The 15-minute monthly Search Console check
Google Search Console is free, comes straight from Google, and tells you things no other tool can: which searches your site appears in, which pages Google has decided not to index, and whether it has found a security problem. Most site owners set it up once and never open it again.
You don’t need to live in it. Fifteen minutes once a month, checking the same things in the same order, catches almost every problem while it’s still small.
If you haven’t set it up yet, add your site as a Domain property, verified with a DNS record. It covers every version of your site at once: http and https, www and non-www, and every subdomain.
1. Security issues and manual actions (1 minute)
Start with the two reports you hope are empty. Both are under Security & Manual Actions.
- Security issues means Google has found something like hacked content, malware or deceptive pages. Google may warn people away from your site, so this is urgent. If it’s a hack, here’s how malware removal works.
- Manual actions means a reviewer at Google found the site breaking its spam policies, for example with unnatural links or copied, thin content. Affected pages can drop in rankings or disappear.
Both should say no issues were detected. If either doesn’t, stop here and deal with it. For security issues, what to do in the first hour after a hack is the place to start.
2. Performance: are clicks holding steady? (5 minutes)
Open Performance, set the date range to compare the last 28 days with the previous period, and turn on all four figures: clicks, impressions, average click-through rate and average position.
What to look for:
- A sudden drop in clicks, not a gentle wobble. Seasonal dips are normal, and comparing with the same period last year shows whether this is one. A third of your clicks disappearing overnight isn’t normal.
- Impressions up, clicks flat. You’re appearing more often but not being chosen. Look at the titles and descriptions of those pages.
- The biggest movers. On the Queries and Pages tabs, sort by the difference in clicks to see which searches and pages gained or lost the most. One page losing most of its clicks usually points to a problem on that page.
Clicks can also fall for reasons unrelated to your site. AI-generated answers and other features at the top of the results can answer a question without anyone clicking. That’s why the trend on your most important pages matters more than the site-wide total.
3. Page indexing: did anything important drop out? (4 minutes)
Open Indexing → Pages. The chart shows how many pages are indexed and how many aren’t. Gradual change is normal as you publish and remove content. Sudden jumps aren’t.
Below the chart are the reasons pages aren’t indexed. Some are expected and fine:
- Page with redirect: old addresses redirecting to new ones
- Alternate page with proper canonical tag: duplicates correctly pointing at the main version
- Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag: expected for login pages, thank-you pages and similar
Others deserve a closer look:
- Not found (404): check whether any of these pages used to get traffic or links. If they did, redirect each one to the closest matching page.
- Server error (5xx): Google hit errors while crawling. A few is noise. A lot means the server was struggling.
- Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag on pages you want in search. This is how sites accidentally hide themselves after a redesign.
- Crawled – currently not indexed: Google saw the page and decided not to index it, often because it’s thin or very similar to another page.
Click any reason to see example addresses. After fixing something, press Validate fix so Google checks again.
4. Sitemaps (1 minute)
Under Indexing → Sitemaps, check that the status says Success and that Google read the sitemap recently. If the number of discovered pages is wildly different from what you’d expect, something is either producing pages it shouldn’t or leaving out pages it should include.
5. Core Web Vitals and HTTPS (2 minutes)
Under Experience:
- Core Web Vitals sorts your pages into Good, Needs improvement and Poor, separately for mobile and desktop, using data from real visitors. Note any new group of Poor pages, and fix what’s slowing them down. Core Web Vitals, minus the jargon explains what the three measurements mean.
- HTTPS should show your pages being served securely, with none flagged.
6. Anything you missed (2 minutes)
Search Console emails verified owners about new problems, like a jump in 404 errors or a structured data error. Check the messages under the bell icon for anything you missed, and make sure those emails go to someone who reads them.
Write it down
Keep a short note each month: clicks and impressions for the last 28 days, the number of indexed pages, and anything that needed action. Three lines is enough. Next time something looks odd, you’ll know whether it’s new.
When to dig deeper
A monthly check spots symptoms. If clicks keep falling with no obvious cause, or large numbers of pages aren’t being indexed and you can’t see why, that’s the time for a proper technical SEO audit, which compares a full crawl of the site with what Google has actually indexed.