How to set up Google Search Console, step by step

Google Search Console is Google’s own free report on your website. It shows which searches you appear for, how often people click, which pages Google has picked up and anything it’s struggling with. When a business owner asks me why their site isn’t showing on Google, it’s the first place I look. This resource walks you through setting it up from scratch in eight steps, then reading what it tells you. Allow about half an hour, plus a couple of days for the first numbers to come through.

What do you need before setting up Search Console?

Three things. A Google account you own and will keep, access to wherever your domain name is registered, and the address of your sitemap. The domain access is the one that holds people up. If your web designer bought the domain for you, it may be sitting in their account rather than yours, so it’s worth finding out before you start. You’ll need to add one small record to it in step 3, and that’s the only slightly technical part of the whole job.

Step 1: which Google account should you sign in with?

Use an account tied to your business that you’ll still have in five years. Go to Google Search Console and click Start now. I’ve lost count of the businesses I’ve met who can’t get into their own Search Console because it was set up on a designer’s or an old employee’s account. Whoever owns the account controls the data, so make sure it’s you. Anyone helping you can be added as a user later in step 8.

Step 2: should you choose Domain or URL prefix?

Choose Domain. Search Console offers two ways to add your site, and Domain is the one I use for every client. It covers every version of your address in one go, with and without www, and http as well as https. URL prefix only covers the exact address you type in, so you can end up with gaps in your data without realising. Type your domain on its own, like yourbusiness.co.uk, with no https or www in front, then click Continue.

Step 3: how do you verify your domain?

By adding a TXT record to your domain’s DNS settings. Google shows you a line of text starting with google-site-verification. Copy it. Then, in a new tab, log in to wherever your domain is registered and look for the DNS settings, sometimes called the DNS zone. Add a new record, set the type to TXT, put @ in the name or host box (or leave it blank if that’s what your provider asks for), paste Google’s text into the value box and save.

Go back to Search Console and click Verify. It often works within minutes, but DNS changes can take longer to spread, so if it fails the first time, leave it an hour and try again. Don’t delete the record afterwards. Google checks it now and then, and removing it can lose you access. Google’s own guide to verifying site ownership covers the other methods if you’re stuck.

Step 4: how do you submit your sitemap?

Click Sitemaps in the left-hand menu, under Indexing, type your sitemap address and click Submit. A sitemap is simply a list of the pages you want Google to find. On WordPress with Yoast or Rank Math it’s usually sitemap_index.xml. Without an SEO plugin, WordPress makes its own at wp-sitemap.xml. If you’re not sure, type your web address followed by one of those into your browser and see which one loads.

After a short while the status should change to Success. If it says it couldn’t fetch the sitemap, check the address loads in your browser first. Google explains what a good sitemap looks like in its sitemap guide, though for most small business sites the plugin handles it for you.

Step 5: how do you check which pages Google has indexed?

Open Pages, also under Indexing. It splits your site into pages Google has indexed, meaning it can show them in search, and pages it hasn’t, with a reason for each. Don’t panic at a long not-indexed list. Redirects, tag pages and old addresses are often left out on purpose, and that’s fine.

What you’re looking for is your important pages in the wrong pile. Click into each reason and check the examples. If a main service page shows up under “Excluded by noindex tag”, something is telling Google to hide it, and that’s usually a quick fix. “Crawled, currently not indexed” on a key page tends to mean Google didn’t think it was worth showing yet, which is a content problem rather than a technical one. If you find more than you want to tackle, that’s exactly the sort of thing my SEO fixes work sorts out.

Step 6: how do you read the performance report?

Click Performance, then Search results. Across the top you’ll see four boxes. Clicks is how many people came to your site from Google. Impressions is how many times you appeared in results. CTR is the share of impressions that turned into clicks, and average position is roughly where you sat on the page. Click all four so they’re switched on, and change the date range to the last three months so you’re not reading too much into a single week.

Then scroll down to the Queries tab and sort by impressions. This is the part I’d spend your time on. Look for searches with plenty of impressions and an average position somewhere between 8 and 20. Those are the ones you’re nearly ranking for, just off the first page, and a bit of work on the right page can move them up. Searches with lots of impressions but very few clicks usually need a better page title and description, which I cover in how to get more clicks from Google.

Step 7: what is the URL inspection tool for?

Checking a single page. Paste any page address from your site into the search bar along the top of Search Console. It tells you whether the page is on Google, when Google last visited it and whether it found any problems. If you’ve just published a new page or made big changes to an old one, click Request indexing to ask Google to come back sooner. It’s a nudge, not a guarantee, and there’s no benefit to clicking it over and over.

Step 8: how do you add users and link Google Analytics?

To give someone access, go to Settings, then Users and permissions, and click Add user. Full access lets them see everything and make changes. Restricted lets them look but not change much. Keep yourself as the owner and add anyone helping you as a user, so you can remove them whenever you like.

Linking to Google Analytics is done from the Analytics side. In GA4, go to Admin, then Product links, then Search Console links, and follow the steps. Once linked, you can see the searches people used alongside what they did on your site. If you haven’t got Analytics set up yet, my Google Analytics setup page explains what I put in place. For clients I look after, the Search Console numbers also feed into a live reporting portal you can log into any time.

Once you’re set up, check in every week or two rather than every day. The numbers move around, and a single bad day rarely means anything. Look at the page indexing report and the performance report, note anything that’s changed, and act on the few things that matter. That habit alone puts you ahead of most of the businesses you’re competing with.

Questions people ask me

Keep reading

Once Search Console is running, how to get more clicks from Google shows you how to turn impressions into visits. If you’d like a second pair of eyes on what it’s telling you, what I check in a free SEO audit explains how I go through a site. And if you’d rather hand the whole thing over, my Google Search Console setup service does it all for you.

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