Google’s own data now puts its search volume at over 5 trillion searches a year — roughly 14 billion every single day. It is crucial that you use the best methods available to capture as many of these as possible. One of the most commonly used tools to help with this is Google Search Console (GSC), which you may already have heard of. As such, you may now be wondering how to use Google Search Console to improve SEO and what else it can offer you.

Discover how to get more visibility by:

• The search queries people discover you or your competitors with
• Any errors in your website
• Your core metrics and how these impact your SEO
• Problems you need to fix to boost your organic search performance

With these actionable insights, you can start iterating on what you already have and pave the way for more traffic moving forward.

Analyzing SEO Performance Reports

After you have taken steps to set up Google Search Console, it can offer you a plethora of helpful information. Within its dashboard, you can discover:

• All the search queries for which your site appears
• The number of clicks made on your website’s link
• How many people see your site in the list of Google results
• The average position of your site on Google’s search engine results page (SERP)

All of these data items together can offer key insights into your content’s effectiveness in meeting users’ needs. If people are searching for specific terms and then click on your link, it means that what your listing offers meets what they are looking for. Helping these visitors resolve the issue through your content then proves your website valuable both for users and as a tool for collecting leads.

Identify Top-Performing Pages

In the GSC interface, switch to the Pages section to see which pages generate the most clicks or impressions through Google. You can use this information to discover which parts of your site are the most popular and which ones Google ranks high based on its E-E-A-T criteria, which is how it rates the value and trustworthiness of web pages.

Comparing the top-performing with lower-rated pages, you can learn which content is most appealing to users and how to improve the SEO ranking for each page.

In every case, the purpose of the page is to grow your brand or convert potential customers. However, it should never be solely a direct attempt at conversion, as people need a reason to visit in the first place. In short, GSC can help you ensure your site offers real value.

Detect Underperforming Keywords

As you review the site, you should also check which keywords are performing or underperforming. Track statistics such as clickthrough rates to learn how often people visit your site compared to how many receive it in a Google listing. If these are trending down, it indicates they either need attention or that you need to pivot your keyword strategy.

Look at which queries perform better to understand which elements you need to update on each page. Develop content that targets these keywords, or try A/B testing different titles and content to improve keyword rankings over time.

One particularly useful addition to GSC is the branded vs non-branded queries filter, which now lets you automatically separate traffic driven by people already searching for your brand name from traffic coming from people who haven’t heard of you yet. Previously this required manual workarounds or external tools — now it’s built directly into the Performance report. This distinction matters because non-branded queries are where your real growth opportunities sit: if you’re barely appearing for searches unrelated to your brand name, that’s a content and keyword gap worth addressing directly.

Utilizing Index Coverage Reports

These pages give you information on which of your pages are successfully indexable by Google or other search engines and which are not. Essentially, they offer insights into how Google perceives your whole website.

Resolve Crawl Errors Using the GSC

Check these reports to see color-coded summaries on each page, which inform you which pages have received successful indexing. If any errors exist, the reports should also list the specific problem and the steps you could take to resolve it.

For each web page, investigate the individual error message, as the issues may include:

• Broken links
• Incorrect redirects
• A lack of page content
• Blocked content
• Duplicate information

All of these, and more, are potentially significant errors that could cause Google to no longer understand your website’s purpose or its organization method. If this is the case, Google may either attempt to serve users pages that are less relevant to their needs or remove your listing from the SERP entirely.

Prioritize resolving the errors that affect the highest-value pages you have. Your goal should be to ensure you appear back in search results as fast as possible with the right websites offering your visitors high-value content. So, after you make any significant changes to your site, revalidate the fixes in GSC once more so that Google knows to update the data.

Manage Indexed Pages

There are a few other “quick wins” you can implement to help you ensure you have the best chance of appearing high in SERPs. Use these to catch any technical issues quickly or consistently improve your visibility:

• Compare the number of pages indexed with the sitemap to ensure all have received indexing
• Check the “excluded” section to see if or why specific pages are not indexed
• Learn if any pages need resubmission to the GSC for SEO visibility
• See how old the sitemap in the GSC is and update it if necessary
• Monitor metrics from indexed pages at a glance for sudden changes

Fast access to this information prevents your site’s maintenance from taking too much time out of your day.

Applying the URL Inspection Tool

In addition to seeing broad information about your site, you can also dig into individual pages to learn more about their current status.

After entering your URL, Google will attempt to view and render them, allowing you to see how others will see the content you wish to serve. You can use this to confirm that key content is visible and if data appears on the page like you intended.

If the page’s UX does not match your expectations, you can iterate and check again to ensure the user experience matches your goals. If, for example, you are primarily targeting mobile users, you can view how these pages look on mobile devices, helping you determine if specific form factors cause your content to appear differently from your expectations.

You can also see how long ago Google last crawled the page and whether Google is taking into account the most recent data on that site. If not, you can prompt Google to queue a crawl of the site to update its knowledge of what you offer.

Interpret Core Web Vitals Metrics

Through this tool, Google provides a vast number of other reports. However, one of the most important is the visibility of several “core web vitals.” These include:

Largest contentful paint: The time it takes for the page content to load, allowing users to engage with it faster.

Interaction to next paint: How fast the page responds after the user interacts with it. Faster response times often reduce the amount of user bounce you experience.

Cumulative layout shift: How much the page’s layout moves around as content loads in. If this happens over a long period, it can seriously impact UX.

Comparing these numbers with Google’s benchmarks will give you a clear understanding of where you might need to make improvements. If you want a broader view of how Core Web Vitals fit into your overall SEO measurement approach, our guide to how to measure SEO performance covers the full picture.

• Optimizing images and media files
• Improving your hosting environment
• Updating your backend processes with best practices
• Minifying CSS and JavaScript files to reduce load times
• Enabling browser caching for future visits
• Leveraging a content delivery network to get data to users faster

The number of changes you can make is nearly limitless, so take your time to assess the issue and improve your site based on the specific problem to ensure the best results.

Advanced Strategies for Google Search Console

GSC’s capabilities are not limited only to reports. It can also offer you other help over and above these, such as:

• Sending you email notifications about significant drops in traffic
• Linking to third-party tools to help you create unique site datasets
• Working alongside Google Analytics to see how search queries convert to on-site behavior
• Offering tailored suggestions to help boost your site’s SEO performance
• Reporting on any manual actions Google has taken regarding your site and how to resolve them
• Weekly and monthly views in the Performance report for easier analysis of longer-term trends, rather than being limited to daily data

One of the most significant recent additions is AI-powered configuration, launched in late 2025. Instead of manually setting filters and date ranges, you can now describe the analysis you want in plain language — for example, “show me my mobile performance for the last three months” — and GSC will automatically configure the report for you. This is particularly useful if you find the filtering options time-consuming or if you want to run the kind of complex comparisons that used to require exporting data to a spreadsheet.

Having all this functionality in one place quickly forms a unified GSC tool you can leverage to give you the best chance of boosting your SEO performance.

How to Use Google Search Console to Improve SEO

GSC is a free and powerful tool that offers huge amounts of information on how Google views your website. As such, understanding how to use Google Search Console to improve SEO can be a game-changer for your efforts in growing your organic traffic.

However, all this can take a long time, and if you are too busy with the rest of your business, Rose & Cactus is ready to take on this challenge for you. Contact us to discuss how we use both Google Search Console and many other tools in the fight to get you noticed in your industry.

Laura Pulling Laura is a content strategist, SEO consultant, and lover of quiz nights. She works with global clients to turn great ideas into well-ranked, high-converting content.