Google Search Console is a free tool that shows you how Google sees your website. It tells you which searches are bringing people to your site, whether Google can find all your pages, and if there are any problems you should fix.
Honestly, it is wild that more companies do not use this. It is completely free, takes about ten minutes to set up, and gives you information you literally cannot get anywhere else.
How to set it up
First, go to search.google.com/search-console and sign in with your Google account. Click "Add property" and enter your website's domain.
Google needs to verify that you actually own this website. The easiest way to do this is with a DNS record. Google will give you a text string that looks like a bunch of random characters. You need to add this as a TXT record in your domain registrar (wherever you bought your domain, like GoDaddy, Namecheap, or Cloudflare).
If you have no idea what that means, just search for "add TXT record" plus the name of your domain registrar. There are tutorials for every single one.
After you add the record, click "Verify" in Search Console. It might take a few hours for Google to see the change, so do not panic if it does not work immediately.
Once verified, wait a day or two. Google needs time to collect data about your site before it shows you anything useful.
What to look at every week
The Performance report is the most useful thing in Search Console. It shows you which searches are bringing people to your site, how many people see your site in search results (impressions), how many actually click (clicks), and what percentage of people who see you end up clicking (click-through rate).
Look at this once a week. Over time, you will start to notice patterns. Maybe one blog post is getting a lot of impressions but very few clicks. That means people are seeing you in search results but not clicking. The title or description probably needs work.
The Pages report (under Indexing) shows you which pages Google has found and indexed. If an important page is not showing up here, Google does not know it exists, which means it will never show up in search results.
The Core Web Vitals report tells you if your site is slow or has annoying layout problems. Google uses this as a ranking factor, so if you see red or yellow warnings here, it is worth fixing.
Things to do right after setup
Submit your sitemap. A sitemap is basically a list of all the pages on your website. Most website builders create one automatically at yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. In Search Console, go to Sitemaps and add yours. This helps Google find all your pages faster.
Check if your main pages are indexed. Use the URL Inspection tool at the top of Search Console. Paste in your homepage URL and see if it says "URL is on Google." If not, click "Request Indexing" to ask Google to crawl it.
Look at the Pages report for any errors. If Google is having trouble with certain pages, it will tell you here. Common problems include pages that return errors, pages that are blocked by your robots.txt file, or pages that tell Google not to index them.