Most small business owners who have heard of analytics tools know about Google Analytics — it shows you how many people visited your site, which pages they looked at, and how they found you. What fewer people know is that Google offers a separate free tool specifically for understanding how your site performs in Google search, before anyone even clicks.
That tool is Google Search Console, and for anyone trying to get found on Google, it is arguably more useful than analytics.
What Google Search Console Actually Shows You
Once you have connected your website to Google Search Console, it gives you a window into how Google sees your site. The main things it shows are:
- Search performance. Which search terms (called "queries") are bringing your site up in Google results, how many times it appeared (impressions), how many people clicked through, and your average position in the results. This is genuinely fascinating — you will often discover that people are finding you for search terms you never expected.
- Index coverage. Which of your pages Google has successfully found and added to its index. If a page is not in Google's index, it will not appear in search results — full stop. GSC tells you if any pages are missing and why.
- Core Web Vitals. A report on how fast and responsive your pages are, based on real visitor data. Poor scores here can affect your Google ranking. (We have written a separate piece on Core Web Vitals if you want to understand them in detail.)
- Sitemap status. You can submit a sitemap — a list of all your pages — to help Google find everything on your site. GSC shows you whether Google accepted your sitemap and how many pages it has processed.
- Mobile usability. Whether any pages have problems when viewed on a mobile phone. Since Google primarily looks at the mobile version of your site, this matters for rankings.
- Security issues. If Google detects anything suspicious on your site — such as malware or unusual redirects — it will flag it here.
What the Search Performance Report Actually Tells You
The performance report in Google Search Console is the one most worth spending time with. Here is what the terms mean in plain English:
- Impressions. The number of times your website appeared in Google search results during the selected period. This counts every time someone saw your link — even if they scrolled past it without clicking.
- Clicks. The number of times someone actually clicked your link from the search results and visited your site.
- Click-through rate (CTR). The percentage of impressions that resulted in a click. If your page appeared 1,000 times and got 30 clicks, your CTR is 3%. A low CTR often means your page title or description is not compelling enough to make people click.
- Average position. Your average ranking in search results for a given query. Position 1 is the top result. Position 10 is the bottom of the first page. Anything over 10 means you are on page two or beyond, where almost nobody looks.
If you are appearing on page two of Google for searches relevant to your business, that is not a ranking problem — it is an opportunity. You are close.
How Is It Different from Google Analytics?
People often confuse the two tools. Here is the clearest way to think about them:
- Google Analytics answers the question: "What did people do after they arrived on my website?" It tracks page views, time spent, which pages people looked at, and how visitors found you.
- Google Search Console answers the question: "How does my website perform in Google search?" It tracks impressions, clicks, rankings, and technical issues that affect whether Google can find and show your site.
For a complete picture, you want both. Search Console tells you whether Google is finding and ranking your pages. Analytics tells you whether visitors are then doing something useful when they arrive.
How to Set Up Google Search Console
The process is free and does not require technical knowledge, but it does require you to prove to Google that you own the website. There are a few ways to do this — the simplest is usually adding a small piece of code to your website, which your web developer can do in a few minutes. Alternatively, Google lets you verify ownership through Google Analytics (if that is already set up) or by uploading a small file to your website.
Once verified, Google starts collecting data from that point onwards. It does not provide historical data from before you connected — so the sooner you set it up, the sooner you start building a useful picture of your site's search performance.
What to Do With What You Find
Once you have a few weeks of data, there are a few things worth checking regularly:
- Look at what search terms are bringing people in. Are they the terms you expected? Are there any valuable queries where you rank on page two, just outside the top 10? Those pages are prime candidates for improvement — a small tweak to the title or content can sometimes push a page from position 12 to position 5, with a significant increase in clicks.
- Check for coverage errors. Any pages flagged as "not indexed" or "crawl errors" are invisible to Google. If important pages are missing, it is worth investigating why.
- Watch your Core Web Vitals scores. Pages labelled as "poor" or "needs improvement" may be losing rankings to faster competitors. This is worth fixing.
All of this is easier when the website itself is built for speed and clean indexing from the start. GitFoundry builds a website with no monthly fees that arrives with Analytics and Search Console already connected — so your data starts accumulating on day one.