Knowing how your website is performing can lead to valuable insights into your audience.

It can also provide you with clues as to how well your current SEO strategy is working.

An effective way to find this is through Google Search Console, a convenient and valuable tool right at your fingertips.

This tool comes straight to you from Google, providing you with the crawling, indexing, and ranking experience you want and need to make the most of your site.

If you haven’t actually poked around the interface lately, you might be surprised by how much detail it gives on live search queries and site health. Sometimes even the little numbers that look insignificant—say, a handful of “Discovered – currently not indexed” URLs—end up revealing a technical problem you’d never have noticed on your own. It’s easy to overlook, but if you care about catching site issues before they snowball, Search Console basically becomes mission control for organic search.

And that includes providing you with the capabilities to optimize for organic search rankings.

People sometimes forget just how much you can piece together from the data in Google Search Console. For instance, you might notice a subtle drop in impressions on a couple of pages and, at first, just brush it off—maybe seasonality, maybe a fluke. But looking closer, sometimes those tiny blips are the first signs of a technical hiccup or a chunk of content that’s going stale. When you dig in, patterns sort of emerge on their own, even if you’re not a data scientist.

These days, I feel like hardly anyone talks about the wealth of historical data tucked away in the console, but it’s a lifesaver for seeing whether those random spikes or dips in clicks were actually one-off events or a pattern you should keep an eye on. Looking at performance over months (or, if you’ve had your site long enough, years), you’re able to spot bigger shifts or slow-burning trends that standard analytics tools just gloss over. It’s not the slickest interface, and, sure, Google can be cryptic about explanation sometimes but, honestly, the raw data is kind of addictive once you get into it.

Honestly, sometimes just scrolling through the longest list of queries or looking at coverage errors late at night ends up being more revealing than a formal report. You get these low-key “aha” moments—like seeing keywords you never optimized for bubbling up, or realizing a minor template change from two months ago is still rippling through your results. It’s not glamorous work, and half the time nobody else will notice what you fixed, but it’s actually where a lot of the SEO magic happens.

Not only is Google Search Console free and easy to set up, but it also provides you with beneficial search console reports to help you identify where you are and what you need to focus on to improve your SEO and your website.