How I Read Google Search Console Report: The First 3 Things I Look At

Open Google Search Console for the first time and it feels like walking into a cockpit. Graphs, tabs, coloured numbers going up and down and a quiet sense that you're supposed to understand all of it specially if you are new to SEO.

Most of us do the same thing at first: glance at the clicks number, feel good or bad about it, and close the tab. That's reading a mood, not a report.

So where should you actually start? The order you look in matters almost as much as what you look at. These are my first three checks.

1. What time range am I actually looking at?

Every number in Search Console is a number for a period. Change the period and the story changes.

Search Console keeps about 16 months of data, so you can zoom out far enough to see real trends. But zoom in too tightly and an ordinary quiet week can look like a crisis. Data is also usually a day or two behind, so the most recent days can look thin without anything being wrong.

My habit is to decide what I'm asking before I pick the window. Checking whether a recent change did anything? A shorter window. Looking for a trend? Longer. And when I compare two periods, I keep them the same length.

2. Is Google even able to see my pages?

Before asking how well a page performs, I ask whether it's in Google at all. A page that isn't indexed can't show up in any query report.

The Indexing section, under Pages, splits your URLs into indexed and not indexed, with a reason for each group. Two you'll see early:

• Discovered – currently not indexed: Google knows the URL exists but hasn't crawled it yet.
• Crawled – currently not indexed: Google looked at the page and, for now, chose not to include it.

Not indexed doesn't automatically mean a problem. Redirects, duplicates, and pages you deliberately blocked also land in this list. What I'm checking is narrower: are the pages I want in Google actually in the indexed group? If an important page is sitting in "not indexed", that's where I dig first.

3. What are people searching, and is it changing?

Now the Performance report, under Search results. It gives you four numbers:

• Clicks: how many times people clicked through to your page
• Impressions: how many times your page appeared in results
• CTR: clicks divided by impressions
• Average position: roughly where your page appeared

The useful move is the Compare option, which puts two periods side by side. Then I ask a few questions. Which queries gained impressions? Which have plenty of impressions but few clicks (showing up but not being chosen)? Which are brand new?

After queries, I look at pages. Sometimes a single page explains most of a change.

Where can this mislead you?

Quite a few places, honestly.

Average position is an average. A page ranking well for one query and badly for another can blend into a middle number that describes neither.

Small numbers are noisy. Going from 3 clicks to 5 is a 67% increase, but it probably isn't a signal.

And most importantly, Search Console tells you what changed, never why. If clicks rose after you rewrote a title, it's tempting to credit the title. Maybe it was. Maybe not.

Pro tip: keep your own change log

Search Console can't tell you what you did. So keep a sheet with two columns: the date and what you changed (a new page, a rewritten title, a new internal link, a sitemap update). Easy downloadable Google Search Console Change Log

When a number moves, check the log before forming a theory. Nine times out of ten you'll find a change that lines up. That doesn't prove it caused the movement, but it stops you from crediting the wrong thing, and it gives you something to test later.

The question I'm left with

If Search Console can show us what changed but not why, what would it take to design a test that gets us closer to the why? That's the question behind every experiment on Michelle Labs.