Google Search Console for Beginners: A Guide for Local Business Owners

Maybe your web designer said they’d “set up Search Console” when the site went live. Maybe Google has emailed you about an indexing issue and you weren’t sure whether to worry. Or you’ve never logged in and don’t know whether anyone has.

Google Search Console is a free tool that shows how your website appears in Google Search: which searches it turns up for, how often people click, and whether Google has had problems reading your pages. You don’t need to know any code, and once it’s set up properly it needs 10 to 15 minutes a month.

For a local business, three things matter:

1. Make sure your business owns it, not just your web designer.
2. Tell Google where your sitemap is, if your site needs one. Many small sites don’t.
3. Check a handful of reports once a month, and leave the rest alone.

This guide follows Google’s help pages as of September 2026. Google renames things fairly often, so treat menu names as a guide.

What Search Console is, and what it isn’t

Google describes Search Console as a service that “helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results”. You don’t need it to appear in Google; it’s a window onto what Google already sees.

Google even says that if your site runs on a hosted platform such as Wix or Squarespace, or you’re a small business without much time for your website, you “might not need to use Search Console at all”. We’d still set it up: it’s free, and it’s how Google tells you when something goes wrong.

It’s easily confused with two other free Google tools:

Tool	What it tells you	What it doesn’t
Search Console	How your website appears in Google Search, and how often people click through	What visitors do on your site, or whether a click became an enquiry
Google Analytics	What visitors do on your site, such as pages viewed and actions you’ve set up to track	Which searches showed your site, unless you link it to Search Console
Business Profile Performance	How people find and use your Business Profile on Search and Maps: views, calls, direction requests, website clicks	How your website performs in search results

That last row matters for local businesses. Calls and direction requests from your listing are in your Business Profile, not Search Console. Google’s Business Profile performance page explains the figures, which only verified profiles get. If you haven’t claimed yours, start with our guide to setting up a Google Business Profile, and our Google 3-pack guide explains the Maps results that sit above the ordinary listings.

How to set up Search Console, step by step

You’ll need a Google Account and access to either your domain settings (at the company where your web address is registered) or your website. If a web designer manages those, you may need their help with step 3.

1. Find out whether it’s set up, and who owns it

Sign in to Search Console with the business’s Google Account. If your website is listed, you have access. If not, it may exist under someone else’s account; Google notes that some hosting services register sites automatically.

So ask whoever built your site: “Is Search Console set up, and which account is the verified owner?” That question matters more than any report. Google’s page on owners, users and permissions sets out three levels:

• Owner: full control, including adding and removing people and changing settings.
• Full user: can see all the data and take some actions.
• Restricted user: can view most of the data.

There are two kinds of owner. A verified owner has proved ownership with a “token”, such as a file on the website or a record in the domain settings. A delegated owner has been given owner rights by a verified owner, without a token of their own. If all verified owners are removed, Google says everyone else loses access after a grace period.

If your web designer is the only verified owner and their token disappears (they remove it, or a rebuild wipes the file), you can be locked out of your own data. Our advice: the business should be a verified owner, using an account the business controls, with your web designer or agency added as a user. Our guide on choosing an SEO agency covers access when you work with an agency or take over from a previous one.

2. Choose your property type

A “property” is the website you’re tracking. Google’s guide to adding a property offers two main types:

• Domain property (for example, yourbusiness.co.uk): covers the whole site, with or without “www”, on http and https. It can only be verified through your domain settings.
• URL-prefix property (for example, https://www.yourbusiness.co.uk): covers only addresses that start with exactly that. It has more ways to verify.

If you or your web person can add a record to your domain settings, choose a Domain property; it covers everything, so there’s no need for separate http and https properties. If not, use a URL-prefix property for the address your site actually uses, usually the https one.

You can’t break anything here: Google says adding a property doesn’t affect your website.

3. Verify that you own the site

Google’s verification page lists the methods. The main ones for a small business:

• DNS record, the only way to verify a Domain property. DNS is the set of settings that points your web address to the right places. Search Console gives you a line of text to add there. Google says it can take up to two or three days for your provider to start serving the record, so if verification fails at first, wait a day or two and try again.
• HTML file upload (URL-prefix only): a small file uploaded to your site.
• HTML tag, Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager (URL-prefix only), if one is already on your site.
• Your website platform. On WordPress, Wix, Shopify and similar, check your platform’s instructions first. For WordPress, Google says Site Kit “is the only plugin that is officially sponsored by Google”.

Whichever you use, leave it in place. Google checks periodically, and removing the file or DNS record loses you verification. Google also suggests adding a second method in case the first one breaks.

4. Add your web designer or agency as a user

Only owners can add people. In Search Console’s settings, open users and permissions and add their Google Account email. Full user usually gives a web designer enough to see what’s going on; restricted suits someone who only needs to look. If they need an owner-only job, such as submitting a sitemap, you can make them a delegated owner and remove them later. You stay the verified owner either way.

5. Submit a sitemap, if you need one

A sitemap is a file listing your site’s pages. You can’t upload it to Google; “submitting” just tells Google where it lives. Google’s Sitemaps report page is frank about who needs one:

• On a hosted platform like Wix or Squarespace, the platform “probably” manages your sitemap already.
• If your site has about 500 pages or fewer, all reachable by links from your homepage, you probably don’t need a sitemap or this report.

If either describes you, skip this step. Otherwise, ask your web designer for the sitemap’s address (it varies by platform) and add it in the Sitemaps report. You want the status to say “Success”; “Couldn’t fetch” means Google can’t read the file, so pass that to whoever manages the site. And remember a sitemap is, in Google’s words, “merely a hint”. It doesn’t guarantee Google will use it.

6. Wait a few days

Google says data “takes a few days” to build up, so empty reports on day one are normal.

The reports that matter for a local business

Search Console has a long menu. Google’s advice for occasional visitors is to look for manual actions, security issues and dramatic drops in clicks. Beyond those, these are the reports we’d focus on.

Performance: how you appear in Google Search

This is the report you’ll use most. It opens on the last three months and shows four numbers, defined in Google’s Performance report guide:

• Impressions: how many times your site appeared in search results. For an ordinary listing, Google generally counts it even if the searcher never scrolled down to it.
• Clicks: how many times someone clicked through to your site from Google Search.
• CTR (click-through rate): clicks divided by impressions.
• Average position: where your highest result sat, averaged across all the searches you appeared in. Position 1 is the top.

You can break these down by Queries (the search terms), Pages, Countries, Devices and Dates.

A made-up example: a plumber in Kidderminster sees “emergency plumber kidderminster” with 400 impressions, 12 clicks, a 3% CTR and an average position of 6.2. That’s 400 appearances, not visitors. The 12 clicks are visits, not jobs; Search Console can’t tell you whether anyone rang. And 6.2 is an average across many searches made at different times, places and devices; any one searcher may have seen you higher or lower. Google’s page on impressions, position and clicks says a position number “can mean different things in different situations” and recommends watching how it changes over time.

Three more things catch beginners out:

• The latest days are missing. Google says data is available 48 hours after it’s collected, and the report shows complete days by default.
• History stops at 16 months. Note your monthly totals if you want a longer record.
• The rows won’t add up to the totals. Some searches are hidden to protect privacy (Google calls them “anonymized queries”). They count in the chart totals but aren’t listed.

As of September 2026, Google also says appearances in AI Overviews and AI Mode are counted in the Performance report, within the “Web” search type.

Page indexing: which pages Google has stored

“Indexed” means Google has stored a page so it can show it in results. The Page indexing report shows which of your pages are indexed and, for the rest, why not.

A long “not indexed” list is often fine. Google says “You should not expect all URLs on your site to be indexed”. The goal is the main version of every important page. Duplicates and redirected addresses are meant to be left out, and a page you deleted on purpose isn’t a problem either.

Two statuses worry people more than they should:

• Crawled – currently not indexed: Google visited the page but didn’t add it. It “may or may not be indexed in the future; no need to resubmit this URL for crawling.”
• Discovered – currently not indexed: Google knows the page exists but hasn’t visited yet, typically because it didn’t want to overload your site.

Worry only if one is a page that matters, such as a main service page.

URL Inspection: checking one page

Paste any address from your site into the search bar at the top of Search Console, and the URL Inspection tool tells you whether that page is indexed. “URL is on Google” means the page is eligible to appear in search results, not that it’s guaranteed to.

For a new or changed page, you can request indexing. Google’s help page gives timings from “a day or so” to “a week or two”, says a request doesn’t guarantee indexing, and applies a daily limit, so ask once for a page that matters and then leave it.

Core Web Vitals and HTTPS

The Core Web Vitals report grades how quickly your pages load, respond and settle for real visitors. “No data available” means, Google says, the property is new or there isn’t enough real-world data yet. Good scores help visitors, but Google says they don’t guarantee top rankings.

The HTTPS report counts how many indexed pages use the secure https version. Ideally, all of them. It only appears for Domain properties and https URL-prefix properties.

Manual actions and Security issues: the ones you want empty

A green tick in both is the goal.

• A manual action means a person at Google has decided some of your pages break its spam policies, and some or all of your site won’t be shown in results. The Manual actions report explains the fix-and-review process, which Google says can take several days or weeks.
• Security issues means Google has found hacked content, malware or deceptive pages. Affected pages can carry a warning in search results or the browser.

If either ever shows a problem, get help rather than experimenting.

Insights and generative AI performance

Google is gradually introducing an Insights report, a simplified overview of your key figures, so it may not be on your account yet.

Google says that as of 31 August 2026 it has rolled out a generative AI performance report to all websites. It shows impressions (not clicks) from AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country, device and date. The same page also says not every property has access yet, and the report won’t show if you’ve had too few AI impressions, so don’t worry if it’s missing.

There’s also a Search generative AI control in Settings, which includes your site by default. Excluding it means no traffic or impressions from those features, so for a local business that wants to be found we see little reason to touch it. Our guide to appearing in Google’s AI Overviews covers both in more depth.

Keep email alerts on

Google says there’s “no need to sign in to the tool every day”, because Search Console emails you when it finds new issues. Email preferences are set per person, and every message also appears in the message panel inside Search Console. Make sure they reach the business, not only your web designer.

A 15-minute monthly check

Google suggests checking “around once every month”, or when you change your site’s content. This is the routine we’d suggest; it’s our advice, not an official checklist.

1. Overview and messages: no manual actions or security issues, and nothing unread in the message panel.
2. Performance: any sharp drop in clicks that the season or a bank holiday doesn’t explain? Note last month’s total clicks and impressions in a spreadsheet, so you can compare month on month and year on year.
3. Queries and Pages: are people finding you for the services and towns you want? Are your main service pages getting impressions?
4. Page indexing: any new reason in the “not indexed” list, and does it include an important page?
5. Sitemaps, if you submitted one: still “Success”?
6. Generative AI report, if you have it: which pages are getting impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode?
7. Business Profile performance: calls, direction requests and website clicks from your listing, which Search Console won’t show.

Most months, nothing will need doing. You’re watching for change, not chasing numbers.

Common beginner mix-ups

• “I searched for it and I’m not there.” Google says results depend on the time, place, device and recent history of the person searching, so your own search isn’t a fair test.
• “Where’s the Mobile Usability report?” Google retired it on 1 December 2023. Older guides still mention it.
• “I need to track Bing too.” Optional. Bing Webmaster Tools can import your verified sites from Search Console, according to Bing’s announcement.

What to do with what you find

Search Console shows symptoms. Where to go next depends on what you see:

• Something looks broken (a key page not indexed, a security warning): work through our website health check, which turns these reports into pass-or-fail checks.
• Your service pages barely get impressions: you may not have a clear page for each service and area. Our guide to service and location pages explains how to structure them.
• You’re planning a new website: record your Performance figures first and keep verification in place. Our guide to redesigning without losing SEO covers the rest.
• You’ve made changes and are waiting: our guide to how long SEO takes explains what to watch, and when.

Where Get Found comes in

Get Found is a local SEO, AI SEO and web design agency based in Worcester, with a second office in Stockport. When we build a site, Search Console, analytics and your Business Profile are linked up at launch, and afterwards we keep an eye on Search Console so anything that slips gets caught early. For ongoing work on how you show up in local search, see our local SEO page.

Our free visibility audit checks where you show up on Google, Maps and the main AI tools. If you’re stuck on access or verification, get in touch.