Chapter 2 · 2.7
Reading the Performance and Page indexing reports
After a few days, data appears in Google Search Console. You'll use two reports most often. This article shows you where to look and what to do with what you find. For what the figures mean exactly and how Google calculates them, see the lessons Reading the performance report and The Page indexing report and URL inspection in the Getting found online course.
Performance: how often are you found?
Click Performance in the menu. At the top you'll see four figures. Click them to show or hide them in the chart.
| Figure | What is it? |
|---|---|
| Clicks | How often someone clicked through to your site from Google. |
| Impressions | How often your site appeared in the search results. |
| CTR | The share of impressions that led to a click. |
| Average position | The average position of your highest result. |
Below the chart are the tabs Searches, Pages, Countries, Devices and more. By default you see the last three months. Use the date filter to choose a different period or compare two periods.
What do you do with it?
- A search with lots of impressions and few clicks: check whether the title and description of that page match what people are looking for.
- A page you consider important that isn't in the list: use URL inspection to check whether it's in Google (see Checking a single page with URL inspection).
- After a major change, compare the period before and after.
Page indexing: what's in Google?
In the menu, under Index, click Pages. You'll see how many pages are indexed and how many aren't, with the reasons listed below.
Not every page belongs in Google. A redirect, a page with noindex that you deliberately keep out of Google, or a duplicate of another page: that's fine. Mainly check whether your important pages are indexed. You don't need a hundred per cent.
| Reason | What do you do? |
|---|---|
| Excluded by 'noindex' tag | Should the page be in Google? Then make it findable. |
| Blocked by robots.txt | Check your robots.txt. |
| Not found (404) | Old addresses? Set up a redirect to the new page. |
| Server error (5xx) | Open the page yourself. If it shows an error, fix that first. |
| Page with redirect | Usually fine: the old address redirects. |
| Crawled - currently not indexed | Google has looked at the page but hasn't included it (yet). Improve the page or merge it with another one. |
Fixed a cause? Then click Validate fix next to that reason. Google checks the pages again. This usually takes up to about two weeks.
Notifications
Google Search Console emails you if something serious is wrong, such as a manual action or a security issue. You can also find these in the menu, under Security & Manual Actions. Make sure these emails don't end up in your spam folder.