Get started with Search Console

Search Console is a tool from Google that can help anyone with a website to understand how they are performing on Google Search, and what they can do to improve their appearance on search to bring more relevant traffic to their websites.

Search Console provides information on how Google crawls, indexes, and serves websites. This can help website owners to monitor and optimize Search performance.

There is no need to log in to the tool every day. If new issues are found by Google on your site, you'll receive an email from Search Console alerting you. But you might want to check your account around once every month, or when you make changes to the site's content, to make sure the data is stable. Learn more about managing your site with Search Console.

To get started, follow these steps:

  1. Verify site ownership. Get access to all of the information Search Console makes available. Learn more about how to verify your site ownership.
  2. Make sure Google can find and read your pages. The Index coverage report gives you an overview of all the pages Google indexed or tried to index in your website. Review the list available and try to fix page errors and warnings.
  3. Review mobile usability errors Google found on your site. The Mobile usability report shows issues that might affect your users experience while browsing your site on a mobile device.
  4. Consider submitting a sitemap to Search Console. Pages from your site can be discovered by Google without this step. However, submitting a sitemap via Search Console might speed up your site's discovery. If you decide to submit it through the tool, you'll be able to monitor information related to it. Learn more about the Sitemaps report.
  5. Monitor your site's performance. The Search performance report shows how much traffic you're getting from Google Search, including breakdowns by queries, pages, and countries. For each of those breakdowns, you can see trends for impressions, clicks, and other metrics.

Learn more about which reports to use.