Google Search Console is the closest thing most UK businesses have to a direct line into how Google sees their website. It is free, it is first-party data, and it answers the questions that guesswork cannot: which queries you appear for, which pages actually get clicked, what is indexed, and where the site is failing technically.
This guide covers the core setup steps to get started properly, the reports you should live in week to week, and the metrics that matter for both classic SEO and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) — because what Google indexes is still the raw material AI Overviews and other generative answers draw from.
What Google Search Console is — and what it is not
Search Console reports how Google Search interacted with your property. It is not Google Analytics. Analytics tells you what people did after they arrived. Search Console tells you what happened in the search results before they clicked — and whether Google could crawl and index the page at all.
Use both. Search Console for discovery and technical health; Analytics (or your equivalent) for on-site behaviour and conversions. Linking the two accounts lets you see query and landing-page data in Analytics without treating either tool as a substitute for the other.
Getting started: the core setup
1. Choose the right property type
A Domain property covers every subdomain and protocol (http, https, www and non-www) once you verify via DNS. A URL prefix property covers only the exact prefix you verify — for example https://www.example.co.uk/.
For most businesses, Domain is the cleaner long-term choice: one property, one set of reports, fewer gaps when you add a staging subdomain or migrate to HTTPS. If you already have prefix properties, you can keep them and add a Domain property alongside.
2. Verify ownership
DNS TXT (or CNAME) is the most robust method for a Domain property. URL prefix properties can also verify with a HTML file upload, a meta tag, or via Google Analytics / Google Tag Manager if those snippets are already on every page.
Complete verification before you start reading reports. Unverified access is limited, and you cannot submit sitemaps or inspect URLs as the owner.
3. Submit an XML sitemap
Go to Indexing → Sitemaps and submit the sitemap URL WordPress (or your SEO plugin) already generates — typically /sitemap_index.xml or /sitemap.xml. Search Console does not guarantee indexing, but a clean sitemap is still the fastest way to tell Google which URLs you consider canonical.
Check the sitemap status after 24–48 hours. “Couldn’t fetch” almost always means a robots.txt block, a 404, or a plugin serving the file with the wrong content type.
4. Confirm robots.txt and canonicals are not fighting you
Open Settings → robots.txt (or fetch the live file) and make sure you are not disallowing CSS, JS or important template paths. Then spot-check a handful of money pages with the URL Inspection tool: Google’s chosen canonical should match the URL you want to rank.
5. Set users and email alerts
Add the people who actually need access — owner, full user or restricted — and turn on email notifications for manual actions, security issues and data anomalies. Search Console is most valuable when someone notices a crawl collapse the same week it happens, not three months later in a quarterly review.
The reports that matter first
You do not need every report on day one. Start with these four, then add Links and Experience once the basics are stable.
Performance (Search results)
This is the commercial report. Filter by search type (Web is the default), date range, query, page, country, device and search appearance. For UK businesses, pin Country to United Kingdom unless you genuinely serve other markets — mixed-country totals hide local problems.
Pages (Indexing)
Formerly “Coverage”. It splits URLs into why they are indexed or why they are not: not found, redirect, excluded by ‘noindex’, crawled – currently not indexed, duplicate without user-selected canonical, and so on. This is where technical SEO either holds or quietly fails.
URL Inspection
Use this for individual pages after a publish, a redesign or a migration. Request indexing only for URLs that are already live, canonical and internally linked — it is a nudge, not a queue-jump for an entire site.
Experience and enhancements
Core Web Vitals, HTTPS and (where relevant) rich result types such as FAQ, Product or Article. Enhancements tell you whether structured data is valid enough for extra search features — which also helps machines parse your content for generative answers.
The metrics to measure
Four numbers sit at the top of Performance. Read them as a set, never in isolation.
- Impressions: how often a link to your property appeared in search results. Rising impressions with flat clicks usually means you are visible for queries you have not yet earned (or you are stuck on page two).
- Clicks: how often someone followed that link. This is your search traffic, not your branded homepage visits from typing the URL.
- Average CTR: clicks divided by impressions. Title, meta description, sitelinks and rich results all move this. A high position with a weak CTR is almost always a snippet problem, not a ranking problem.
- Average position: the mean ranking of your URLs for the filtered queries. It is a blended number — useful for trend, dangerous as a KPI on its own because one viral branded query can flatter the whole site.
How to slice the data so it is useful
- Queries: separate branded vs non-branded. Brand terms should convert; non-brand is where SEO and GEO work shows up.
- Pages: find landing pages with impressions but weak CTR, and pages with clicks but no conversions in Analytics — those are two different fixes.
- Devices: mobile vs desktop. If mobile CTR or Core Web Vitals lag, that is where Google (and most users) will feel it first.
- Dates: compare 28 days vs the previous 28, then 3 months vs 3 months, so you do not overreact to a single algorithm week.
- Search appearance: isolate AI Overviews, rich results or Discover where the report is available, so you can see how generative surfaces change click behaviour even when impressions hold.
Indexing metrics you should actually track
- Valid pages: should trend with the number of URLs you intentionally publish — not with parameter junk or thin archives.
- Error / not found / server error: treat as incidents. A spike after a plugin update or host change is a crawl emergency.
- Crawled – currently not indexed: quality and consolidation signal. If important service pages sit here, they need stronger internal links, clearer purpose, or less duplication.
- Excluded by noindex / canonical: confirm these are deliberate (thank-you pages, filters, paginated leftovers), not accidental.
Experience metrics
Watch the share of URLs that are “good” for Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift, split by mobile and desktop. You do not need a perfect Lighthouse score on a staging URL — you need field data in Search Console to stay in the “good” bucket for the URLs that already attract impressions.
Why this matters for GEO as well as SEO
Generative answers still depend on pages Google can fetch, understand and trust. If Search Console shows a service page as excluded, duplicate or “crawled – not indexed”, that page is a poor candidate for citation in AI Overviews, ChatGPT-style answers that draw on the open web, or any engine that starts from a search index.
Practically, GEO work on a UK site still starts here: valid indexation, a sitemap Google accepts, queries you already almost rank for, and snippets that state a clear answer. Structured data and extractable headings help machines quote you — but only after the URL is in the index.
A simple 30-day operating rhythm
- Weekly: Performance 7-day vs previous 7-day (clicks, impressions, CTR). Open Pages for new errors. Inspect any URL you published or redirected.
- Fortnightly: Query report — pick five non-brand queries in positions 4–15 and improve the matching page (title, H1, first paragraph, internal links).
- Monthly: Indexing totals, sitemap status, Core Web Vitals, and a branded vs non-branded split so you can see whether growth is real demand or just people searching your name.
Export the Performance table occasionally. Search Console’s on-screen view is capped; a spreadsheet lets you catch long-tail queries that never appear in the first 1,000 rows of the UI.
Ready to put Search Console to work?
Setup is the easy part. The advantage comes from reading the reports against your commercial pages — service landing pages, location pages and guides — and fixing what Google is already telling you.
Contact Gareth at GLC Web Solutions to discuss Search Console setup, technical SEO, GEO visibility and a measurement plan that fits your site.
