Most business owners have Google Search Console set up. Very few actually use it. And even fewer are doing anything with the data it gives them.

That is a shame, because this free tool is arguably one of the most powerful things Google has ever given small businesses and founders. It is not flashy. It does not have a fancy dashboard. But if you know where to look, it is packed with the kind of real, direct insights that can genuinely move the needle on your visibility, your content, and your growth.

At fleek.marketing, we have been using Google Search Console with clients for years, and the patterns we see again and again are the same: businesses sitting on a goldmine of data, not knowing where to start. So let us change that.

What Google Search Console Actually Is (and What It Is Not)

Before we dive in, let us clear something up, because a lot of people confuse it with Google Analytics.

Google Analytics tells you what happens on your website: how long people spend, which pages they visit, what device they are on, where they came from.

Google Search Console tells you what happens before the click. It shows you how Google actually sees your website, which searches you are appearing for, how often you are being shown, and how many people are choosing to click through to you.

It is free. It is direct from Google. And it gives you data that literally no other tool can replicate, because it is Google telling you exactly what it thinks of your site.

Quick distinction worth knowing:
It is not a keyword research tool. It shows you what you already rank for, not what you could rank for.
It is not a technical rabbit hole. You do not need to be a developer to get real value from it.
It is not the same as Google Analytics. The two tools complement each other, but they are telling very different stories.

Why This Matters More Than Ever Right Now

Here is something worth sitting with: clicks from traditional Google search results have dropped by around 50% in the past six months alone.

Why? Because AI is answering more and more questions directly in the search results themselves. Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini. People are getting answers without ever visiting a website. The whole landscape is shifting towards what some are calling zero-click search.

That might sound alarming. But here is the flip side: the clicks that do happen are far more valuable. When someone clicks through to your site in this environment, they are genuinely interested. They have gone past the AI summary. They want you specifically.

Visibility beats rankings. It is not about where you sit on the list.
It is about being found, being named, being chosen.

This means visibility, being seen, being surfaced, being mentioned, matters more than ever. And Google Search Console is the tool that tells you where you stand. Not estimates, not projections. Real data, from real searches, showing you exactly how Google sees your site right now.

Setting It Up (It Is Easier Than You Think)

If you have not got Google Search Console set up yet, here is the short version:

• Go to search.google.com/search-console
• Sign in with your Google account
• Add your website using the URL prefix option. Copy your website address from your browser and paste it in
• Verify ownership. The easiest route is through Google Analytics if you already have it connected

Once it is set up, it takes a few days to start populating data. The key thing to know: it cannot go back in time. It only collects data from the day you set it up. So even if you are not ready to dive in straight away, get it connected now so the data starts building.

Not sure how to verify it?
Just ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude to walk you through it step by step. You will be set up in minutes.

The One Report That Actually Matters: Performance

Google Search Console has quite a few sections including indexing, sitemaps, experience, and removals, and yes, they all have their place. But for most founders and SME owners, there is really only one place you need to spend your time. That is the Performance report.

Inside the Performance report, you have four key metrics to pay attention to:

• Queries — the exact words and phrases people typed into Google that caused your site to appear
• Impressions — the number of times your site was shown in search results, whether anyone clicked or not
• Clicks — the number of times someone actually clicked through to your website
• CTR (click-through rate) — the percentage of impressions that turned into clicks
• Average position — where you are ranking in Google on average for a given query

The relationship between impressions and clicks is where a lot of the insight lives. If you have a page getting thousands of impressions but almost no clicks, that is not a visibility problem. Google is already showing you. It is a messaging problem. Something about your title or description is not compelling enough to make people choose you over everyone else.

Quick tip:
When you first open the Performance report, the default view does not show all four columns. Click the tick boxes at the top to make sure you can see clicks, impressions, CTR, and position all at once.

Finding the Opportunities in Your Data

1. Pages in Positions 11 to 20: Your Biggest Quick Win

Here is the thing that often surprises people: the biggest opportunity in Google Search Console is not necessarily on page one of Google. It is page two.

Positions 11 to 20 are page two of Google. Almost nobody goes to page two, but the reason you are there rather than on page one is often surprisingly small. In many cases, you are ranking for a query but not actually using that exact phrase clearly enough on the relevant page. You might mention it once, or not at all.

A small amount of work, adding a paragraph, a subheading, an FAQ, or a few well-placed mentions of the phrase, can be enough to push a page from position 14 to page one.

2. High Impressions, Low CTR: Fix Your Meta Titles

If you are appearing thousands of times but barely getting any clicks, the culprit is almost always your meta title and meta description, the headline and summary text that shows up in Google’s results.

Here is a real example. A page titled “Services – ABC IT Solutions Durham” had 4,500 impressions and just 9 clicks. A 0.2% click-through rate. The title was doing nothing to earn the click.

Compare that to alternatives like these:

• “Reliable Managed IT Support for Durham Businesses”
• “Stop IT Headaches Before They Start, 24/7 Support in County Durham”
• “Durham IT Support: Fast Response Times for Local SMEs”

Different conversation entirely. Google shows you because of your keywords. But humans click because of your value. Your meta title needs to answer the question: so what? It needs to speak directly to the person who just searched that term, in language they recognise, addressing something they actually care about.

3. Brand vs Non-Brand: Know Where You Stand

Scroll through your queries and notice how many of your clicks are coming from people who typed your brand name versus people who typed a product, service, or topic. If the majority of your traffic is brand-driven, it means people already know you, but Google is not surfacing you for the things you actually sell.

Ideally, you want roughly 80 to 90% of your traffic coming from non-brand queries. If you are skewed the other way, that is a clear signal to invest more in content that targets what your ideal clients are actually searching for.

4. Understand the Search Intent Behind Your Queries

Not all searches are equal. Every query broadly falls into one of three categories:

• Informational — someone is learning or researching, for example: “what is managed IT support?”
• Commercial — someone is comparing options, for example: “best IT support companies in Leeds”
• Transactional — someone is ready to buy or act, for example: “IT support Yorkshire contact”

When you spot a query in your data, ask yourself: what is the intent here? Then look at the page it is pointing to. Does the page match that intent? A transactional search landing on a purely informational page is a missed opportunity. A commercial query landing on a page with no testimonials or social proof is leaving money on the table.

5. The FAQ Filter Trick

Go to your queries, add a filter, and search for queries that include the words how, what, why, where, or when. This surfaces all the questions real people are already asking Google that are pulling up your site.

Take those questions and start adding them as FAQs across the relevant pages of your website. You are not guessing what your audience wants to know. They have already told you.

How AI Makes This Whole Process Much Faster

You do not need to manually analyse every row of data. This is where AI comes in, and it is genuinely a game changer for how quickly you can turn raw numbers into clear actions.

Export your Google Search Console data using the export button in the top right of the Performance report, download it as a spreadsheet, and upload it to an AI tool. For Google Search Console specifically, Gemini is worth prioritising because it is in the Google ecosystem, understands how Google search works, and is well-placed to interpret the data meaningfully. That said, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity all do a solid job too.For best results, use the ABCD framework when writing your prompt:

The more context you give, the more useful the output. And if you are not sure how to write a great prompt, just ask the AI to help you write it.

Your Three Actions for This Week

If you take nothing else from this, take these:

1. Set up or verify Google Search Console. If you have never had it or you are not sure it is connected, get that sorted first. The data only starts from today.
2. Look at your Performance report. Pick 28 days or three months of data. Turn on all four metric columns. Scroll through your queries and pages. Just look. Notice what surprises you.
3. Pick one page to improve. Find something with decent impressions but a low click-through rate, or a query stuck in positions 11 to 20. Use AI to help you understand what to change, rewrite the meta title and description, add an FAQ or some more relevant content, and check back in 30 days.

One improved page done well will teach you more than a dozen half measures.
Bite-size it down and hyper-focus.

Making This a Habit

Google Search Console is not something you do once and forget. The businesses that get the most out of it treat it as a rhythm. Once a month or once a quarter, download the data, look for new opportunities, act on one or two of them.

Over time, data-led decisions just become the normal way you run your marketing. No guesswork. No vanity metrics. Just a clearer picture of how people are finding you, and a steady process for making that work harder for your business.

Want help making sense of your search data?

At fleek.marketing, we work with Yorkshire founders and SMEs to turn search data into clear, practical actions, without the jargon, without the agency runaround.

Get in touch and let us have a look at what your data is telling you.