Search Console for Contractors: Seeing What People Searched

“How do I know what people google to find me?” For your website, Google will show you. Search Console is Google’s own tool for site owners, which Google describes as “a tool from Google that can help anyone with a website to understand how they are performing on Google Search.” Its Performance report lists the searches your site showed up for, how often it showed, roughly where it sat on the page, and how many people clicked.

This article covers setting it up on a small contractor site, reading the one report that matters most, and the three changes that report most often points to. Most of it needs no web developer.

Two reports in two places

Keep two things apart from the start. Search Console reports on your website in Google Search. Your Google Business Profile, the listing that appears on Maps and in the local results, has its own performance page. Google says that page “highlights how customers use Search and Maps to find your profile, and what actions they take once they do,” and its Searches metric lists “the search terms people used to find your business,” updated at the start of each month. It works only for verified profiles; the Business Profile setup covers verification. Look at both. The rest of this article is about the website.

Setting it up

1. Choose the property type

Search Console calls a site a property, and offers two kinds. A Domain property includes “all subdomains (m, www, and so on) and multiple protocols (http, https, ftp),” so yourcompany.com, www.yourcompany.com and any old http addresses all land in one report. A URL-prefix property includes “only URLs with the specified prefix, including the protocol.” On a small site, the Domain property is usually the simpler choice, because nothing falls outside it.

2. Prove the site is yours

A Domain property is verified by DNS record only: Search Console gives you a record to add at the company where your domain is registered, and Google says you must be able to log in to that domain name provider’s administration page. A URL-prefix property offers other methods, among them uploading an HTML file, adding an HTML tag, or using your Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager code. If your site runs on WordPress, Wix or Squarespace, Google notes that the platform “might provide a special plugin or setting to verify your property easily, or even automatically.” Once you are verified, leave the record in place: “To stay verified, don’t remove the DNS record from your provider, even after verification succeeds.”

If you cannot log in to your domain account at all, that is a bigger problem than Search Console. Who owns your website walks through getting control of it back.

3. Check who else has access

A web designer may have set Search Console up for you years ago. Open Settings, then Users and permissions, to see the list. Owners have full control: they can “add and remove other users, configure settings, view all data, and use all tools.” A full user can view all data and take some actions; a restricted user mostly views. If you remove a former agency as an owner, Google says you must also delete its verification tokens, or “the removed owner will be able to re-verify ownership.”

4. Give it a few days

Google says data should appear within a few days of adding a property. Submitting a sitemap is optional; Google’s getting-started guide says your pages “can be discovered by Google without this step.”

Reading the Performance report

Open Performance, then Search results. The chart at the top carries four numbers, and Google defines each one:

• Clicks: “The number of times a user clicked your site from Google Search results.”
• Impressions: “How many times your site appeared in Search results.” In general an impression counts when your result is on the page of results the person is viewing, “whether or not the item is scrolled into view.”
• CTR (click-through rate): the clicks divided by the impressions.
• Average position: the topmost position a link to your site held on the results page, averaged across the searches it appeared in. Position is counted from the top, so 1 is the top and a smaller number is better.

Under the chart, tabs group the same numbers by Queries, Pages, Countries, Devices, Search appearance and Dates. Two of them do most of the work for a contractor. Queries are “the search terms that led to your site.” Pages groups the numbers by the page Google showed. The report opens on the past three months, and the newest data can be preliminary and change over the next few hours.

A worked example

Say a gutter contractor opens the Queries tab for the last three months and sees these rows. The queries and numbers are made up for the example.

The first row is people who already know the name: that measures word of mouth more than the website. The last row is working; leave it alone. The two middle rows are where the changes are, and the Pages tab supplies the third.

The three changes it usually points to

1. Seen often, clicked rarely: rewrite the title and description

Google itself suggests using the Queries tab “to find queries with high impressions and low CTR for opportunities to improve your page title and description.” Click the query, then the Pages tab, to see which page was shown. Then read that page’s title and description the way a homeowner scanning results would. Google’s advice for titles is to write “descriptive and concise” text, avoid keyword stuffing, and brand the title concisely. “Gutter Cleaning in (Town) | (Company)” tells a searcher what they will get; “Home” tells them nothing.

Two cautions. Google writes the title link itself, taking “into account both the content of a page and references to it that appear on the web,” and it uses your meta description only sometimes: “if it might give users a more accurate description of the page than content taken directly from the page.” So the page has to deliver what the title promises. And Google warns that “identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site aren’t helpful”: write a different one for each page.

2. A real question with no real answer: build or fix the page

When a query for a job you do sits well down the list, like “gutter guards cost” at 16.4 in the example, ask one question: does any page on the site truly answer it? If the only mention of gutter guards is one line in a list of services, there is nothing for Google to rank and nothing for a homeowner to read. A page about gutter guards that says what drives the price, the range you charge and what the job includes is the fix. Town names in queries raise the same question for each area you serve; service-area pages that rank without spam covers when a town page is worth having and when one page serves better, and the website pages a contractor needs covers the rest of the site.

3. The wrong page, or no page: check Pages and URL Inspection

Switch to the Pages tab. Google files each click and impression under “the final URL linked by a Search result after any redirects,” and under the page’s canonical address rather than a duplicate. Look for two things. One is searches for a service landing on the wrong page, such as the home page or another service: the right page is missing or too thin. The other is an important page that is not in the list at all.

For that second case, paste the page’s address into the URL Inspection tool at the top of Search Console. It shows “information about Google’s indexed version of a specific page” and can test whether the address might be indexable. After you fix or publish a page, you can click Request indexing. Google is plain about the limits: “Submitting a request does not guarantee that the page will appear in the Google Index,” there is a daily limit on requests, and indexing “typically takes only a day or so, but can take much longer in some cases.”

What the report will not tell you

• Every search. “Some queries are omitted from the report to protect user privacy,” Google says. These anonymized queries are counted in the chart totals unless you filter by query, so the table rows will not add up to the total. Google also says it “stores and shows only the most important data rows.”
• What you will see when you search. Typing your trade and town into Google will not reproduce the report, because “Search results are specific to the time, place, device, and recent history of the person searching.”
• Calls and jobs. A click is a visit, not a lead. To see which visits became calls and booked work, you need your own count; tracking where leads come from sets one up.

A fifteen-minute monthly habit

1. Set the date range to the last three months and open the Queries tab.
2. Sort by impressions. Copy the top ten queries, with their CTR and position, into a sheet under this month’s date.
3. Pick one: a query seen often and clicked rarely (fix the title and description), or a job you do with a weak position (fix or build the page).
4. Make that one change, request indexing for the page, and write down the date.
5. Next month, compare that query’s row with your note before you change anything else.

One change a month, written down, tells you what worked. Five changes at once tell you nothing.

If your top queries are full of “cost” and “price,” answer them on the page itself. NapkinPrice™ puts instant price ranges, built from your own pricing rules, on the website you already have.