There’s one common mistake most website owners make when their site’s visibility is at risk; they treat Search Engine Optimization as a set-it-and-forget-it task. Publish content, build a few links, and that’s it. What they don’t take into account is that this passive approach often leads to stagnation and frustration when these sites stay hidden. A truly effective, dynamic SEO strategy requires continuous diagnosis and adjustment.
Fortunately, one of the most powerful and popular diagnostic tools available is free: Google Search Console (GSC). This platform provides an unfiltered view of how Google sees your website, offering the raw data you need to audit, troubleshoot, and ultimately fix your SEO strategy.
You could say this tool shows you your website’s health and performance in a Google Search. While many of the best SEO tools offer sophisticated analysis, GSC provides direct data from the source, like which queries bring users to your site, which pages are most visible, and what technical issues might be holding you back.
Learning to interpret this data is a superpower for any marketer or business owner.
First Steps: Performance Report
The first step to use this tool is to do a Performance Report, something that for most marketers is the true heart of GSC. This reveals the queries users type to find your pages, the pages they click on, your average click-through rate (CTR), and your average position on search results. In short, this useful data will be the foundation to build your SEO strategy.
To perform this report, start by analyzing the “Queries” tab. Are the search terms that trigger impressions for your site aligned with your target audience?
For example, if you run a bakery in Chicago and you want to build a local SEO strategy to attract customers around you, you would not want your top queries to be generic terms like “bread recipes” because you will be attracting the wrong population to your site. This will result in bounces that will harm your SEO strategy in the long run.
To fix this problem, you must refine your on-page content and meta tags so you will be able to better target commercial-intent keywords. In this example, something like “artisan sourdough bread Chicago” or “custom birthday cakes near me” would be more suitable to target nearby, ready-to-buy customers.
Your next step will be to scrutinize your click-through rate. Having a high amount of impressions but a low CTR indicates that your metadata—either meta title, meta descriptions, or even both—is currently not compelling enough in the search results. In this particular scenario, performing an A/B test on your snippets to make them more enticing and relevant may prove to be the best option to tweak your on-page SEO strategy.
Diagnosing Technical Health with the Page Indexing Report
Setting up a brilliant SEO strategy on a not-so-solid technical foundation is like building a mansion on sand; sooner than later, it will crumble and become nothing but rubble. The Page Indexing Report (formerly the Coverage report) is your geotechnical survey to prevent this scenario. It details which pages Google has tried to crawl and index, and—more importantly—it pinpoints errors found on your website.
Although “errors” can cover a wide range of possibilities, there are some common instances most users encounter:
- “Submitted URL not found (404)” and “Server error (5xx).” These broken links and server issues can create a poor user experience, which in consequence wastes your site’s “crawl budget” while Googlebot never finds your site or hits a dead end while addressing your content.
- “Crawled – currently not indexed” and “Duplicate without user-selected canonical.” These issues suggest that Google is seeing your content but choosing not to add it to its index, mostly because it feels content is duplicate or has little to no value to offer.
If you’re working on a technical SEO audit, then these are non-negotiable situations that you must address: redirect broken links, fix server errors, and use canonical tags to signal your preferred version of duplicate pages. By systematically cleaning up these issues, you remove those roadblocks that are preventing Google from properly understanding and ranking your site.
Validating User Experience with the Core Web Vitals Report
Some time ago, Google explicitly stated that page experience (“user experience”) is a ranking factor. The Core Web Vitals report offered by GSC provides direct feedback on how real users perceive your site’s speed and stability. There are three key metrics taken into account to consider here:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which assesses loading performance;
- First Input Delay (FID), which measures interactivity; and
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which evaluates visual stability.
Pages flagged with “Poor” or “Needs Improvement” ratings are most likely providing a bad quality experience. In some instances, a slow-loading page (poor LCP) or a page where elements shift places when users try to click on them (poor CLS) is usually the culprit behind some companies’ high bounce rates and loss in conversions.
Integrating fixes for these issues—such as optimizing images and properly sizing their elements— is an essential component of a modern, holistic SEO strategy.
Connecting the Dots for a Cohesive Plan
The true power of Google Search Console is often understood when users connect the data from these different reports. For instance, you might discover why a key landing page is losing impressions in the Performance Report., or why the Page Indexing Report states there are no errors, while Core Web Vitals establish a “Poor” LCP score. In this last case, the diagnosis is clear: technical performance, not a crawling error, is hindering your visibility.
This integrated diagnostic approach prevents you from wasting effort by fixing the foundational issue, instead of blindly building links to a broken page. This methodical process of diagnosis and repair is what separates a professional SEO strategy from amateur guesswork. For businesses that lack the time or expertise, this is precisely the kind of deep analysis provided by our professional SEO services at First Page SEO.
