Google Search Console (GSC) is the most important free SEO tool available to South African website owners, and most SA businesses either are not using it or are barely scratching the surface of what it can tell them. It is not a traffic analytics tool; that is Google Analytics. GSC is your direct line of communication with Google about your website: it tells you how Google sees your site, what problems it has found, which queries are driving impressions and clicks, and how your pages are performing in search results.
Setting it up and knowing how to use it is not optional for any SA business taking SEO seriously.
Setting Up and Verifying Your Property
Go to search.google.com/search-console and sign in with the Google account associated with your website. Click “Add Property” and enter your domain. Choose the Domain property type if possible; this covers all URL variations (http, https, www, non-www) in a single property. The URL-prefix property type requires separate verification for each variation.
Verification can be done by adding a DNS record (recommended for Domain properties), uploading an HTML file to your server, adding a meta tag to your homepage, or using your Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager account. Once verified, GSC begins collecting data for your property. Allow forty-eight to seventy-two hours for the first meaningful data to populate.
If you have multiple language or regional versions of your site, or a separate mobile site, set up separate GSC properties for each.
The Performance Report: Your Most Valuable Dashboard
The Performance report shows you data on how your site appears in Google Search: total clicks, total impressions, average click-through rate (CTR), and average position, broken down by query, page, country, device, and date range.
For SA businesses, the default “Search” view covers regular Google search. You can also filter by “Discover” (Google’s content recommendation feed) and “News” (Google News) if your content appears in those surfaces.
The most immediately useful analysis is the Queries report. Export the full list of queries your site receives impressions for. Sort by impressions descending. Any query receiving significant impressions but with a CTR below 3% is a candidate for title tag and meta description optimisation (the page is appearing in results but not compelling users to click. Any query receiving significant impressions with an average position between 8 and 20 is a candidate for content improvement) you are ranking on page one or two but not prominently enough.
The Pages report shows you which individual URLs are generating the most organic impressions and clicks. Cross-reference high-impression, low-CTR pages with the query data to understand which specific terms those pages are appearing for and why their CTR is underperforming.
The Coverage Report: Understanding Indexation
The Coverage report (or “Indexing” in newer GSC versions) shows you the indexation status of your pages, which are indexed, which are excluded, and why.
The “Valid” section shows pages successfully indexed by Google. The “Error” section shows pages Google tried to crawl but could not index due to technical problems (server errors, redirect issues). The “Excluded” section (which most SA webmasters ignore) is actually where the most instructive information lives.
Common and important exclusion categories to investigate: “Crawled (currently not indexed” (Google crawled the page but decided not to index it, usually indicating thin or low-quality content), “Discovered) currently not indexed” (Google knows the page exists but has not crawled it yet, often indicating crawl budget limitations on large sites), and “Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical” (Google has chosen a different URL as the canonical version of a piece of content).
If you find important commercial pages in the “Not indexed” section, this is a critical finding that requires immediate attention. Use the URL Inspection tool (covered below) to diagnose the specific issue.
URL Inspection Tool
The URL Inspection tool allows you to check the status of any specific URL: whether it is indexed, when it was last crawled, what the rendered version of the page looks like to Googlebot, and any issues detected. After fixing a technical problem on an important page, use the “Request Indexing” function in this tool to ask Google to re-crawl and re-index the updated page.
This is also useful for new content: after publishing an important page, use URL Inspection → Request Indexing to accelerate the crawl and indexation rather than waiting for Google’s regular crawl schedule to pick it up.
Core Web Vitals in Search Console
The Core Web Vitals report (under “Experience”) shows field data (real measurements from actual users visiting your site) for LCP, INP, and CLS, categorised by URL and rated Good, Needs Improvement, or Poor. This is the data Google uses in its ranking algorithm.
Investigate every URL flagged as “Poor” and fix the underlying performance issues. Group similar URLs (templates) to understand whether a performance issue is page-specific or template-wide, and fix template-level issues to improve Core Web Vitals across multiple URLs simultaneously.
Sitemaps
Submit your XML sitemap to GSC from the Sitemaps section. This tells Google about all your important pages and helps it crawl them efficiently. Check back regularly, the Sitemaps report shows whether Google has processed your sitemap and flags any errors it found.
A sitemap submitted to GSC does not guarantee indexation of all URLs within it, but it does ensure Google is aware of those URLs and will crawl them during regular crawl cycles.
Request a GSC audit service to get a professional analysis of your Search Console data and a prioritised list of actions to improve your SA organic performance.