How to Use Google Search Console for SEO: 13 Tips to Grow Your Traffic

Google decides what happens to every page you publish — which searches it appears for, where it ranks, and whether it gets indexed at all. None of that is visible from inside your own site.

Google Search Console (GSC) is the record of those decisions. It’s free, and it reports what Google actually did with your pages.

You can see how often each page appeared in search, how many people clicked, and where it ranked. A page with thousands of impressions, almost no clicks and a top-three position needs a better title, not a better ranking.

The great thing about GSC is it keeps adding to what it can tell you. It now reports how your pages show up in Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, and it covers your social and video posts alongside your website.

Here are 13 ways to use Google Search Console for SEO, whatever platform your site runs on.

In This Article:

What Is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a free Google tool that shows you how your site performs in Google Search. It used to be called Google Webmaster Tools.

Search Console reports on search performance, which of your pages Google has indexed — added to the list it can show in search results — and the queries people use to reach you. You can also submit sitemaps, check crawl stats and work through indexing problems from inside it.

What’s the Difference Between Google Analytics and Google Search Console?

Google Analytics tracks user behavior on your website. It tells you how many visitors arrived, which source they came from, which country they’re in, and what they did next. Its referral reports even name the individual sites sending you traffic.

Google Search Console stops at the results page. It reports impressions, clicks, indexing problems and search rankings — everything that happens before someone reaches your site.

In practice, that earlier stretch of the journey covers a specific set of jobs:

• Making sure your pages are indexed in Google search
• Seeing which other websites link to your site (backlinks)
• Seeing the search queries (keywords) visitors used to find your website
• Submitting a sitemap, the file that lists the pages you want Google to find
• Identifying your top organic pages
• Seeing how your pages show up in Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode
• Making sure your structured data (rich results) is working
• Checking your Core Web Vitals scores

Between the search data and the indexing reports, Search Console tells you both what’s working and what Google couldn’t reach. No other tool has that information, because it’s Google’s own record of what happened to your pages.

How to Connect Google Search Console to Your Site

Google only shows you data for a site you’ve proven you own. That verification step is what stops a stranger typing in your domain and reading your queries, your rankings and your indexing problems.

Setup runs in three moves: pick a property type, enter the address it covers, then prove the site is yours. The first panel, Select a property type, splits that first choice into Add a website and a list of social platforms.

Click Add a website and the Select property type screen offers Domain or URL prefix.

A domain property covers every subdomain and both the http and https version of each one, which gives you the fullest picture. The only way to verify it is a DNS record, which means editing the settings wherever your domain is registered.

A URL prefix property covers only the addresses that begin with the exact prefix you type in, and only on the one protocol you type in, http or https. Its own card says it allows multiple verification methods, which makes it the quicker route when you can’t reach your DNS settings.

Whichever you pick, enter the address it covers on that same card: a bare domain, or the full URL including the protocol. Search Console then moves you on to verification, and you choose whichever method you can already reach — your DNS settings, your site’s header, or a tag Google Analytics or Tag Manager already put there.

On WordPress an SEO plugin can hold that tag for you, and our Search Console setup guide for WordPress walks through those steps. Once verification goes through, the data starts arriving — every query you appeared for, every page Google indexed, and every page it couldn’t.

13 Ways to Use Google Search Console to Improve Your SEO

Each of the tips below starts in one Search Console report and ends in a decision — which page to rewrite next, or which problem to fix first.

If Search Console is new to you, start with the first one, because it hands you a shortlist to take into all the others. After that, jump to whichever tip matches the question you have.

1. Start With the Insights Report and Google’s Recommendations

The Insights report answers the plainest questions you have about your site — which content is doing well, and what people searched to find it. You don’t need to know what you’re looking for to get something out of it.

Insights sits alongside the other reports in the Search Console navigation, though not every property has it.

Search Console may also show a Recommendations panel on the Overview page.

Google only puts recommendations there when it has one available for your site, so seeing none is normal rather than a sign that something is wrong.

When a recommendation does appear, it names something specific Google has spotted — a query whose impressions jumped or fell, a search feature your pages aren’t eligible for, or a loose end on the property itself.

Treat Insights and any recommendation you get as a shortlist rather than a verdict. Whatever page they point at is the page to take into the detailed reports below.

For a closer look at what each part of Insights shows, see our guide on the Search Console Insights reports.

2. Find the Pages Getting Impressions but Almost No Clicks

Once Insights hands you a page worth a look, the Search results report tells you why it underperforms. Search Console counts an impression every time one of your pages appears in search results, and a click every time someone chooses it.

The share of impressions that turn into clicks is the click-through rate, and it sits next to your average position, the average spot your page held in the results.

Read those two columns together. A page with plenty of impressions and a tiny click-through rate is one Google is already willing to show.

People are seeing that page and picking something else, so the fix is the title and the description, not the ranking.

To find those pages, open Google Search Console and click Performance » Search results in the left-hand navigation. Then click Average CTR and Average position to add them to the report.

Scroll down to the table and click the Pages tab.

The table then shows the click-through rate of individual pages.

To see which searches a specific page appears for, click that page in the table, then switch back to the Queries tab.

The table narrows to the queries that one page ranks for.

Start with the keywords that already put you on page one, in positions 1 to 10, with a lot of impressions and a low click-through rate. That’s where a better title pays off fastest.

Here are a few things worth trying on those pages:

• Add power words to your titles
• Replace a vague title with one that names exactly what the page delivers
• Keep your meta descriptions descriptive and engaging
• Use easy-to-read URLs
• Try to capture the featured snippet — the answer box above the results — or the AI Overview on the search term, if there is one
• Match your title and description to the searcher’s intent

Google puts no limit on how long a title can be. It just truncates the title link — the clickable headline you see for a page in the results — to fit the device width, so a character count isn’t a target to hit.

Google also writes that headline itself, pulling from the title you set, your visible heading and other prominent text on the page. A vague or stale title is the one most likely to get rewritten.

Rewrite the title first, then check back in a couple of weeks to see whether the click-through rate moved. For more ways to lift a low one, see our guide on how to improve your CTR.

3. Find the Queries Sitting Just Below Your Best Results

Individual queries show the same impressions-without-clicks gap that whole pages do, and they’re the easiest kind to fix. The page already ranks and Google already shows it, so improving it takes less work than writing something new.

To find those queries, open the Queries tab and click the Position column header — that sorts ascending, so your strongest rankings come up first, and a second click flips the sort to bring your page-two queries to the top.

You can also export the table and sort it in a spreadsheet, which is easier for working through a long list.

That column is an average, and it counts every element on the results page, not just the ordinary text results. Treat it as a direction of travel rather than a rank.

Even the top of that ascending sort is worth reading. For example, in the table below, the stock photography row holds position 1.0 on 8,171 impressions and a single click.

Ranking first has earned that page almost nothing, which makes it a title problem rather than a ranking one.

Look for the gap between a lot of impressions and very few clicks. That gap is the signal, whatever the position number says.

Open the page that ranks for that query and check its on-page SEO. Does the phrase actually appear in the title, the intro and a subheading? Does the page read well?

Don’t aim for a set number of times your keyword appears on the page. Google has never published a ratio, and repeating a phrase to hit one is keyword stuffing.

For the on-page checks that do matter, you can stay inside the WordPress editor and use the TruSEO analysis in All in One SEO (AIOSEO). TruSEO scores your page against a keyword you’ve already chosen, and it’s on every plan, including the free one.

For the wider list of checks worth making on a page you’re trying to move, see our WordPress SEO checklist.

You can also look at what’s already ranking above you. Search the query on Google, read the top results, and decide whether your page is missing a section they all cover.

Our guide on how to track competitor website traffic covers how to do that without guessing.

By the end of that pass you’ll know which page to rewrite first — the one with the most impressions and the smallest share of the clicks.

4. Turn Your Top Queries Into Your Next Content Ideas

Your Search Console reports point at new content as well as old. The queries you already appear for are a list of topics your audience has turned up for, which beats a brainstorm as a starting point.

Open the Pages tab in the Search results report to see which of your pages Google shows most often.

A page that keeps earning impressions is telling you something about the subject, not just the post. Ask what else someone searching for that would want to know.

The pages at the top of that list are your proven subjects. Our guide on how to create cornerstone content that ranks covers how to build a hub around one of them.

The queries behind a single page are even more useful. Filter the report to one page, switch to the Queries tab, and you’ll see the exact phrasing people used.

The filtered view below narrows to one such query — “how to paint your front door” — for a single page.

From there, a keyword research tool can show you related phrases you don’t rank for yet. Paste the query into Semrush or Ubersuggest and look for variations worth their own article.

A keyword tool returns a list like the one below, pairing the phrase you entered with related variations and their search volumes.

Pick a variation with real search volume that none of your pages already targets.

That’s your next piece, built on a subject your audience has already searched for rather than one you guessed at.

5. Match Your Keywords to Where People Are in the Buying Process

Search volume isn’t the only thing worth weighing. Every query in your Search Console report also carries an intent, and not all intents are worth the same to you — some bring readers, and some bring buyers.

Knowing which is which tells you where a keyword sits in your sales funnel. There are four types:

• Navigational, where someone searches for a particular website.
• Informational, where someone searches for the answer to a question.
• Investigational, where someone searches for information that may eventually lead to a purchase.
• Transactional, where someone is ready to buy.

Informational keywords answer your audience’s questions, and a blog can earn a lot of its impressions from them. They’re often the easiest to rank for, but the furthest from a sale.

Investigational and transactional keywords sit closer to the money. Product reviews, comparisons and “best X for Y” phrasing all point at someone getting ready to buy.

Say you sell paint. “How to paint your front door” is informational.

An investigational keyword would be “what type of paint to use for a front door”, and a transactional one would be “best paint for wood door”.

Scan your report for the investigational and transactional queries you already appear for. Those are the pages to strengthen first if you need the traffic to convert and not just grow.

Our guide to keyword research in Search Console covers a fuller process for turning queries into a plan.

6. See How Your Pages Show Up in AI Overviews and AI Mode

Some of those queries get answered on the results page itself. Google now puts a generated summary above the results for many searches, called an AI Overview, and AI Mode is the conversational version of the same idea.

An AI Overview looks like this from the searcher’s side. A generated answer sits above the results, with citation cards linking to the pages it drew from.

Until recently there was no way to tell whether your pages were among those citations. Search Console’s Generative AI features report breaks those impressions down by page, so now you can. Google still labels it Beta, and every site has it now, whatever its share of AI traffic.

Those impressions were never missing from your numbers, though. Impressions and clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode are already counted in the main Search results report under the Web (text) search type — that’s how the search-type dropdown labels it. The new report pulls that slice out on its own.

You’ll find it under Performance in the Search Console navigation, as Generative AI features beneath Search results. It shows how your impressions from Google’s generative AI features change over time, and you can break them down by page, country, device and day.

Read it as an impressions report, because it doesn’t report clicks, click-through rate or average position. It also doesn’t separate AI Mode from AI Overviews, since Google reports the two together as generative AI features.

Use it to see which of your pages Google’s AI answers draw on. Then check those same pages in the Search results report to find out what the clicks did.

7. Separate Your Branded and Non-Branded Search Traffic

Your query list splits another useful way too. Branded searches — people typing your name — behave nothing like the searches that find you for the first time, and mixed together in one report they hide each other.

Search Console can now split them for you. The branded queries filter has rolled out to every eligible property.

Open the Search results report, click + Add filter, choose Query, and pick branded or non-branded. Search Console then shows the applied filter above the report, labeled Query: Branded, and redraws the whole report around that slice.

Google works out which queries count as branded, including variations, misspellings and your product names.

The filter isn’t available everywhere. A site with very few impressions doesn’t get it, and neither does a sub-property, if you’ve set one of those up.

The clicks and impressions line now covers branded searches only, which is the number to watch month on month.

The split tells you which growth you actually earned. Rising branded demand points at your marketing, and rising non-branded demand points at your SEO.

If the non-branded side is flat, the next move is a keyword one. Our guide to adding SEO keywords in WordPress covers how to choose them and where to put them.

8. Catch a Traffic Drop Within Hours Using the 24-Hour View

Everything so far reads history. Search Console’s standard reports run a couple of days behind, which is a long time to wait when you suspect something broke this morning.

The 24-hour view is how you see this morning’s data today. It breaks the last 24 hours of search data down by the hour.

Select 24 hours in the date row at the top of the Search results, Discover and News reports, alongside the 7 days, 28 days and 3 months options.

It carries the same metrics as the rest of the report — clicks, impressions, average CTR and average position — with much fresher data.

Open the 24-hour view when something feels wrong and you don’t yet know what. An hourly line that falls off a cliff at 2pm points you straight at what changed at 2pm.

Read the solid part of the line only. Search Console draws the most recent hours as a dotted line while it’s still collecting them, so that tail always slopes down — a dotted decline is missing data rather than a lost audience.

The 24-hour view is also the fastest way to see whether a page you published this morning is being seen at all. You don’t have to wait two days to find out.

9. Fix the Core Web Vitals Problems Google Flags

Getting seen is one thing, and keeping the visit is another. A page that loads slowly, or shifts around while it loads, can cost you that visit before anyone reads a word of it.

Core Web Vitals are Google’s measurements of what a page feels like to use, taken from real visits to your site. There are three, and each covers a different part of the experience:

• Largest Contentful Paint — how fast the main content loads.
• Interaction to Next Paint — how quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks.
• Cumulative Layout Shift — whether the layout stays put while the page loads.

Speed is only one of the three, which is why a page can load quickly and still fail.

Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal for both mobile and desktop results.

Page experience is one signal among many, but relevance comes first. Google says a good page experience doesn’t override having great, relevant content.

It matters most when several pages answer a query about equally well. That’s when the experience on the page can be the tiebreaker.

Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report shows which of your URLs are failing and groups similar pages together. So a broken template shows up as one group rather than a hundred separate problems.

The counts in that report tell you how many of your URLs sit in each band, and the failing band is where to start.

Our Core Web Vitals guide explains what each score means and how to move it.

Start with the group that holds your highest-traffic pages. One template fix there does more for your traffic than a week spent on your quietest pages.

10. Compare Your Mobile and Desktop Search Performance

Core Web Vitals come in a mobile panel and a desktop panel, and your search data splits the same way. Google Search Console can show you the queries that bring people in on a phone separately from the ones that work on desktop.

Open the Performance » Search results report, click + Add filter in the filter row at the top, then choose Device.

Search Console then shows the applied filter as Device: Mobile and redraws the report for that device alone.

Choosing Device opens a dialog with a FILTER tab and a COMPARE tab. You can look at one device on its own, or set two of them side by side.

The device split matters more here than it would in most reports, because Google indexes the web from a phone’s point of view.

Google crawls and indexes sites for Search with its smartphone crawler. So Google ranks the mobile version of your page, not the desktop one.

If a query performs well on desktop and badly on mobile, look at the mobile page itself before you touch the content. Google based the ranking on that version.

11. Use the Links Report to Strengthen a Page and Earn New Links

Sometimes the page itself isn’t the problem at all. A well written, well researched page can still rank badly because almost nothing points to it.

The Links report in the Search Console navigation covers both halves of that problem. It shows the links inside your own site, and the links pointing at it from elsewhere.

Start inside your own site. In the Internal links section, click MORE at the bottom of the Top linked pages table. That shows which of your pages have the most internal links.

Then click the filter icon, choose Target page, and enter the URL of the page you’re trying to improve.

Compare that count against your better-performing pages. A page you want to rank with far fewer internal links than the rest is a page to link to from your existing content.

Our guide to internal linking in WordPress covers how to do that well.

All in One SEO’s Link Assistant can find those opportunities for you, including orphan pages that nothing links to. It’s available on the Pro and Elite plans.

Link Assistant is currently optimized for English-language content, and every suggestion waits for your approval. It never adds a link on its own.

The same report shows who links to you. In the External links section, click MORE at the bottom of the Top linking sites box.

That gives you the domains linking to your site, ranked by how many links each one has.

Click a site in that list and Search Console shows you which of your own pages it links to most.

A site that already linked to you once knows your work. That makes it a reasonable place to ask about a newer article.

Read what they published first, and only reach out where your page genuinely belongs. Google’s spam policies treat link building at scale as link spam, so this is outreach rather than a campaign.

OptinMonster has a set of tricks for sending effective outreach emails worth reading before you write the first one.

Work down the list by relevance rather than by link count. A link from a site that covers your subject is worth more of your time than several from sites that don’t.

12. See How Your Social and Video Posts Perform in Google

Your own site isn’t the only thing of yours that Google ranks. Posts on Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube can turn up in Google results as well as on the platform itself, and that traffic sits outside the follower and view counts the platform shows you.

Search Console reports on it through a property type called a platform property.

A platform property measures how those posts do in Google Search, Google Discover and Google News, including the queries that led people to them. That’s performance on Google, not on the platform, so it won’t tell you how many times your video was watched on TikTok.

A platform property is also separate from the property that covers your website. It isn’t a new report inside your site’s property, so adding your TikTok account gives you a second property but changes nothing in the first.

Visitors who land on your site from one of those posts still turn up in your analytics, and our guide to analyzing social media traffic in Google Analytics covers the reports that track them.

Each platform property carries its own Performance report, with clicks and impressions you can filter and sort by post and by query, plus an Export button for taking the numbers elsewhere.

Google documents what each one reports in its guide to analyzing social and video content.

The Insights report there covers recent traffic trends, your top-performing posts, and how people discover your account on Google, so start there and drop into Performance when you need the query-level detail.

To add one, open the property selector dropdown anywhere in Search Console and click Add property.

On the Select a property type panel the platforms sit under a New heading — Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube — each with its own Add link.

Click the one you want, then follow the verification steps on screen.

A property you’ve just added through that panel opens both Insights and Performance on the last 28 days. It can also show empty charts for a few days while Google processes its data, so give it that long before you read anything into it.

Once the data lands, you can see which of your posts Google surfaces and which queries brought people to them.

That tells you which topics to post about again, and whether a platform is earning you enough search traffic to be worth the effort.

13. Check Your Rich Results and Confirm Your Changes Worked

Back on your own site, a listing’s shape matters as much as its position. A star rating, a price range, stock availability and the delivery and returns terms take up far more room on the results page than a plain blue link.

Those extra details are rich results, built from structured data — extra code telling Google what a page is about, so a product page can declare its rating and price.

Search Console gives each rich result type its own report under Enhancements in the left-hand navigation, and the Overview page links through.

It lists only the types it has found on your site, so your group won’t match anyone else’s — the one below holds Breadcrumbs and Profile page. Product and shop reports sit under Shopping.

Click into one to see which pages qualify and what each error is.

Not every type is still supported, though. Google has retired several, including FAQ and How-to, so check the current list of supported structured data types first.

Fix the errors before you add anything new, since broken structured data can cost a page the listing it already had.

Whatever you fix, record the change and its date, then compare Search Console date ranges from before and after.

Google says recrawling and reprocessing a page can take from a few days to a few weeks, so give a change that long. The URL inspection tool tells you when Google has re-read the page.

Once it has, check the same Enhancements report and confirm the page has dropped out of the error count. If it has, the Search results report will tell you what the fix did to your clicks.

Reading Your Search Console Data Inside WordPress

If your site runs on WordPress, you can read much of this without opening Search Console. MonsterInsights, the Google Analytics plugin for WordPress, carries three of these reports, all on Plus and above.

Under Insights » Reports, the Search Console report heads its table Top 50 Google Search Terms and lines up Search Terms, Clicks, Impressions, CTR and Avg. Position.

A term with impressions and almost no clicks points at the title to rewrite.

The same navigation holds Traffic » Landing Page Details, whose Top Landing Pages panel lists Landing Page, Sessions, Engaged Sessions and Pages / Sessions.

Those columns name the entry pages that hold attention after a search, so your next post starts from a proven subject.

A Site Notes pill beneath the Overview graph opens a panel where Add New Site Note logs each change as a dated row. Read those rows against the graph to see whether a rewritten title moved anything.

So read your search performance in Search Console, or beside your traffic in WordPress — whichever you’ll actually open.

Video Tutorial: Using Google Search Console for SEO

In the video walkthrough below, we go through these same Search Console reports inside the tool itself, for anyone who’d rather watch than read.

We work through the reports on screen, so you can open your own Search Console account and follow along.

Google Search Console for SEO: Frequently Asked Questions

Does Google Search Console help SEO?

Google Search Console shows how your pages perform in Google Search — impressions, clicks, average position, and any indexing or crawling problems Google ran into. That tells you which pages to improve and which ones Google can’t reach. For what visitors do once they land, you need Google Analytics.

How do I use Google Search Console for an SEO audit?

Start with the Search results report to see which queries and pages are working. Then check Page indexing for pages Google couldn’t index, and Core Web Vitals for pages flagged as slow or unstable. Use URL inspection on any single page you’re unsure about, and confirm your sitemap is being read.

How accurate is Google Search Console?

The data comes straight from Google, so it’s the most reliable source for how your site performs in search. It isn’t exhaustive, though. The report shows up to 1,000 rows at a time, and Google leaves out queries too rare to report without identifying the person who searched.

Does Google Search Console show AI Overview traffic?

Yes, in two places. Impressions and clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode are already counted in the main Search results report under the Web (text) search type. The separate generative AI performance report gives you a dedicated view of those impressions, but it doesn’t report clicks, CTR or average position.

How long does Google Search Console take to show data?

The standard reports run a day or two behind, and a newly verified site can take a few days to show anything at all. For a change to a page that’s already indexed, Google says recrawling and reprocessing can take from a few days to a few weeks. The 24-hour view is the freshest data in the tool.

Is Google Search Console free?

Yes. Google Search Console is free and there’s no paid tier. You only need to verify that you own each site you want to add.

Can I use Google Search Console for any website?

Yes, as long as you can verify that you own the site. Google offers several verification methods, including uploading a file to your server, adding a meta tag to your header, or updating a DNS record.

Search Console is most useful when you open it with a specific question rather than for a general look around. Pick the one you actually have: which page is underperforming, which query is just short of its clicks, or whether last month’s change moved anything.

Then open the tactic above that answers it, and leave the rest until you need them.

We hope this guide helped you get more out of Google Search Console. If you found it useful, check out the following guides next:

• On-page SEO in WordPress: Your Complete Guide
• How to Increase Organic Traffic
• How to Do an SEO Audit on WordPress
• How to Optimize for E-E-A-T
• Organic Search in Google Analytics: Quick-Start Guide

Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube for more Google Analytics tips.