Tools & Data — Article 16 of 19

Getting started with Google Search Console.

Google gives every website owner a free dashboard that shows exactly how their site appears in search results, which pages have problems, and what queries bring visitors. Most business owners never open it. This guide changes that.

The most valuable free tool you are probably ignoring.

Lorna owns a bakeshop in Marikina. She has been in business for eight years, and her customers find her through word of mouth, Instagram, and the occasional Facebook post. She built a website last year — a simple one with her menu, prices, location, and a contact form. When someone mentioned Google Search Console to her at a local business meetup, she had no idea what they were talking about. “Is that the thing where you search on Google?” she asked.

Lorna is not alone. Most small business owners have never heard of Google Search Console, and those who have often assume it is for developers or large companies. It is neither. Google Search Console (often shortened to GSC) is a free tool built specifically for website owners — including bakeshop owners in Marikina, lawyers in BGC, spa owners in Alabang, and florists in Quezon City.

Think of GSC as a report card from Google. It tells you which of your pages Google knows about, which ones have problems, what search queries bring people to your site, and how your pages perform compared to the competition. Without it, you are running your online presence blind. With it, you have the data to make smarter decisions about your content and your business.

The basics

What Google Search Console actually is — and what it is not.

Google Search Console is a free web service from Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your website’s presence in Google Search results. It is not Google Analytics (which tracks what visitors do on your site). GSC tracks what happens before someone visits — how your site appears in search results, which queries trigger your pages, and whether Google can even find and read your content properly.

Here is what GSC tells you:

Which search queries cause your pages to appear in Google results
How many times your pages are shown in search results (impressions)
How many clicks those impressions generate
Your average ranking position for each query
Which pages Google has indexed and which ones have errors
Whether your site works well on mobile devices
How fast your pages load (Core Web Vitals)
Any security issues or manual penalties affecting your site

Enrique is a lawyer with an office in BGC. He built a professional-looking website two years ago and assumed everything was working fine because clients occasionally mentioned finding him online. When he finally connected his site to Google Search Console, he discovered that 14 of his 30 pages had crawl errors. Google could not read almost half his content. His blog posts about Philippine corporate law — the very content he spent weeks writing — were invisible to search engines because of broken internal links and server timeout issues his web developer never noticed.

Enrique’s story is common. Without GSC, you do not know what you do not know. Your site could be performing brilliantly or failing silently, and you would have no way to tell the difference.

Getting set up

How to set up Google Search Console in under 15 minutes.

Setting up GSC requires two things: a Google account (any Gmail address works) and proof that you own the website you want to monitor. Here is the step-by-step process.

Step 1: Go to Google Search Console

Visit search.google.com/search-console and sign in with your Google account. If you do not have a Google account, create one first — it is free and takes two minutes.

Step 2: Add your website property

Google will ask you to add a “property.” You have two options:

Domain property — covers your entire domain including all subdomains (www, blog, shop, etc.). Requires DNS verification. This is the recommended option if you have access to your domain settings.
URL prefix property — covers only a specific version of your site (for example, https://www.yoursite.com). Easier to verify but narrower in scope.

For most small business owners, either option works. If you are unsure, start with the URL prefix option because the verification methods are simpler.

Step 3: Verify ownership

Google needs to confirm that you actually own the website. There are several verification methods:

HTML tag — Google gives you a short meta tag. You paste it into the <head> section of your homepage. This is the most common method and works on any website.
HTML file upload — Google gives you a small file. You upload it to the root directory of your website. Good if you have FTP access.
DNS record — You add a TXT record to your domain’s DNS settings. Required for domain-level properties. Your hosting provider or domain registrar can help with this.
Google Analytics — If you already have Google Analytics installed on your site, GSC can verify through that automatically.
Google Tag Manager — Similar to Analytics verification, if you use Tag Manager on your site.

Lorna’s experience: Lorna’s nephew helped her build the bakeshop website on WordPress. For verification, she used the HTML tag method. She installed the Yoast SEO plugin (which has a field specifically for the Google verification code), pasted the code, and clicked save. Verified in under three minutes. No coding. No technical knowledge needed.

Step 4: Wait for data

After verification, GSC starts collecting data immediately, but it takes a few days to accumulate enough to be useful. Expect to see meaningful data within 48 to 72 hours. Historical data (up to 16 months back) may also appear if Google was already crawling your site before you connected GSC.

Your most important report

The Performance report: clicks, impressions, CTR, and position.

The Performance report is where most business owners should spend the majority of their time in GSC. It answers the question: “What is actually happening with my site in Google search?”

The report shows four key metrics:

Total clicks — How many times someone clicked on your site in search results. This is real traffic driven by organic search.
Total impressions — How many times your pages appeared in search results, whether or not anyone clicked. High impressions with low clicks means people see you but are not compelled to visit.
Average CTR (click-through rate) — The percentage of impressions that resulted in clicks. If your page appeared 1,000 times and got 50 clicks, your CTR is 5 percent. Higher is better.
Average position — Where your pages typically rank in search results. Position 1 means you are the first result. Position 10 means you are at the bottom of page one. Anything above 10 means you are on page two or beyond, where very few people look.

How Vanessa used the Performance report to find her best content

Vanessa owns a spa in Alabang. She had been publishing blog posts for six months — topics like “benefits of hot stone massage,” “how to prepare for your first facial,” and “best treatments for stressed professionals.” She assumed the blog was not doing much because she rarely got comments or shares.

When she opened the Performance report in GSC for the first time, she was surprised. Her post about hot stone massage had received 3,200 impressions in the previous month. People were searching for that topic and seeing her page in Google results. But her CTR was only 1.8 percent — meaning out of 3,200 impressions, only about 58 people actually clicked.

The problem was obvious once she looked at her title tag: it was a generic “Blog Post — My Spa Name.” Nobody would click on that. She rewrote the title to “Hot Stone Massage Benefits: 7 Reasons to Try It Today” and updated her meta description to include her Alabang location. Within three weeks, her CTR for that page climbed to 4.5 percent, and clicks more than doubled.

Without the Performance report, Vanessa would never have known that people were already searching for her content. GSC showed her the opportunity. She just had to act on it.

Filtering your Performance data

The Performance report lets you filter by:

Queries — See exactly what words people type to find your site
Pages — See which specific pages are performing best (or worst)
Countries — See where your traffic comes from geographically
Devices — See how much traffic comes from mobile versus desktop
Date range — Compare performance across different time periods

Gina, a florist in Quezon City, used the Queries filter and discovered something she never expected. People were finding her website by searching for “sympathy flowers delivery Quezon City” — a service she offered but barely mentioned on her site. She created a dedicated page for sympathy flower arrangements, mentioned Quezon City delivery explicitly, and within six weeks that page became her top traffic driver. GSC gave her the insight. She turned it into revenue.

Making sure Google can find you

The Indexing report: which of your pages Google actually knows about.

Just because a page exists on your website does not mean Google has indexed it. The Indexing report (previously called the Coverage report) shows you the status of every page Google has discovered on your site. Pages are grouped into categories:

Indexed — Google has successfully added this page to its search index. It can appear in search results.
Not indexed — Google knows about this page but has chosen not to index it, or encountered a problem when trying. You need to investigate why.
Errors — Something went wrong when Google tried to crawl or index this page. Server errors, redirect loops, and blocked resources are common culprits.

Remember Enrique, the BGC lawyer? When he opened his Indexing report, he saw 14 pages listed under “Crawled — currently not indexed” and “Server error (5xx).” His web hosting was returning timeout errors for his blog pages because his shared hosting plan could not handle the server load during peak hours. He upgraded to a better hosting plan, fixed the broken internal links his developer had left behind, and within two weeks all 14 pages were indexed and appearing in search results for Philippine corporate law queries.

Submitting your sitemap through GSC

The Indexing section also includes a Sitemaps panel where you can submit your XML sitemap (covered in detail in Article 5 of this guide). Submitting your sitemap tells Google exactly which pages you consider important. In the Sitemaps panel, enter your sitemap URL (usually yoursite.com/sitemap.xml) and click Submit. Google will read it regularly from that point forward and use it to discover new and updated pages faster.

Page-level detail

The URL Inspection tool: checking any page, one at a time.

The URL Inspection tool is like a magnifying glass for individual pages. Paste any URL from your site into the search bar at the top of Google Search Console, and GSC tells you everything Google knows about that specific page:

Whether the page is indexed or not
When Google last crawled it
How Google found the page (through a sitemap, an internal link, or an external link)
Whether the page has mobile usability issues
Whether it passes Core Web Vitals assessment
Any crawl or indexing errors specific to that page

The most useful feature is the “Request Indexing” button. When you publish a new page or make significant updates to an existing page, you can paste the URL into the inspection tool and click “Request Indexing.” This sends a signal to Google to re-crawl and re-index that specific page. It does not guarantee instant indexing, but it puts your page at the front of the queue.

Lorna used this feature when she added a new page for her custom birthday cakes. Instead of waiting for Google to discover the page on its own (which could take days or weeks), she pasted the URL into the inspection tool, clicked “Request Indexing,” and the page was indexed within 24 hours. Her “custom birthday cakes Marikina” page started appearing in local search results that same week.

Mobile matters

Mobile usability: making sure your site works on phones.

In the Philippines, the majority of web browsing happens on mobile phones. Google knows this, and it uses “mobile-first indexing” — meaning Google primarily looks at the mobile version of your website when deciding how to rank it. If your site does not work well on a phone, your rankings suffer everywhere.

The Mobile Usability report in GSC flags specific problems:

Text too small to read — Your font size forces users to pinch and zoom
Clickable elements too close together — Buttons and links are so close that phone users tap the wrong one
Content wider than screen — Users have to scroll horizontally to see your full page
Viewport not set — Your page does not adapt to different screen sizes

Roland owns a printing business. His website was built five years ago by a freelancer who designed it primarily for desktop screens. Roland never checked how it looked on a phone because he always used his laptop. When he opened the Mobile Usability report in GSC, he saw 22 pages flagged with “clickable elements too close together” and “content wider than screen.”

His pricing tables — the most important pages on his site — were completely unreadable on mobile. Customers had to pinch, zoom, and scroll sideways to see prices. Many of them probably gave up and called a competitor instead. Roland hired a developer to make the site responsive (mobile-friendly). After the fix, the mobile usability errors disappeared from GSC within a week, and his phone enquiries increased by roughly 30 percent over the following month.

Speed and experience

Core Web Vitals: how fast and smooth your site feels.

Core Web Vitals are Google’s way of measuring user experience. They focus on three things:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) — How long it takes for the main content of your page to load. Good is under 2.5 seconds.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP) — How quickly your page responds when someone taps a button or clicks a link. Good is under 200 milliseconds.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — How much your page content jumps around as it loads. Good is a score under 0.1. You have experienced this when text shifts just as you are about to tap a link, causing you to tap the wrong thing.

GSC groups your pages into three categories: Good, Needs Improvement, and Poor. You do not need to understand the technical details of each metric. What matters is the category. If a significant number of your pages fall into “Poor,” your rankings could be affected, and more importantly, your visitors are having a frustrating experience.

Roland’s printing website also had Core Web Vitals issues. His product pages included large, uncompressed images that took eight seconds to load on mobile connections. After his developer compressed the images and implemented lazy loading (only loading images as users scroll to them), his LCP dropped from 8 seconds to 2.1 seconds. Every page moved from “Poor” to “Good” in the GSC report within a few weeks.

Taking action

How to use GSC data to improve your content and strategy.

Having access to data is useless if you do not act on it. Here are the most valuable actions you can take based on what GSC tells you.

Find your “almost there” pages

Filter the Performance report by average position. Look for pages ranking between positions 8 and 20 — these are pages that are close to page one but not quite there. They represent your biggest opportunities. Improving the content, title tags, and internal linking for these pages can push them onto page one, where the majority of clicks happen.

Discover what your audience actually searches for

The Queries tab in the Performance report shows you the exact words people type when they find your site. These are not guesses or estimates — they are real search queries from real people. Use them to guide your content strategy. If dozens of people find your bakeshop by searching “custom fondant cake Marikina,” and you do not have a dedicated page about fondant cakes, that is an immediate content opportunity.

Gina’s florist shop is a perfect example. She never would have thought to create a sympathy flowers page if GSC had not shown her that people were already searching for that exact service in her area. The data told her what her customers wanted before they even walked through her door.

Fix pages that are not getting indexed

Check the Indexing report regularly. If important pages are not being indexed, investigate why. Common fixes include:

Removing accidental noindex tags
Fixing broken internal links that prevent Google from reaching pages
Resolving server errors and timeouts
Consolidating thin or duplicate content
Ensuring pages are included in your sitemap

Improve titles and descriptions for low-CTR pages

If a page has high impressions but low CTR, the problem is usually your title tag or meta description. People see your page in search results but choose to click on a competitor instead. Rewrite your title to be more specific, compelling, and relevant. Include your location if you serve a local area. Vanessa’s title tag rewrite is the textbook example — same content, better packaging, more clicks.

Beyond traditional search

Linking GSC insights to your AI search strategy.

Here is something most guides will not tell you: the data inside Google Search Console is directly relevant to how your business appears in AI search tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot.

AI search tools pull information from the web. Many of them rely on Google’s index or Bing’s index as a primary data source. When someone asks ChatGPT “Where can I get custom cakes in Marikina?” or asks Perplexity “Best printing service Manila,” those AI systems search the web and cite pages that are well-indexed, authoritative, and relevant.

GSC helps you strengthen your AI search presence in several ways:

Ensure all your pages are indexed. AI tools can only cite pages that exist in search indexes. If GSC shows pages with indexing errors, fix them so those pages are available to both Google and AI crawlers.
Identify your strongest topics. The queries that bring traffic in traditional search are the same topics AI systems associate with your brand. Double down on content for those topics.
Create content that answers questions directly. Look at the queries in your Performance report. Many of them are questions or contain question-like intent. Creating clear, well-structured answers to those questions makes your content more likely to be cited by AI systems that generate answers from web sources.
Monitor your brand queries. Filter Performance data for your business name. If people are searching for you by name and finding you, that is a signal of brand authority that AI systems also pick up on.

Gina’s sympathy flowers page eventually started appearing not just in Google results but also in Perplexity’s AI-generated answers when users asked about flower delivery in Quezon City. The same content, optimised based on GSC data, performed well in both traditional and AI search. That is the power of letting real data drive your content decisions.

Common questions

Frequently asked questions about Google Search Console.

What is Google Search Console and is it really free?

Google Search Console is a completely free tool from Google that shows you how Google discovers, crawls, and indexes your website. It tells you which search queries bring visitors to your site, how many times your pages appear in search results, which pages have errors, and whether your site meets mobile usability and Core Web Vitals standards. There is no paid tier and no feature is locked behind a paywall. Any website owner with a Google account can use it.

How do I verify my website in Google Search Console?

Google offers several verification methods. The easiest for most business owners is the HTML tag method: Google gives you a short line of code, you paste it into the head section of your homepage, and Google confirms ownership within minutes. If you use a platform like WordPress, Shopify, or Wix, there are built-in fields where you paste a verification code without touching any code. Domain-level verification through your DNS provider is another option that covers all subdomains at once.

What is the Performance report in Google Search Console?

The Performance report shows you exactly how your website performs in Google search results. It displays four key metrics: total clicks (how many times someone clicked through to your site), total impressions (how many times your pages appeared in search results), average click-through rate or CTR (the percentage of impressions that resulted in clicks), and average position (where your pages typically rank). You can filter by date range, specific pages, countries, devices, and search queries.

What does the Coverage or Indexing report tell me?

The Indexing report (previously called Coverage) tells you which of your pages Google has successfully indexed, which pages it tried to index but encountered errors, which pages are valid but have warnings, and which pages were excluded from indexing and why. This is critical because a page that is not indexed will never appear in search results. Common issues include server errors, redirect problems, pages blocked by robots.txt, and duplicate content.

How do I use the URL Inspection tool?

The URL Inspection tool lets you check the status of any specific page on your website. Paste a URL into the search bar at the top of Google Search Console and it tells you whether the page is indexed, when Google last crawled it, whether it has any mobile usability issues, and whether it passed Core Web Vitals assessment. You can also request that Google re-crawl and re-index the page, which is useful when you have updated content and want Google to see the changes quickly.

Does Google Search Console data help with AI search visibility?

Yes. Google Search Console shows you which queries people use to find your content. These same queries are what people type into AI search tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot. By analysing your top-performing queries in GSC, you can identify topics where you already have authority and create content optimised for both traditional and AI search. Pages that rank well in Google are more likely to be cited by AI systems that use web search as a data source.

How often should I check Google Search Console?

For most small business owners, checking once a week is sufficient. Look at the Performance report to see if traffic is trending up or down, check the Indexing report for new errors, and review any messages Google may have sent about your site. If you have just launched a new website, made significant changes, or published a batch of new content, check daily for the first two weeks to ensure everything is being crawled and indexed properly.

Quick glossary

Terms used in this article.

Google Search Console (GSC): A free tool from Google that shows how Google sees your website, including which searches bring visitors, which pages have errors, and how your site performs technically.
Impressions: The number of times your page appeared in Google search results, whether or not anyone clicked on it.
Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of people who saw your page in search results and actually clicked on it. Calculated as clicks divided by impressions.
Indexing: The process of Google adding your page to its searchable catalogue. A page must be indexed to appear in search results.
Core Web Vitals: A set of three metrics (LCP, INP, CLS) that measure how fast and smooth your website feels to visitors. Google uses them as a ranking factor.
URL Inspection: A GSC tool that lets you check the indexing status, crawl details, and technical health of any individual page on your website.
Mobile-first indexing: Google’s approach of primarily using the mobile version of your website for ranking and indexing, rather than the desktop version.
Crawl errors: Problems that prevent Google from accessing and reading your pages, such as server timeouts, broken links, or pages blocked by robots.txt.

Bottom line: Google Search Console is the single most important free tool available to any website owner. Lorna went from not knowing it existed to discovering which Marikina bakeshop queries brought people to her site. Enrique found and fixed 14 crawl errors that were hiding half his content from Google. Vanessa doubled her clicks by rewriting a single title tag based on Performance data. Roland fixed mobile usability problems he never knew he had. Gina discovered an entire revenue stream by reading what people actually searched for. The tool is free. The data is real. The only thing standing between you and better search visibility is 15 minutes of setup time. Do it today.

Next: Diagnosing Traffic Drops → ← Previous: International SEO

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