Google Search Console for business owners: six reports worth reading every month

First, make sure you own it

Search Console access should belong to your company. Ask whoever manages your website to add a company account as a verified owner of the property — ideally a “domain property”, which covers every version of the site (with and without www, http and https, Arabic and English sections). Your agency can be added as a user. If you are not sure who owns it today, find out this week.

1. Performance: what people search, and whether they click

The Performance report shows four numbers: clicks, impressions (how often you appeared), click-through rate and average position. Set the date range to the last three months and compare with the same three months last year.

Then open the Queries tab and read the top fifty. Ask: are these the searches our customers use? Are the important commercial searches — the service plus “in Saudi Arabia”, “in Riyadh”, “company”, “price” — there at all? Do Arabic queries appear, or only English? Then open the Pages tab and check that the pages earning clicks are the ones that make you money.

2. Pages: what Google has and has not indexed

The Pages report (under Indexing) splits your URLs into indexed and not indexed, with the reason for each. You do not need to understand every reason. Look for two things: a sudden rise in “not indexed” pages, and any important page — a service page, a city page, a product category — appearing in the not-indexed list. Either is worth an email to your SEO team. Our indexing issues guide explains the common reasons in detail.

3. Core Web Vitals: is the site fast for real visitors?

This report uses data from real Chrome users, not a lab test. It groups URLs into good, needs improvement and poor, separately for mobile and desktop. In Saudi Arabia mobile is the report that matters. If a group of pages moves into “poor”, something changed — a new script, a heavy image, a plugin — and conversion rates on those pages are usually suffering too. See our Core Web Vitals guide for what the three measures mean.

4. Links: who is pointing to you

The Links report lists the sites that link to yours and the pages they link to. You are looking for quality, not quantity: links from Saudi business media, industry bodies, partners and clients are valuable; a sudden flood of links from unrelated foreign sites is not, and is worth mentioning to your SEO team. Also check the internal links column — your most important commercial pages should be among the most linked-to pages on your own site.

5. Enhancements: structured data that is broken

If your site uses structured data — breadcrumbs, products, articles, FAQs, reviews — Search Console reports errors under Enhancements or Shopping. Errors here do not usually hurt rankings directly, but they stop Google from using the data, and they often signal that a template change broke something. A new error appearing after a website update should be fixed within the week.

6. Security and manual actions: the reports you hope stay empty

These two reports should say “no issues detected”. If either ever shows a problem — hacked content, malware, or a manual penalty for spam — treat it as urgent. A manual action can remove pages or the whole site from results until it is fixed and a reconsideration request is accepted.

A monthly routine that takes thirty minutes

1. Performance: last three months versus the same period last year — clicks, impressions, top queries, top pages.
2. Pages: any jump in not-indexed URLs? Any important page missing?
3. Core Web Vitals: any group moved to poor on mobile?
4. Links: anything unusual, good or bad?
5. Enhancements: any new errors?
6. Security and Manual actions: still empty?

Write three lines in a shared document each month: what went up, what went down, and what you asked the team to look at. After six months that document is the clearest record of your SEO progress you will have — and a far better basis for decisions than a ranking report.