Google Search Console step by step for a small site

Search Console is Google’s free tool that shows your site as Google sees it: the searches that make you appear, the clicks that follow, the indexed pages, the problems spotted. It tells you what is happening, and warns you when something breaks.

Here is how to set it up, then the four screens that are really useful to an independent business.

Domain or URL prefix: choosing your property

In Search Console, a site is called a property. There are two kinds.

If you have your own domain name, the Domain property is the simplest: it sees everything at once. Otherwise, the URL prefix requires being able to put a file or a tag on the site; check that your tool allows it. An account can manage up to 1,000 properties, and nothing prevents you from having both kinds.

Verifying the site is yours

Verification proves to Google that you control the site.

1. By DNS: Search Console gives you a line of text to add to your domain name’s settings, at the provider where you registered it. Google warns that a record added by hand can take two or three days to be served, then from a few minutes to a few days to be visible to it. If verification fails, try again a day or two later.
2. By HTML file or tag: for a URL-prefix property, you put a small file on the site, or you add a tag to the homepage’s code.

In every case, leave the token in place. Google regularly checks that it is there; if it disappears, you lose your rights over the property after a grace period.

Two bonuses. Once your site is verified in Search Console, Google can, in some cases, instantly verify your business profile. And Bing Webmaster Tools, Bing’s equivalent, can import your sites from Search Console: they are verified there automatically.

The sitemap: useful, not essential

A sitemap is a file that lists your site’s pages. Google writes it itself: a small site, of about 500 pages or fewer, whose important pages can all be reached by links from the homepage, may not need one. A one-page site obviously falls into this case. Submitting one can still speed up discovery.

If you have one:

1. open the Sitemaps report;
2. paste its address into the “Add a new sitemap” field, then click Submit;
3. read the status: “Success”, “Has errors” or “Couldn’t fetch”.

No need to resubmit it with every change: once read, Google comes back to it on its own, and only advises submitting it again after big changes. You can also give its address in the site’s robots.txt file.

The performance report

This is the most useful screen. It gives four figures:

• clicks: how many times people clicked through to your site from Google;
• impressions: how many times your site appeared in results;
• click-through rate: clicks divided by impressions;
• average position: the average place of your best result.

You can then break them down by query, page, country, device, search appearance and date. The default view covers the last three months, and Search Console keeps 16 months of data. The very last days are provisional and can still change.

Some queries are hidden to protect users’ privacy: they count in the totals, but disappear as soon as you filter by query. Since March 2025, a filter also separates searches that contain your brand from the others, except for sites with too few impressions.

Take a bakery in Rennes. If “bakery rennes” earns it many impressions, an average position of 8 and few clicks, the title and the snippet need rework: our article on the title and meta description explains how. If clicks mostly come from searches on its name, those are customers who already know it; the work remains to be done on the trade and the town.

URL inspection

Paste a page’s address into the top bar. Search Console shows:

• the indexed version: “URL is on Google” means the page can appear, with no guarantee it will; “URL is not on Google” means it can’t;
• the Google-selected canonical URL, which may differ from the one you declared;
• the rich results detected, such as structured data.

The Test live URL button examines the page as it is now, with a screenshot. A successful test doesn’t guarantee indexing.

After a significant change, Request indexing invites Google to come back. The number of requests is limited each day, nothing is guaranteed, and indexing can take up to a week or two.

The monthly routine

Google says it itself: no need to log in every day. It sends an email when it detects a new problem, and suggests taking a look about once a month, or after changing the content. Here is what to look at:

1. Performance: compare the past month with the previous one; note the queries that rise and those that fall.
2. Almost-won queries: an important search where you appear just below the top results deserves a clearer title or a better-named section.
3. Page indexing: is your page properly indexed?
4. Experience: the Core Web Vitals report, when it has enough data, and what it flags. The thresholds are explained in our dedicated article.
5. Security and manual actions: these two sections should stay empty.
6. After every big change: URL inspection, then an indexing request.

In short: a Domain property if you have your domain name, a token you never remove, an optional sitemap, and a monthly visit to performance, indexing and alerts.