Process
The Free Google Report Most Business Owners Never Open
By the LA Web Design team6 min read
Google Search Console is free, it comes straight from Google, and it answers questions most business owners pay someone to guess at: which searches show your website, how often people click, and which pages Google has decided to leave out. Most owners never set it up, or set it up once and never log in again.
Setting it up
Add your website as a Domain property and verify it with a TXT record at your domain registrar. One property then tracks the whole domain, with or without www. Search Console only keeps about 16 months of history, so set it up now even if you don't plan to look at it for a while.
If a web designer set it up for you, make sure your own Google account has owner access. When you change designers, the access should stay with you.
Performance: what people actually search
This is the report worth opening every month. It lists the searches your website appeared for, how many times it showed up (impressions), how many people clicked, and its average position. Set the range to the last three months and sort by impressions. You'll usually find searches you never targeted that are already sending traffic, and pages that show up often but rarely get clicked.
That second group is the quick win. A page with thousands of impressions and very few clicks usually has a title or description that doesn't match what people searched for. Rewriting those two lines is one of the cheapest ways to get more traffic from rankings you already have.
Page indexing: what Google left out
This report shows which pages are indexed and which aren't, and Google gives its reason in each case. Plenty of exclusions are expected: redirects, duplicate versions of the same page, admin screens. The ones to look at are your real service pages listed under “Crawled - currently not indexed” or “Discovered – currently not indexed.” Those usually mean Google found the page and decided it wasn't worth including, which often points to thin or duplicated content.
URL Inspection: check a single page
Paste in any address from your website to see whether it's indexed, when Google last crawled it, and how the page looks to Google on a phone. After you publish a new page or fix an old one, you can request indexing from here. It doesn't guarantee anything, but it usually gets the page looked at sooner.
Sitemaps and alerts
Submit your sitemap once under Sitemaps so Google knows about every page, including the new ones. Then let the email alerts do their job. Search Console emails the property owner about manual penalties, security problems, and sudden indexing drops, which is one more reason the owner should be you and not a former vendor.
Fifteen minutes a month covers it: check Performance, scan Page indexing for anything new, and confirm the number of indexed pages roughly matches the number you have. Pair it with a well-kept Google Business Profile and you're watching most of what drives local search. When the numbers point to bigger problems, a local SEO checklist is the next step.