How to Use Google Search Console Step by Step: Expert Guide for Catalan Businesses
Google Search Console is the only tool that gives you direct data from Google about your website: which keywords people use to find you, which pages aren't indexed and why your traffic isn't growing despite publishing content. It's free, official and, when read properly, is worth more than many paid tools. Here I explain how to actually use it, in what order to act and which errors to avoid, with examples from Catalan businesses I've seen firsthand.
- 1. Verify Your Website (and Do It Right from the Start)
- 2. The Performance Report: Where Hidden Gold Lies
- 3. Indexation: Detect What Google Doesn't See
- 4. Core Web Vitals: The Speed That Ranks
- 5. Internal and External Links
- 6. In What Order to Act (and Why It Matters)
- 7. Common Errors That Cost Rankings
- Frequently Asked Questions
| Tool | Google Search Console |
|---|---|
| Cost | Free |
| Initial Setup Time | 15-30 minutes |
| Recommended Review Frequency | 15 min weekly + in-depth monthly review |
| Useful For | SMEs, freelancers, e-commerce, SEO agencies |
1. Verify Your Website (and Do It Right from the Start)
Before seeing any data, you need to prove to Google that you own the site. There are four methods, but not all hold up equally well over time:
- Via Google Analytics (GA4): If you already have GA4 configured on the same Google account, verification is automatic. No additional code, no risk of losing it due to a theme change.
- HTML tag in the head: A single line of code in the
<head>of your website. If you use WordPress with Yoast SEO or Rank Math, you can do it in less than 2 minutes from the admin panel, without touching any files. - HTML file on the server: It works, but if you do a migration or change themes, it's easy to lose verification without realizing it.
- Google Tag Manager: A good option if you already use GTM and have access to the container.
There's a detail many overlook: add both versions of your website as separate properties to GSC, the version with www and the version without. If you don't and Google receives signals from both, the data will appear fragmented and you won't see the real volume of clicks and impressions. Also check that one version redirects to the other with a permanent 301.
2. The Performance Report: Where Hidden Gold Lies
This is the section that provides the most value and, paradoxically, the one that's least utilized. Most website owners enter, see the clicks graph and leave. That's staying at 10% of what it offers.
What I commonly find when auditing websites of Catalan businesses is that there are pages with hundreds or thousands of weekly impressions and a CTR below 2%. Google shows them, but nobody clicks. The cause is almost always the same: an uninformative SEO title or a meta description that could belong to any company in the sector.
How to Detect Opportunities in 5 Minutes, Step by Step:
- Go to "Performance" and select the last 3 months as the date range.
- Enable all four metrics (clicks, impressions, CTR and position) by clicking the colored squares at the top.
- Click the "Pages" tab in the table below.
- Sort by impressions from highest to lowest and identify pages with more than 300-500 impressions and CTR below 3%.
- Click each problematic URL and change the view to "Queries" to see exactly which keywords that page appears for.
- Rewrite the SEO title and meta description including the exact keywords people use, with an angle that generates curiosity or conveys a clear benefit.
A concrete example: a physiotherapy clinic in Tarragona had a "back pain treatment" page with about 1,200 monthly impressions and a CTR of 1.8%. The title was "Treatments — Fisio Tarragona Clinic". We changed it to "Physiotherapy for Back Pain in Tarragona: No Waiting List". The CTR rose to about 6% in six weeks. No other technical modification, no new content. Just the title.
3. Indexation: Detect What Google Doesn't See
The "Page Indexation" report shows you which URLs Google has processed and which it has discarded. This is where silent technical problems appear that cost rankings without anyone noticing.
These are the cases I find most frequently in audits of Catalan websites:
- Noindex activated by mistake: It happens a lot in migrations or theme changes. The SEO plugin is misconfigured and marks pages that should be indexed as noindex. I've seen shops in Sabadell that had been losing traffic for months without understanding why, and the cause was a checkbox marked by error in the WordPress panel.
- 404 errors in old URLs without redirect: If you've changed your URL structure without setting up 301 redirects, Google keeps trying to access the old addresses and finds errors. Every 404 without a redirect is authority that dissipates. The solution is to create 301 redirects to the equivalent new URLs, not to the homepage generically.
- Pages "Discovered but not indexed": Google has found them but decided not to process them. It generally indicates insufficient content quality, very similar pages to each other or an exhausted crawl budget on sites with many URLs.
- Duplicates from URL parameters in e-commerce: A product accessible via
/product?color=blue&size=Mand via/product/blue/mgenerates duplicate pages that confuse Google. The solution is to implement canonical tags pointing to the main version of each product.
In a clothing e-commerce in Sabadell we detected 340 product pages excluded for duplicate content, all size and color variants without canonical tag. After implementing them correctly, organic visibility improved progressively over the following months, especially in the main categories.
4. Core Web Vitals: The Speed That Ranks
Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal since 2021. Search Console groups your URLs into three categories: good, needs improvement and poor. The common mistake is trying to fix everything at once. What I recommend is prioritizing pages that generate the most traffic or conversions, and leaving secondary pages for a later phase.
| Metric | What It Measures | Good Threshold | Typical Technical Error |
|---|---|---|---|
| LCP | Loading speed of main visible content | Less than 2.5 s | Uncompressed images, slow hosting, render-blocking CSS |
| INP | Page response to user interactions | Less than 200 ms | Excessive JavaScript, heavy plugins, third-party scripts |
| CLS | Visual stability: elements jumping while loading | Less than 0.1 | Images without defined dimensions, dynamic ad banners |
When GSC marks a group of pages as poor, click on the specific issue to see which URLs it affects. Then open PageSpeed Insights with one of those URLs and you'll get the detailed technical diagnosis with the exact causes. This way you can give your developer a specific task instead of a "the website is slow".
5. Internal and External Links
The GSC links report is the least flashy, but hides two concrete opportunities that are often overlooked:
- Unexpected backlinks: Sometimes you discover that a local media outlet, a sector directory or a client has linked to you without you knowing. Take advantage of it: contact them, thank them and maybe you can get an additional link or a collaboration. Conversely, if you detect links from spam sites, you can disavow them with the official tool, but do it with judgment: disavowing legitimate links by mistake can cause harm.
- Pages with little internal linking: Look at which service or category pages receive few internal links. If your main service page doesn't appear among the top ones, you have a clear opportunity: add links to it from blog articles or pages with more internal authority.
A restaurant in Gràcia (Barcelona) had eight well-ranked blog articles about Catalan gastronomy, but none of them linked to the reservations page. We added a CTA with an internal link to each article and organic reservations increased noticeably in the following weeks, without any other intervention.
6. In What Order to Act (and Why It Matters)
Knowing how to read Search Console is one thing. Knowing in what order to act is what makes the difference between a project that moves forward and one that gets stuck in endless diagnostics. This is the sequence I apply:
| Priority | Concrete Action | Why First | Indicative Timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🔴 Urgent | Fix critical indexation errors and 404s without redirect | Every day without solution is lost authority | This week |
| 🔴 Urgent | Review security warnings or manual penalties | They block all ranking while they exist | Immediate |
| 🟡 Important | Improve CTR of pages between position 5-15 | You gain traffic without needing to gain positions | 1-2 weeks |
| 🟡 Important | Submit updated sitemap and verify coverage | It helps Google discover new content | Immediate if not done |
| 🟢 Plannable | Fix Core Web Vitals on high-traffic pages | Mid-term ranking improvement | 1-4 weeks |
| 🟢 Plannable | Optimize internal link building to key pages | Distribute authority to where it matters most | Ongoing |
The routine I recommend: 15 minutes each week to review performance and alerts, and a monthly one-hour session to analyze coverage, Core Web Vitals and ranking evolution. With this cadence, no problem goes unnoticed for too long.
7. Common Errors That Cost Rankings
These aren't theoretical errors: I see them every time I review a Search Console account for the first time.
- Not having the sitemap submitted: Go to the "Sitemaps" section and add
yourdomain.cat/sitemap.xml. Without a sitemap, Google discovers your pages randomly and may take weeks to find new content. - Confusing impressions with traffic: You can have 10,000 monthly impressions and 80 clicks. Impressions is how many times you appeared; traffic is how many times people entered. They're very different metrics and require very different actions.
- Looking at data without temporal context: Comparing November with December doesn't make sense in most sectors. Always compare the same period from the previous year to eliminate seasonality effects.
- Not filtering by device: In many local businesses in the Barcelona metropolitan area, mobile generates between 65 and 80% of visits. If mobile CTR is much lower than desktop, it could be that titles are truncating poorly on small screens or there's a mobile usability issue you don't see from your computer.
- Ignoring manual penalties: They appear under "Manual Actions". If you have one, it's absolute priority over any other SEO optimization. While it exists, nothing you do in SEO will have effect.
Conclusion
Google Search Console isn't a complicated tool, but it does require knowing where to look and, above all, in what order to act. The difference between a business that grows organically and one that publishes content without results is often not budget or size: it's whether someone regularly reviews this data and acts accordingly.
If you've read this far and want us to help you review your Search Console account, detect priority issues and define a concrete action plan, contact us. We work with businesses throughout Catalonia: shops in Girona, clinics in Tarragona, e-commerce in Sabadell and SMEs in Barcelona that want to grow on Google without depending on paid advertising.
Frequently Asked Questions
How Long Does It Take for Google Search Console to Show Data?
The first data appears between 24 and 72 hours after verification. The performance report accumulates up to 16 months of history, so the sooner you set it up, the better comparison base you'll have to measure the evolution of your web ranking.
What's the Difference Between Google Search Console and Google Analytics?
GSC shows you how Google sees and indexes your website: clicks from search, impressions, indexation errors, Core Web Vitals. Google Analytics shows you user behavior once they've entered your site: sessions, conversions, time on page, sales funnels. They're complementary and should be used in a coordinated way, not as substitutes for each other.
Why Are There Pages on My Website That Google Doesn't Index?
The most common causes are: noindex tag active by mistake, duplicate content without canonical tags, insufficient content quality by Google standards, recurring server errors or exhausted crawl budget on sites with many URLs. The coverage report in GSC indicates the exact reason for each URL, which greatly facilitates diagnosis and allows you to act with precision.