is clicks divided by impressions. Position is your average ranking for the queries shown.

Below the summary, there is a table of queries. These are the actual search terms people typed into Google before clicking through to your site. This data is gold. You can see which terms are driving traffic, which terms get a lot of impressions but few clicks (potential to optimise your title and meta description), and which topics you rank surprisingly well for without trying.

The coverage and index report

The Coverage report shows which of your pages Google has indexed and which have errors. Common issues for Indian WordPress sites include pages blocked by robots.txt, pages returning 404 errors, and "submitted URL not found" errors from old sitemaps.

If you see a high number of excluded pages, check the reason. Pages marked "Crawled - currently not indexed" mean Google has seen them but decided not to index them. This is often a signal that the content is thin or too similar to other pages on your site.

Using Search Console for content decisions

Here is how I use Search Console practically. Filter the queries table to show only queries where average position is between 8 and 20. These are pages ranking on the bottom of page one or the top of page two. A focused round of on-page improvements, like adding more detail, updating examples, or improving the meta title, can often push these pages onto page one.

Also look at pages with high impressions but low CTR. If a page is appearing thousands of times in results but only getting a 1% click rate, rewriting the meta title and description to be more compelling can significantly increase traffic without any new content.

Frequently asked questions